A Decision that “Spits in the Face of Our History”: Catholics, Protestants, and the Changing Church-State Vision of 1960s America

In 1962 and 1963, a pair of U.S. Supreme Court decisions—in Engel v. Vitale and Abington v. Schempp—solidified the “wall of separation” mandated by the Establishment Clause to preclude non-denominational prayer and Bible reading in public classrooms. A century earlier, American Catholics had petitioned school officials across the country to take similar action—to remove the Bible, in its Protestant King James Version, from public schools. Only a decade earlier, in the 1940s and fifties, legal wrangling over the First Amendment’s religion clauses continued to reliably pit Catholics against Protestants and other Americans over questions regarding public education’s character. In the immediate aftermath of Engel and Abington, however, Catholic voices joined those of conservative Protestants and Jews to decry the Court’s decisions banning prayer and Bible reading. These interdenominational objections—to what all-involved perceived as a Court-imposed secularism that threatened American public education—join the election of John F. Kennedy Jr. in 1960 and the opening of the Second Vatican Council in 1962 as critical episodes responsible for laying to rest lingering concerns among American Protestants regarding Catholic difference. This paper will explore the conversations among Catholics and conservative Protestants, which developed around Engel and Abington in the early 1960s. Encountering one another for the first time as allies in a common cause—as dissenters to the Court’s vision of “Godless” public schools—conservative Catholics and Protestants embarked upon a shared legal vision in the sixties, one that closely paralleled the liberal ecumenism religious historians often celebrate as the legacy of that era.