Bible riots, Know-Nothings and the amendment named for James G. Blaine

When a legislature writes a rule against funding "sectarian" schools, the word sounds neutral. It sounds like something a careful civics teacher would approve. Ask what "sectarian" meant to the people who put it in the law and the neutral sound goes away fast.

It meant Catholic. In much of the country in the 1870s, a "sectarian" school was a Catholic school, and the rules that bear that word were written to keep Catholic families from sharing in public money for education. Those rules are still on the books in many states. They still shape which parents can use a school-choice program. And the Supreme Court has begun, slowly, to say what they are.

This is a history post, so let me tell it in order. The path runs from a riot in Philadelphia, through a political party that took its name from a pledge to say nothing, to a failed amendment in the Senate, and to a hundred and fifty years of state constitutional text.

The thesis and the terms

A Blaine Amendment is the usual name for a provision of a state constitution that bars public money from going to "sectarian" or religious schools. The name comes from James G. Blaine, a congressman from Maine, who proposed a federal amendment in 1875 that inspired them.

Nativism is political hostility to immigrants, in this case aimed especially at Irish and German Catholics.

My claim: the state "no aid" clauses grew out of nineteenth-century anti-Catholic politics, they were adopted by people who knew whom they were aimed at, and conservatives who defend religious families have a strong historical case when they say these clauses should not block neutral school-choice programs. I'll make the case in five steps and then state the strongest objection.

Step one: the Bible in the common school

Start with the schools themselves. In the first half of the nineteenth century, American public education, as Horace Mann and others built it, was meant to be a "common school" for all children. Common did not mean secular. It meant nondenominational Protestant. The school day opened with a reading from the Bible, and the Bible in question was the King James Version. The textbooks assumed a Protestant account of history. Catholic children sat through devotions and lessons that treated their own church as an error to be corrected.

Catholic immigrants objected, and they objected on grounds a free country should take seriously. The Douay Bible is the Catholic translation, and their church did not accept that a child should read Scripture without the church's guidance. They asked a modest thing: let our children be excused from the Protestant devotions, or let us read our own version.

In Philadelphia in 1844 that request touched off a riot. Bishop Francis Kenrick had asked the school board to excuse Catholic children from reading the Protestant Bible. Rumors spread, false and wildly exaggerated, that Catholics wanted the Bible removed from the schools altogether. In May of 1844, mobs in the Kensington district fought, houses were burned, and a Catholic church, St. Michael's, was set on fire, along with St. Augustine's, and a Catholic neighborhood was attacked. In July the violence returned, with the militia called out. Lives were lost in both outbreaks.

Pause on that. American citizens burned churches in an American city because other Americans had asked that their children not be forced to read a version of the Bible their faith did not accept. The people who started it believed they were defending Scripture. They were burning the houses of people who also prized Scripture.

Step two: the Know-Nothings

Violence of that scale needs a politics, and it got one. In the 1840s and 1850s secret societies organized to oppose Catholic immigration and Catholic influence. Members were told to say, when asked about their organization, "I know nothing," and so the movement became known as the Know-Nothings. By 1854 it had become a political force, formally the American Party, and in the elections of that year it won a startling number of offices, with its biggest victory in Massachusetts. In 1856 the party's presidential nominee was Millard Fillmore, a former president, who carried one state.

The Know-Nothings did not last long. The slavery question shattered their coalition, and the new Republican Party absorbed many of their voters. But the instinct behind them did not die, and a generation later, with the Civil War over and Catholic immigration still growing, the instinct found a respectable vehicle.

Step three: Blaine's amendment of 1875

In September of 1875, President Ulysses S. Grant gave a speech to a veterans' meeting in Iowa calling for free public schools and warning against "sectarian" interference with them. The remark helped set the stage for the 1876 election. Congress took up the matter that winter. In December of 1875, Representative James G. Blaine of Maine, who had ambitions for the Republican nomination, offered a proposed amendment to the Constitution.

As Blaine drafted it, the amendment extended the First Amendment's religion clauses to the states, which had not yet happened, and then added what mattered: no money raised by taxation for the support of public schools, nor any public land devoted to them, could be controlled by any religious sect, and none of it could be divided among religious sects or denominations. The text did not mention Catholics, because it did not need to. Everyone knew what "sects" meant. The Protestant common schools were not regarded as sectarian. The Catholic parochial schools were.

The House passed the amendment by a lopsided vote in August of 1876. In the Senate it fell a few votes short of the two-thirds required for a constitutional amendment, and it died. That is the fact worth noticing: the amendment failed. The country, at the federal level, declined to write the rule into the Constitution.

Step four: the states copy it anyway

The failure at the federal level was not the end. Supporters of the idea turned to the states, where it was easier. Over the following decades, state after state added "no aid" language to its own constitution. Congress helped. When it admitted new states, the enabling acts of 1889, for the Dakotas, Montana and Washington, required that their constitutions provide for public schools "free from sectarian control." Later states adopted similar language, often on their own initiative. Many states now have some version of a provision barring public funds for religious schools or "sectarian" institutions.

