Recently, our state supreme court was asked to rule on the following case: a divorced couple could not resolve their dispute regarding appropriate schooling for their kids. The dad preferred a private Christian school, the mom preferred a public education. Each side premised their argument on the First Amendment, the dad arguing freedom of religion, the Mom arguing antiestablishmentarianism. The Court came to the “correct” conclusion given current FA jurisprudence and held that the appropriate standard the lower court must apply is “the best interests of the child” and in measuring the best interests of the child, the court could not consider religion or any decision tangential to religion.
I am curious as to how the various parties to this blog discussion react to such a decision, especially as it is an opportunity to bring all the theoretical stuff to bear on a real life decision which civil authorites are duty bound to render on a daily basis.
Really complicated, of course. Is the child baptized? Is there a good Christian school around? Is the public school part of a real town or neighborhood?
But without knowing these answers, I’d still offer that the court made a good ruling formally by acting in the interests of the child but substantially a bad ruling in disregarding religion. Even with only one Christian parent, the child is one of the covenant and so the court could, it seems to me, use “experts” from the family’s “faith community” to see what would be best for the child.
Or to put it another way, even if Christianity doesn’t go all the way down in the believer (as in the politics of identity), I don’t see how the court can neglect what is clearly part of the child’s identity.
BTW, if the parents are believers, shame on them for going to the civil authorities.
As the judge, you would not be permitted to ask or consider those matters. The “best interest of the child” test is the very old, standard, common law test judges are asked to apply in cases of divorce disputes.
The point of bringing the case up is to illustrate the difficulties (or impossibility) of determining the “best interest” of a child (or of a society?) without any recourse to anything touching on religion.
Disregarding religion (or in legal lingo, maintaining “strict neutrality”) is the proper posture of a thoroughly secular state. The very impossibility of this posture, however, will force a judge to admit in the back door what he can’t admit through the front, either by: 1) treating ultimate questions in a completely instrumentalist way (like asking if it is part of the child’s “identity,” or bringing in experts to discuss how religious education produces less juvenile delinquents) which ends up being a massive exercise in question begging; OR, 2) the judge can just sereptitiously make a judgment concerning religion and pretend to the public that he had not done what he just did. The latter of these is what ends up happening most often, which tends to erode the public’s trust in their government over time and convince people that power is all that matters, which can lead to unseemly struggles among persons of various religious persuasions over matters of temporal power and authority.
Was it really so much an issue of the “court neglect[ing] what is clearly part of the child’s identity” more than trying to play hands-off when it comes to religion? That seems a tad pessimistic. I think it is the natural result of a noble effort to keep the secular and sacred spheres separate. It does seem to impoverish the equally noble effort to pursue the best interests of a child, though.
As one who believes that “public schools ought to be thoroughly secularized and Christian kids ought to be in them,” I still believe that every educational effort of parents should be where a child will receive the best education available, which may very well mean a Christian school, a public school, a Catholic school, a private school, a charter school. School is about education (not very profound) and having been in education in one form or another the last 15 years, it matters little what template any one organization claims to write upon; you either do it well or not-so-well and slapping a religious label over it never seems to do much. And the onus is on *parents* to decide, not courts or any other institution, sacred or secular.
The father may have been one like me who was fighting for a Christian school, depsite his above slogan, but only because it would have been in Suzie’s “best interest” because the local public school was sub-par and there were no Catholic schools (which enjoy a good reputation) around. Hopefully, that is why he wanted it and wasn’t laboring under that widespread illusion that a Christian school by its very virtue of being such will always trump another…because in my experience, it simply doesn’t.
zrim
I considered exercising my anti-liberal and hierarchical authority as author of this post to delete Steve’s absurd comment. But I endure thought-numbing bureaucratic middle-mindedness nearly every day, so why not here as well?
Needless to say, there is nothing remotely resembling education in Steve’s world. It is all just the lifeless, boring, managerial task of rearranging bits of information on a bland and inconsequential surface. And what gives, are Catholic schools not Christian?
This is my primary objection to Hart’s thesis: that it enables (perhaps through no fault of Hart’s) such weak-kneed and weak-minded expressions of bureaucratic malise as this from Steve. This also from a guy who equates Aquinas with offering scriptural proof-texts for some version of mindless bureaucratic classroom regulations. Anti-scholasticism is fine in its place, but this is absurd.
Caleb, how do you delete comments on this blog? I’m feeling powerless and would like some relief.
Also, why can’t a judge ask those questions I raised? Is it what common law will or will not allow? Or is it the current practice of a secularized form of justice?
As for weak-kneed and weak-minded expressions of bureaucratic malaise, what would a strong anti-liberal and hierarchical prairie response look like? Burning the court building down?
Darryl, for those who have passed into the seventh inner circle of blog mastery and learned the secret DRC gang signs, we are given the power to navigate behind the techno-mystery of the “front page” into the guts of the matrix to alter blog reality at will. Chellis is obviously holding out on you.
I should have been more specific. The judge would not be permitted to ask or consider such things as the child’s baptism. He could ask questions regarding certain aspects of the competing schools, but nothing that would touch religion.
Tarring and feathering a few bureaucrats would be a good start. Especially educrats. Prairie mobs have better sense than to tear down their own courthouse. We pay taxes, after all.
PS. My remark about Steve’s remark concerning Aquinas (he actually didn’t mention the Angelic Doctor by name) references a comment that has not actually made its way to the front page yet. Just FYI
But seriously, what a depressing, disenchanted, and disheartening view of life Steve takes, just waiting around to die. In antiquity, it was often said that human achievement in art and philosophy was the prime consolation against mortality. With Steve, I feel the need for consolation against immortality.
