Garb ban has anti-Catholic roots
Pennsylvania was among the first states in the U.S. to prohibit public school teachers from wearing any type of religious garb — from a small cross on a chain to a yarmulke. Nearly two dozen others passed similar laws by the 1940s.
Philip Jenkins, a professor of history at Baylor University in Texas, said while these laws advanced the separation of church and state, the real focus was on keeping Catholics out of classrooms.
By the late 19th century, one of the dominant facts in American life was anti-Catholicism, Jenkins said. Protestants formed a mass movement called the American Protective Association that had millions of followers across dozens of states.
While it’s largely forgotten today, Jenkins said, at the time it was probably the largest single mass movement in American history.
“They believe they’re there to fight a Catholic conspiracy to take over the country,” he said. “They get a lot of laws passed around the country trying to separate church and state because they don’t want the Catholics taking over Protestant schools.”
Pennsylvania adopted its garb statute in 1895, when the movement was at its strongest, Jenkins said. Other states followed, and in some cases, modeled their laws on the commonwealth’s.
By the 1920s, the American Protective Association had dissolved and the Ku Klux Klan had taken up its cause, having reached the north with a focus on anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic, and anti-immigrant sentiment.
In Pennsylvania, the garb law led some teachers to end their public school careers, including Catholic nuns in Cambria County, and later plain-dressed Mennonite and Brethren school teachers in Lancaster, according to historians Steven Nolt and Jean-Paul Benowitz.
Teacher Lillian Risser, a Mennonite, and the school board that hired her brought the first case against the law in 1908. A judge initially ruled in their favor and declared the ban unconstitutional, citing the freedoms afforded by the state’s constitution.
But the state’s superior and supreme courts reversed the decision on appeal, claiming the legislature had the right to restrict teachers’ dress even if religiously motivated.
In the mid-1980s, three Philadelphia principals cited the law when they denied a teacher who wore a hijab substitute work. She challenged the law, but eventually lost her case.
Protecting students’ freedom of religion
Public school teachers’ rights have increased significantly since Risser’s time, but they still face limits not placed on most other citizens.
David Callaway, a religious freedom specialist for the Freedom Forum, said that’s because public schools have a responsibility to protect the rights of students.
While teachers bring their First Amendment rights into the classroom, at a certain point, they start bumping into the Establishment Clause, Callaway said.
Religion has a dual clause that protects the free exercise of religion — what people go out and do — while also preventing the government itself from establishing or favoring one religion over another.
Since public school teachers are government employees, schools have an obligation to make sure students know the beliefs they carry are personal and not endorsed by the government, Callaway said.
“Most states are totally fine allowing teachers to wear unobtrusive religious jewelry or religious garb, you know, things that are not, like, super proselytizing,” he said.
Not fine? A T-shirt that says, “Jesus saves.”
“The court recognizes that schools and state governments have a real vested interest in appearing neutral in regards to education in particular,” Callaway said.
States have shed their garb laws by choice, not legal decree, he said, in recognition that educators should be allowed to bring more of themselves into the workplace.
“If you are a person who wears a hijab or a yarmulke, or carries around rosary beads, those things should not necessarily prohibit you from being an educator,” he said.