‘Devil’ woman faces down a city and wins

By NEIL STEINBERG nsteinberg@suntimes.com

Illinois public schools do not offer religious training. Children in art class do not color pictures of Jesus holding a lamb, nor do they start each day with a Bible reading.

That’s just the way it is, now.

Adherents to the lesser creeds, i.e., religions other than Protestant Christianity or even — shudder — no religion at all, have a right to attend public school, to learn about spelling and geography and Henry Hudson, without having an alien faith shoved down their throats.

For this, we can thank — or, if you prefer, blame — a Champaign housewife with the incongruous Biblical name of Vashti McCollum, who did not like her son Jim being forced to sit out in the hall while his fifth-grade class at Dr. Howard Elementary School had its weekly Bible study and sued her local Board of Education to make them stop.

The lawsuit went all the way to the United States Supreme Court and began to unravel the grip that Christianity had on supposedly secular public education.

I had never heard of Vashti McCollum until I watched a powerful new documentary film “The Lord Is Not On Trial Here Today,” which WTTW Channel 11 is airing, appropriately enough, on Mother’s Day this Sunday.

The movie tells a simple story. The Champaign public schools offered a voluntary weekly religious class. Vashti McCollum wanted no part of it. The first resistance she encountered was from her own child.

“I wanted to be in with everybody else, but my mother didn’t think that was a good idea,” says Jim McCollum, the eldest of three boys, in the movie. “The teacher was very adamant and put pressure on me, put pressure my parents. And eventually I put enough pressure on my parents to get into the class, toward the end of semester.”

That didn’t last long.

“He came home after a few weeks . . . he had a poster he had colored showing the Resurrection,” says Vashti McCollum. “I thought, ‘This is not what I had expected at all.’ I thought they’d teach him something about the history, the culture; but not indoctrination in the old Christian faith. I said ‘Never again.’ ”

And so it began. Jim McCollum would sit at a desk in the hall during religion class. His classmates, freshly inculcated in the beauties of faith, beat him up for refusing to attend.

Vashti McCollum sued. The case exploded in the newspapers. People in Champaign were shocked to find a family of atheists living amongst them. A member of the Illinois Legislature introduced legislation to fire any state employee who professed to be an atheist.

The trial began in September 1945, and it was the first to take the establishment clause of the Constitution’s First Amendment — “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion” — and successfully argue it applies, not only to Congress, but to the states.

The movie is less than an hour long, but covers not only the forgotten legal basis of our current stab at a secular society, but a study of what a community can do to a family that insists its own theological beliefs are as valid as everybody else’s (you are called the “devil incarnate”; believers hang your pet cat).

I won’t give away the ending (spoiler alert, they don’t hold Bible classes in public school anymore). You should see the movie yourself, even if you are among the incredulous faithful — it is an hour well spent, and might help you wrap your head around the tough-for-some-to-grasp concepts of “other people” who believe “other things.”

The film was created — written, produced, directed and photographed — by Jay Rosenstein, an associate professor in journalism at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “I’ve lived here for 25 years, and this is one of the stories that is part of the folklore of Champaign-Urbana,” he said. “What hooked me was the local News-Gazette did a reprint of famous headlines past, and printed the day the McCollum decision came down.”

He did the movie just in time. “I didn’t even know if she was alive,” he said. “But she was in the phone book, I dialed the number and she answered.” He interviewed Vashti McCollum at age 92; she died the following year.

The movie constitutes both history and, alas, current events.

“There are people here still bitter about what they think she did,” said Rosenstein. (Who, why yes, is Jewish, as I am, thanks for pointing it out. Judaism is just one of the many religions — Muslim, Hindu, Quaker, Mormon, Christian Scientist — that aren’t taught in the public schools either. Yet somehow we have an easier time accepting not being in the public school curriculum along with fractions, photosynthesis and 1776, perhaps because we learn the “other people” lesson early in life).

“The Lord Is Not On Trial Here Today,” airs at noon Sunday on WTTW, Channel 11.

Via: http://www.suntimes.com/news/steinberg/5207590-452/devil-woman-faces-down-a-city-and-wins.html

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