Maybe someday the “experts” of our tolerant and pluralistic society will go in and determine that the “best interest” of a Muslim girl (about to be stoned because she was raped by her brother) is that she be accorded what her “identity” requires (to be determined by Sharia law) in such a case.
Further reactions:
1) In a self-consciously Christian nation that unapologetically gives preference to the Christian religion, the path would be clear.
2) If we must have public schools, let them be Christian, and let whoever wants send his children or not as he prefers!
3) Since I live in this world & not the world of my preference, the choice should belong to whoever has custody of the child. If custody is 50/50, the court should award custody to one or the other, because the situation is such that the divorced couple cannot resolve the dispute on their own… D’oh! This isn’t good enough. I gotta think about it some more.
Aha! I was wondering what happened to some of my comments!
But, seriously… I am under the impression, from connections to a divorced couple who has tangled a bit in family court, that Judges in Pennsylvania make take baptism and vows, and such into account at least in the following respect: When the couple was together they shared and planned their childrens’ upbringing. This couple planned to homeschool. While the particular issue did not have to be settled by the court (they managed some sort of workable agreement that the court ratified), I did not think that the Judge had to ignore such factors, if they were explicit in the previous upbringing of the child. Vows such as the RPCNA baptismal vows would involve something of which the courts would seem allowed to take note, as long as it did not involve the court in making specifically religious judgements. Perhaps this only works at the level of binding arbitration, and not when it comes to a custody battle per se.
Just wondering.
Tony
Caleb, serves me right for not being a cradle-Covenanter. I do now own a lapel pin, however, so I am closer to the kingdom.
I wouldn’t take this out on Steve, whom I know personally to enjoy good beer — there are worse forms of consolation. What would you do to the judge or attorneys?
I wouldn’t do anything to the judge or attorneys. Like I said, the legal approach is correct given our decadent pluralistic state. As has been said before, what are needed are some Christian Machiavellians. I am not entirely sure how that might play out in the case of the local judge on this case. My guess is that he would be particularly adept at adapting option #2 above to the ends of right and good order in the life of the child, which, of course, will involve religious judgments of one kind or another, and therefore be in technical violation of the law.
Caleb, I followed several of your links, and the links within links and want to know if you would rather have a political party that flows from the tribe or cult, or would you prefer to see political independence for Kansas and let Kansans work it out from there? If the former, the chances for success (since we don’t have a parliamentary system) are nil. That doesn’t mean it’s bad; I am on the side of historical losers (think Machen, Nevin and Warfield). But lack of success usually means ineffective — in which case, burning down the court house might be better.
If you prefer autonomy for Kansas, the outcome is likely another fat-chance. But I think such an outcome would be less wooden about a neutral public square.
Mind you, I have not abandoned my two-kindgom convictions. If the OPC were to be part of Kansasland, I would hope she would keep her small nose out of politics — what her members do is another matter. But in the interests of limited government, resisting centralization — all those good things we celebrate today — I am willing to step away from my seat the Session table and sign another Declaration of Independence.
“And what gives, are Catholic schools not Christian?”
Just in case any readers wonder what exactly Caleb is referring to in his initial response to me above with all that talk about Aquinas, he appears mainly to be responding to a post I made on another thread which was itself deleted. I guess that was the “absurd” one, since in it I make reference to my own vocation in standardized student assessments in order to make a point. And I guess my vocation is what he means by “the lifeless, boring, managerial task of rearranging bits of information on a bland and inconsequential surface…and bureaucratic malise.” Fine, think of my vocation any way you please–I am used to these sorts of slings and arrows of not meeting everyone’s superior expectations as I work for the state. But let it be known here, in case anyone was as confused as me, that Caleb’s response seems to be a mix of one responding to a post in existence and one that he took upon himself to delete because he didn’t much care for it.
Or…he’s strictly talking about my post to his post-proper above. If that’s the case, I am lost as to what is exactly absurb about it. I am not clear as to which post was absurd–the one he chose to delete or the one he let stand. But it doesn’t really matter.
More importantly because it bothers me even more, just in case it might be inferred by readers that by the above quote I mean to somehow subtley call Catholics not Christian by how I chose to delineate perfectly valid school choices…what I meant by “Christian” school was the garden variety Protestant ones such as you’d find here in the cradle of Reformed Transformationism, Grand Rapids. When one says “Catholic school” here one knows immediately it to be affiliated with a local diocese; when one says “Christian school” he means one associated with a variety of Protestant denominations, most notably the CRC (my own sell-out demon. to what RSC correctly calls a “trajectory toward broad Evangelicalism). So, I am saying there is a difference…but calling Catholic schools “not Christian” seems to be something someone else incorrectly inferred, not something I meant to imply.
Thanks for letting me interrupt to hopefully calrify some confusionss. You may all get back to solving the world’s problems now,
Steve
I did not delete any posts. Just FYI. My comment re: deletion was mostly a joke, allbeit, perhaps in poor taste … however, that poor taste was actually the point of the joke. In other words, it tends to shock the conscience to think of someone using their power to silence someone else, especially in what we have all more or less come to think of as a context of communication where every idea is equal and disagreements are merely a matter of opinion. This state of affairs is less than healthy and fosters a vincible ignorance of the harsh fact that some ideas ought to be silenced.
(The mysterious undeleted comment appears here at July 2nd, 2007 at 3:51 pm.)