c. 1998 Religion News Service

UNDATED _ When the House Judiciary Committee on March 5 approved the Religious Freedom Amendment barring the government from infringing on religious expression in schools, 85-year-old Vashti McCollum sighed 50 years’ worth.

It was five decades to the month that the Supreme Court ruled in her favor in McCollum vs. Board of Education, prohibiting for the first time religious instruction in public schools.

“Ever since the decision was handed down, people have tried devious ways to put sectarian religion in the public schools and to get public funds for parochial schools,” said McCollum, her voice wavering, her conviction undiminished. “I think (the Religious Freedom Amendment) is designed to undermine the First Amendment of the Constitution.”

Her own largely forgotten case began in the early 1940s when Champaign, Ill., was a farming town on the eve of the World War II. Bobby-soxers were jitterbugging while the Navy was taking over a dormitory at the University of Illinois. And public school students thought nothing of saying the Lord’s Prayer before assembly.

Vashti McCollum was a homemaker raising three sons when her eldest, 9-year-old Jim, came home and asked her for a quarter so he could take religious instruction in his public grammar school. The McCollums had never been church-goers, and her husband, John “Pappy” McCollum, a professor of vegetable crops at the University of Illinois, was vehemently opposed to the class. But Vashti gave Jim the money so he wouldn’t feel left out.

Jim McCollum, now 63 and a computer consultant in Magnolia, Ark., remembers balking at illustrated Bible stories meant for younger children, and his mother recalls fuming over a poster her son made of the Resurrection.

“There was no emphasis on good morality or citizenship,” she said. “It was pure and simple religious indoctrination.”

The next year young Jim opted out of religious instruction and spent the hour in a small music room next to the teachers’ restrooms or in a chair in the hallway used for detention.

“He never complained about sitting in the music room,” said his mother. “But when he sat in the hall, he came home crying and I thought, `If he can’t take it, I can’t take it.”’

School administrators were unresponsive, she said, so she contacted the Rev. Philip Schug, a local Unitarian minister, who agreed she had grounds for a lawsuit. Schug, now 83, remembers “hopping on a railroad train to Chicago” to rustle up support from wealthy liberals committed to church-state separation. “Soon we were raising a lot of money,” he said, “and we filed a suit against the legislature of Illinois.”

Their first lawyer, Landon Chapman, wanted to prove that religious teaching is inevitably sectarian by demonstrating how minority groups were discriminated against when schools got involved in religion. He even proposed bringing Vashti McCollum’s father, a prominent atheist, into the case to show how nonbelievers would get an unfair shake.

Vashti McCollum objected, fearing such a strategy would pit believers against nonbelievers. She was acting independently of her father, she said, and she didn’t share his atheist sentiments, which struck her as too militant.”I’m a humanist,” she said then and says now. “That’s a much more positive position. I believe that we have one life that we know of, and we are responsible for making the world fit for our fellow men. … If there’s another life, so be it.” Nor did she want to wage a war against formal religion or convert anyone to her particular belief.

Her lawyer prevailed, however, and her father took the stand. He announced to the court that the Adam and Eve story was fictitious and ministers who believed in God were insane. Soon the press dubbed his daughter “The Atheist Mother.” And anonymous phone callers bombarded her with choruses of “Onward, Christian Soldiers.”

Jim McCollum remembers his own turn on the stand at age 10. “I was kind of a nervous kid,” he said. “They had a swivel chair, and I swiveled around a lot. It must have driven the attorneys nuts. I remember on cross-examination (the lawyer) asked me if my lawyer and my mother told me what to say. I said, `Yes, they told me to tell the truth.”’

The court ruled Jim was not harassed, that the Champaign system was not sectarian, and that religion class was like any other extracurricular activity in the schools.

The following Halloween, a mob of trick-or-treaters pelted the McCollum family with rotten tomatoes and cabbage plants. “But I think the most horrifying thing,” Jim McCollum said, “was when they lynched our cat that fall.”

When the Illinois Supreme Court agreed to hear the case, Vashti McCollum hired a new lawyer, Walter Dodd, an expert on constitutional law. He took a new tact.

Dodd argued that publicly segregating students in sectarian groups for religious education in the schools during school hours violated constitutional guarantees of freedom of religion. And he said such action is not validated by allowing children to be excused.

When the court ruled against the McCollums, Jim remembers thinking it was good. “I said if we won (in the Supreme Court) it would be the law of the land and not just the state of Illinois.” And, indeed, on June 2, 1947, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to review the case.

Given the potential precedent, religious groups that had remained on the sidelines went public with their support of Vashti McCollum. The Synagogue Council of America, the American Unitarian Association and the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists filed briefs on her behalf.

Although many Baptists opposed the McCollums, the Baptist leadership historically had supported church-state separation. And the Joint Conference Committee on Public Relations, set up by the Southern Baptist Convention, the two Northern Baptist Conventions and the National Baptist Convention, filed a brief backing the McCollums.

After the hearing, Vashti McCollum said, the family lived “from Monday to Monday” waiting for the court’s decision. Then on March 8, 1948, a newspaper reporter awakened her with the news: The Supreme Court had decided 8 to 1 that public school systems may not assist religious groups in giving religious instruction and thus spreading their faith.

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Justice Hugo Black delivered the majority opinion, saying such assistance “falls squarely under the ban of the First Amendment.” Religion and government, he said, “can best work to achieve their lofty aims if each is left free from the other.”

Half a century later, Rep. Ernest J. Istook Jr., R-Okla., thinks not. He says that his proposed Religious Freedom Amendment is a response to decades of Supreme Court decisions that have barred or discouraged religious expression in public places. Amendment supporters say it would secure students’ right to pray in schools.

Vashti McCollum believes such a proposal is unconstitutional, “according to my case, and more importantly, according to the wording of the First Amendment.”

Jim McCollum, now married to a Unitarian Universalist minister, agrees. Children, he notes, are already permitted to pray in school. But the First Amendment, he believes, prohibits schools from organizing and sanctioning religious activity. Supporters of Istook’s amendment, McCollum is convinced, “want this country to be declared a Christian country.”

After 50 years, Schug shrugs at what he sees as the ongoing demand for vigilance in the face of assaults on church-state separation. “We settled this once,” he says. “Why do we have to settle it again?”

DEA END RNS