Time Out for Religion

The U.S. Supreme Court this week approved (6-3) the practice of releasing children from school classes for religious instruction, provided the instruction is held outside the schools. In upholding such a one-hour-a-week "released time" program in New York, the court cut a passage through the "wall of separation between church and state" which it resoundingly proclaimed in the 1948 McCollum case in Champaign, Ill. (TIME, March 22, 1948).

"In the McCollum case, the classrooms were used for religious instruction, and the force of the public school was used to promote that instruction," wrote Associate Justice William O. Douglas for the majority. "Here . . . the public schools do no more than accommodate their schedules to a program of outside religious instruction . . . No one is forced to go to the religious classroom, and no religious exercise of instruction is brought to the classrooms of the public schools. A student . . . is left to his own desires as to the manner or time of his religious devotions, if any."

The Constitution "does not say that in every and all respects there shall be a separation of church and state. Rather it studiously defines the manner, the specific ways in which there shall be no concert or union or dependency one on the other.

"That is the common sense of the matter. Otherwise the state and religion would be aliens to each other--hostile, suspicious and even unfriendly. We find no constitutional requirement which makes it necessary for government to be hostile to religion and to throw its weight against efforts to widen the effective scope of religious influence."

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