It's All Connected

WITHOUT A PRAYER: RELIGION AND RACE IN NEW YORK CITY PUBLIC SCHOOLS. By Leslie Beth Ribovich. New York: New York University Press, 2024. Pp. vii + 241. Paperback, 30. 00. Whenever I talk about my developing book project on religion and education, I feel like the famous meme from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, in which a wild-eyed Charlie stands before a whiteboard covered with conspiracy theory string: It's all connected! Many of us who write in this field sense that public schools are spaces where people practice and make religion; we also intuit that ideas conventionally understood as "religious" regularly intertwine with conceptions of race. In Without a Prayer, Leslie Ribovich provides a helpful model for how scholars can productively build on such intuitions. She advocates "a transformation in how we view religion in public schools: as entwined with the history of race in public education. Secularization and desegregation are part of the same story" (4). Acknowledging the preponderance of research on First Amendment case law as it applies to schools (e. g. , Green 2019), Ribovich makes a valuable contribution by turning "from the courtroom to the classroom to understand how people practiced public education religiously" (8). 1 Specifically, she shows how one municipality supposedly removed religion from the curriculum while moving somewhat fitfully toward desegregation and integration, tracking "religiosity's influence on the seemingly nonreligious moral and civic worldviews put forward in New York City's schools" (8). New York City has always been an outlier in the broader United States due to its large size and comparatively heterogeneous population. An uncharitable critic might quibble that the city's exceptional status makes it an unlikely avatar for US society as a whole. But Ribovich smartly uses New York to highlight how the process of desegregation proceeded in fits and starts in the urban North just as it did, quite infamously, in the rural South. While the legal machinations, dilatory tactics, and explanatory rhetoric used by people in the South and North differed, there were similarities in how religious ideas and ideals helped various parties navigate a period in which desegregation and integration initiatives dovetailed awkwardly with Cold War concerns about fostering patriotism and combating "godless communism. " The church-affiliated segregation academies that came to dominate the Southern educational landscape by the 1960s and 1970s were not nearly as prevalent in the urban North, but that does not mean that integration proceeded smoothly in Northern cities, nor does it mean that those who aimed to accelerate or retard integration did not appeal to religious values. Thus, although she focuses exclusively on New York City, Ribovich persuasively shows that conceptions of religion were closely linked with practices of desegregation nationwide. I generally find this analysis convincing. But I do wonder what Ribovich means when she says that people "practiced public education religiously" (8, my emphasis). For example, participants in the high-profile 1962 Supreme Court case Engel v. Vitale disagreed about the fundamental question of whether a mandatory theistic school prayer was "religious"; some reserved that adjective for sectarian affiliation while treating theism as American "heritage" (Driver 2018; 365). This suggests that there may be some analytical slippage between the first-order definitions used by people in the historical record and second-order scholarly descriptions that gather various phenomena together under the catchall rubric of "religion. " To be fair, such discrepancies are probably inevitable. As Ribovich states in her introduction, she allowed her historical sources to dictate what specific parties counted as "religion" (9) but it "became impossible to separate out religion because public schools braided notions of whiteness, morality, and meanings of religion together in colonial projects of creating moral Americans, with "moral" as a category that signaled white purity and innocence" (10). With this sort of terminological confusion and prevarication in mind, my main points in this review concern the causal relationships between jurisprudence and pedagogical practice, the analytical concepts of "morality" and "secularization, " and how racialization and religion-making work together in practice. I close by commenting on what I see as Ribovich's key methodological contribution: a novel approach to an otherwise confounding archive. Ribovich writes that jurisprudence tends to imagine a strictly privatized version of religion at the expense of seeing how religiosity structures the quotidian operations of schools (7). She doubles down on this point at the end of chapter 3, where she states that "religion clause case law has so shaped the framing of religion in public schools that other religious concepts and work in public schools often remain invisible" (92). I agree that narrating the history of religion and education exclusively as a story of religion clause case law is excessively simplistic, but I note that even Ribovich cannot escape the gravitational pull of the Supreme Court. From the very first page, she pegs the book's argument to two Supreme Court cases: Engel v. Vitale (1962) and Abington Township v. Schempp (1963), the first of which concerned a supposedly nonsectarian prayer authored by the New York State Board of Regents (1). This framing device reflects what I see not as an undue focus on the "secularizing" Supreme Court decisions, but rather as a bidirectional causal relationship between Supreme Court jurisprudence and local educational policy: Whatever happened in "the classroom" reflected tactical interpretations of whatever had recently transpired in "the courtroom" and vice versa. For example, several of the "moral and spiritual values" initiatives of the 1950s, described by Ribovich in chapters 1 and 2, were clearly a response to earlier cases such as Everson v. Board of Education (1947) and McCollum v. Board of Education (1948), which had both determined, albeit in quite different ways, that confessional instruction could not happen on the grounds of the tax-funded public