That is the point at which a defensible concern, keeping a public school system from becoming the instrument of a particular denomination, was turned into a rule that treats religious schools as a disfavored category. The first is a limit on government. The second is a penalty on citizens for being religious.

The Supreme Court has noticed the history. In Mitchell v. Helms in 2000, a plurality opinion by Justice Thomas said the hostility to aid for "pervasively sectarian" schools has a shameful pedigree, and that the doctrine grew out of an era of intense anti-Catholic bigotry. In the case of Espinoza v. Montana and the Blaine Amendments Against Religious Schools in 2020, the Court held that a state could not, under a no-aid provision, exclude religious schools from a scholarship program that was otherwise open to private schools. It did not need to decide the question of the clause's motive, since discrimination based on religious status was enough. But Justice Alito, in a concurrence, went through the history in detail.

Step five: what Catholics built in response

The people who bore the cost did not sit still, and what they did is the most American part of the story.

If the common school would not respect their children's faith, and the government would not help fund an alternative, Catholics would build their own schools at their own expense. The Third Plenary Council of Baltimore in 1884 directed pastors to establish a parochial school in every parish, and parents to send their children to them. The result was one of the largest systems of private education in the world, built by working-class families who paid taxes for the public schools and then paid again for their own.

Nor did they stop at defending themselves in the legislature. When Oregon passed a law in 1922 requiring nearly every child to attend public school, Catholic and other private schools sued. In Pierce v. Society of Sisters in 1925, a unanimous Supreme Court struck the law down. The opinion said the child is not the mere creature of the state, a line worth a post of its own, and we give it one in the family came before the state, so why does the state act like a parent?. The Oregon law had been backed by the Ku Klux Klan, among others, and its purpose was to close the Catholic schools.

The steelman

Now the best case for the no-aid clauses. It is not a stupid case.

The objection goes like this. Public money should not be spent on the teaching of religion. That principle appeals to Jefferson, to Madison's Memorial and Remonstrance of 1785, which protested a Virginia bill to tax citizens for the support of Christian teachers, and to a long tradition of religious dissenters, including Baptists, who feared state-supported churches. A taxpayer should not be forced to pay for the propagation of beliefs he rejects. That concern is older than any anti-Catholic panic, and many who share it are not bigots.

It deserves an answer in four points.

1. The concern is about compulsion and establishment, and school choice involves neither. In a program where parents choose among schools, the money follows the child, not the government's preference. No taxpayer is taxed to support a church by name. The state is not directing anyone's worship. The parent decides.
2. The no-aid clauses go beyond that concern. A rule that says secular private schools qualify but religious ones do not is not neutrality. It singles out religion for exclusion, which is why the Court in Espinoza and in Carson v. Makin in 2022 found it a violation of the Free Exercise Clause.
3. The history matters because it shows intent. A law that was passed to burden one religious group does not become a neutral principle by surviving a century. The label "sectarian" was a code, and it worked as one.
4. Taxpayer conscience cuts both ways. Catholic, Jewish, evangelical and Muslim parents all pay the taxes. A system that returns their money only if they choose a school with no religion in it is asking them to buy a service and be punished for what they believe.

Reasonable people can still debate how to design school-choice programs, how to handle accountability, and what the Establishment Clause permits. That debate is legitimate. What is not legitimate is the use of a bigoted rule from 1875 as a trump card.

What the story teaches

Three lessons come out of it.

First, neutral-sounding rules can have discreditable histories. Check the history. Read the legislative debates before you accept a clause as a principle.

Second, religious liberty and parental rights belong together. The same families who were told their schools were suspect were the ones who defended the right to run them.

Third, the answer to a bad law is not to hate the people who wrote it, but to fix it with the tools the republic provides: litigation, legislation, and persuasion. You can see how the Court has moved on this and related cases in the Courts section and in Everson v. Board of Education, the school bus case that changed church and state. For a related story about a minority faith's treatment, see Missouri's 1838 extermination order and what Latter-day Saints endured, and for the founding-era roots of religious freedom, Sixteen words on religion in the First Amendment, read phrase by phrase.

The case in brief

1. The Philadelphia Bible riots of 1844 started over Catholic children's objection to Protestant Bible reading in the common schools, and Catholic churches were burned.
2. The Know-Nothing movement of the 1850s turned that anti-Catholic feeling into party politics.
3. James G. Blaine's 1875 amendment to bar public money from "sectarian" schools passed the House and failed in the Senate, but states copied its language into their own constitutions.
4. The Supreme Court has found that excluding religious schools from otherwise neutral programs violates the Free Exercise Clause, in Espinoza in 2020 and Carson in 2022.
5. The correct response is neutrality: let parents choose and let the money follow the child.

What you can do: look up your own state constitution's education article, find out whether it has a "no aid" clause, and ask your state legislators what it would take to remove it.