Education: A Courtroom Clash Over Textbooks

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"It's one of the most important trials of the last several decades." So maintains Robert Skolrood, executive director of Televangelist Pat Robertson's conservative National Legal Foundation and chief counsel for the 624 plaintiffs, all Christian Evangelicals. Anthony Podesta, president of the liberal lobby People for the American Way (P.A.W.), which is providing the legal team for the defense, counters that the case is a "hoax perpetrated by people who don't want the 42 million schoolchildren in this country to learn about ideas these people disagree with -- everything from divorce to evolution." The two sides are clashing in a federal courtroom in Mobile, where the plaintiffs have brought a suit against the Alabama state board of education. At issue: whether some 45 texts used in Alabama schoolrooms illegally espouse a religion, called secular humanism by the Evangelicals, which they argue elevates man at the expense of God.

One of the most extraordinary features of the trial is that the presiding judge, W. Brevard Hand, has previously made his sympathies clear. Nearly four years ago, in a case that gave birth to this one, Hand challenged several landmark Supreme Court decisions with a ruling that not only authorized school prayer in Alabama schools but also stated that the First Amendment did not apply to the states in such cases. Although an appeals court reversed Hand's decision, he provided grounds for restructuring the issue so that the original plaintiff, Lawyer Ishmael Jaffree, was replaced by the 624 Evangelicals and the central argument became not prayer but secular humanism.

"Our claim," says Attorney William Bradford, who is defending the school board, "is that secular humanism is not a religion, and even if it were a religion, there is no evidence it is being espoused in these texts." The common legal definition of a religion specifies belief in a superior being, which would seem to be the very antithesis of secular humanism. Before the plaintiffs' attorneys rested their case last week, they called expert witnesses in an attempt to resolve this apparent contradiction. University of Virginia Sociologist James D. Hunter characterized secular humanism as the functional equivalent of a religion, and, by implication, subject to the law. Hunter, however, subsequently acknowledged that the phrase functional equivalent is absent from the Constitution's First Amendment, which forbids the establishment of any religion by the Government. He also conceded that "vegetarianism, socialism, environmentalism and bureaucracy" might be construed as functionally equivalent religions.