school. The Educational Policies Commission of the National Education Association advanced the "moral and spiritual values" concept in the wake of the McCollum decision to ensure that students could still get exposure to theistic ideals while bypassing explicitly "religious" language (Educational Policies Commission 1951). McCollum was particularly contentious because it clarified that a practice known as "released time, " in which clerics came onto school grounds to offer confessional instruction to students for one hour a week, was unconstitutional. But not all Supreme Court decisions concerning the relationship of religion to public instruction were so negative. For example, in the 1952 New York City case Zorach v. Clauson, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas described Americans as "a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being, " arguing that the public calendar could be adjusted to facilitate Americans' religious practices (Zorach v. Clauson 343 US 313). Many parties eagerly cited Douglas's paragraph in support of "dismissed time" or "weekday religious education" initiatives that allowed students to leave school campuses to receive confessional instruction at local religious institutions (see, for example, Heron 1955). That is, citizens embraced "the spirit of the law" as described by Sarah Barringer Gordon (2010): They responded to Court decisions by tactically refining their approaches or recoding ideas. "Dismissed time" allowed students to continue receiving religious instruction off-campus, while the semantically capacious concept of "morality" allowed municipalities to continue providing hortatory instruction in a legally permissible fashion. But what is morality, exactly? By setting expectations for acceptable behavior through overt and tacit disciplinary measures, public schools clearly inculcate normative understandings of duty and obligation in a manner quite similar to the tax-exempt institutions conventionally described as "religions. " I would go so far as to say that in so doing, schools in secularist societies create perceptions of what counts as religion: Because the law says that schools must not teach students how to be religious, teachers are forced to present certain practices and ideas as "common sense, " while treating others as private "religion. " A teacher might present a Christmas pageant as a traditional seasonal festivity, use Buddhism-derived mindfulness meditation as an aid in classroom management, or lead students in Hinduism-adjacent postural yoga as a type of physical exercise. All of these things can be said to have a "moral" component; any of them could be interpreted as "religion" (Puchner and Markowitz 2018; Brown 2019). Thus, when Ribovich asserts that "education teaches morality" (6), I cannot help but wonder what the word "morality" actually signifies. On the one hand, I think that Ribovich has the same question, which is why she spends a lot of time showing how various parties interpreted that ambiguous concept as "brotherhood" or "neighborliness" (67–93), or alternatively treated integration as a "moral value" (105). On the other hand, I think that she occasionally takes the concept of morality as self-evident when it is anything but. To offer just one example, when she says that "desegregation failed because white New Yorkers could not reconcile … different moral definitions of integration" (179), it reads as if "moral" is her second-order analytical term. But I want to know if and how her usage differs from the historical actors she cites, who may have populated "morality" with different content. To my mind, Ribovich is most persuasive when she offers examples of how the "moral and spiritual values" initiatives of the 1950s created the notion of the "brotherhood of man under the fatherhood of god, " which linked Christian supersessionism with white supremacy. But morality is surely more than just coded language for "Judeo-Christian values. " In my own work, I argue that the concept of morality was convenient for historical actors operating under a recently reconfigured legal regime specifically because it signaled both "religion" and "not-religion, " offering just enough plausible deniability to keep a range of constituents happy. The Supreme Court's religion clause decisions, such as Engel v. Vitale (1962) and Abington v. Schempp (1963), prompted many people to argue that children were not getting enough exposure to religion at a time when Cold War exigencies demanded it. In this context, the concept of "morality" was politically expedient, even if it was not politically neutral. On that note, Ribovich argues against the classic subtraction secularization thesis in which religion inexorably fades from public life. But her framing assumes that secularization did happen, and furthermore suggests that this process began in, or was at least exemplified by, the aforementioned Supreme Court cases. This claim fits somewhat awkwardly with Ribovich's call to shift analysis away from the courts. It also seems to contradict the historical argumentation in the body chapters, which collectively suggest that what appeared to some as the inexorable decline of religion was actually a creative recoding that preserved the privileges conventionally accorded to both whiteness and monotheism. A task for future research is therefore to clarify how to disaggregate "secularization" as a macrosocial historical process from "secularization" as an ideological claim about how things are or should be. This is not a dismissal of the obvious fact that how people define religion, and whether they describe their own or others' practices as religion, shift over time. Rather, it is a "shifting baselines" problem. 