When it came to religion in public schools, they didn’t agree on much else. Some prominent Founders, like Philadelphia’s Benjamin Rush, thought American public schools could only fulfill their mission if they inculcated children with religion. And not just any religion—Rush insisted in 1786 that schools should teach evangelical Protestant Christianity, “the religion of JESUS CHRIST.”
Other Founders disagreed. Thomas Jefferson imagined a flourishing system of free public schools for white children. His public schools, however, would explicitly replace “the Bible and Testament” with “the most useful facts from Grecian, Roman, European and American History.” Some founders went even further. Noah Webster, the textbook and dictionary author, purged religious language from his early schoolbooks. Instead of the old Puritan line that had taught earlier generations their alphabet—“A. In Adam’s Fall, We sinned all”—Webster put in a secular one: “A. Was an Apple-pie made by the cook.”
For DeSantis or anyone to say, then, that the Founding Fathers wanted religious public schools is simply false, a MAGA delusion. There were, however, some general principles upon which the Founders tended to agree. For one thing, they felt that public schools had to teach children how to be moral citizens, and that might include teaching religious ideas—but schools could never teach any one religion as the American religion. The word they used at the time was “non-sectarian,” and they meant that the goal of public schools was to make moral, thoughtful citizens, not better Presbyterians or Baptists or Catholics.
Samuel Knox might have captured this sentiment best. Knox is not as widely remembered today as Thomas Jefferson or Benjamin Rush, but for the founding generation, his prize-winning 1795 essay was often considered the best description of the goals for truly American public schools. As Knox put it, public schools had to “separate the pursuits of science and literary knowledge from that narrow restriction and contracted influence of peculiar religious opinions.”
The reason for this was clear. The Founders worried that their new government might fall into the trap of the decrepit European monarchies. Indeed, the very first constitutional amendment started with a clear statement of their concern: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” As the First Amendment specified, Americans were free to practice any religion, but government leaders could never tell them which religion to practice. The Founders hoped to prevent elected politicians from using state-sponsored religion to agitate the populace into a European-style frenzy. As John Adams explained later in a letter to Thomas Jefferson, “People cannot whip and crop, and pillory and roast, as yet in the U.S.? If they could they would.”