Argument for the Court

Is the reading of the Bible in the public schools a violation of the U.S. Constitution? The U.S. Supreme Court last week agreed to give the question its thought.

The State of New Jersey is the defendant in the case. For 35 years, New Jersey law has prescribed the reading of five verses a day from the Old Testament. Students whose parents object are not required to be present. Even so, two New Jersey taxpayers, Mrs. Anna Klein of Hawthorne and Donald R. Doremus of East Rutherford, members of a group entitled the United Secularists of America, object seriously. They have sued on the grounds that any kind of Bible reading is a violation of the constitutional provision for the separation of church and state. Last October the New Jersey supreme court ruled against Taxpayers Klein and Doremus (TIME, Oct. 30).

The New Jersey justices held that readings from the Old Testament are religious but not "sectarian." Moreover, the New Jersey court thought the readings were a pretty sound idea: "It is not necessary that the state should be stripped of religious sentiment . . . We are at a crucial hour in which it may behoove our people to conserve all of the elements which have made our land what it is."

Next fall the U.S. Supreme Court will hear further arguments from both sides, then render a ruling of its own.

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