2 That is, proponents of the secularization thesis posit a baseline in which religion formerly occupied a certain amount of space or enjoyed a certain amount of prestige and then tell a story of change over time. This sort of narrative may be triumphalist or declensionist; it is politically expedient because it can engender smug satisfaction or indignant outrage. But the narrative is also distorting because it arbitrarily identifies a historical moment as "normal" and then treats secularization as either a deviation from, or progress toward, that norm. In the words of Peter Coviello, narratives of secularization are "partisan" insofar as they are ideological (often teleological) claims about historical change rather than value-neutral observations of social transformations (Coviello 2019, 42–45). Ribovich is absolutely right to caution readers against understanding landmark cases such as Engel and Schempp as watershed moments in a straightforward, inexorable process of "secularization" (7–8). The preponderance of evidence suggests that religion did not go away even after the courts outlawed mandatory prayer and Bible reading in those back-to-back cases. Building on work about the emergence of "Judeo-Christian" (Gaston 2019) or "Tri-Faith" America (Schultz 2011) as a trans-denominational ethos in the mid-twentieth century US, Ribovich persuasively demonstrates that the Christian hegemony of the early twentieth century gave way, by mid-century, to a racially coded set of abstract "values" that nevertheless had explanatory power and hortatory effect. Religion did not exit American schools; educators just changed how they advanced ideals they might have previously described as "religious. " To provide one particularly compelling example, in chapter 2, Ribovich argues that the "moral and spiritual values" curricular guidelines that emerged in the early 1950s shifted veneration away from a creator god, redirecting it toward apotheosized "Founding Fathers. " She rightly describes this as a "theology of whiteness" (40), but it was also notably gendered insofar as it focused students' attention, regardless of their own ethnicities, on a fictive shared patrimony. Deifying the Founders elevated whiteness and masculinity alike. I find this analysis persuasive, but it also raises a question about how racialization and religion-making connect. It has become a truism in our field that religion and race are both socially constructed, and that the construction of one usually informs the creation of the other. In her conclusion, Ribovich emphasizes this point, writing that "religion and race are continuous dynamics in American public education, " and that "it does not make sense to think of them separately" (177). The historical evidence in support of this assertion abounds: We can think of the categorization of Southern European Catholic immigrants as non-white, or the ambiguous status of Judaism as both religion and ethnicity. We might also consider how embracing certain forms of religion has helped ethnic minorities transcend established racial hierarchies (Weisenfeld 2016). However, in saying that religion and race are co-constitutive, I fear that scholars may inadvertently reify or naturalize both terms. My hunch is that many scholars of religion are quite quick to identify race as a social construct with no basis in biology, but still have a vested professional interest in identifying "religion" as a somehow more substantive social reality. In practice, both are socially dependent facts (Schilbrack 2011, 6–10): They are "real" in the sense that humans feel the effects of both racialization and religion-making (Dressler and Mandair 2011). To do this fact justice, we must attend to acts of religion-making—not "religion"— with the same scrutiny that we attend to racialization as opposed to immutable "race. " With this in mind, there are multiple points in the text where Ribovich seems to assume the religiosity of an idea or practice without describing in detail how historical actors made some things into religion or, conversely, rendered some things as not-religion. This was particularly palpable for me in chapter 6, where Ribovich asserts that proponents of "community control" (localized control over school curricula rather than centralized control under the metropolitan government) advocated "religious understandings of race" (146, my emphasis). I am convinced when Ribovich writes that community control advocates necessarily responded to Judeo-Christianity as an ambient religious form that undergirded centralized educational practices (150–151). It is only natural in such a social context that various interest groups responded by articulating alternative understandings that foregrounded different ideals. But responding negatively to a recognizably religious form and positively advancing a "religious understanding of race" are not necessarily the same thing. Rather than describing any given model of race as "religious, " future researchers can be more specific in stating how relevant groups aligned their pedagogical visions with specific doctrines or ritual practices, holding in mind that some ethnic groups have had stronger affinities for the category religion, while others have struggled to make claims in a religious idiom and be heard (Wenger 2017). Ribovich listens carefully to relevant parties to hear what they were saying, but it is an open question whether they were actually or consistently making claims in language that they themselves understood as "religious. " In closing, I want to reflect on the novel methodological contribution this book advances. As Ribovich states in her conclusion, "archival institutions are organized much like our siloed understanding of education, religion, and race" (179). But it is possible to engage the archive differently: "Building on scholarship … that identifies modern religion, race, and education as products of colonialism, I looked for all three across all sources and archives … to show that religion and race do not merely signal each other. " Rather, "they sustain each other through educating the public" (180). As works by Charles Long (1999), Sylvia Wynter (1993), Tomoko Masuzawa (2005), and Brent Nongbri (2013) have shown, the story of the modern categories of religion and race is the story of colonial contact. Recent research has also persuasively demonstrated that schools in the contemporary United States inherit the dubious legacy of colonial religious logics such as the Doctrine of Discovery (Vaught et al. 2022). Ribovich builds on these insights in an excellent, thought-provoking book that takes the religion and education literature in an exciting new direction. It's all connected, and our collective life is richer for knowing how it came to be so.