Written by Charles L. Glenn |
Thursday, July 7, 2022
We welcome the Supreme Court’s explicit recognition that faith-based schools that retain a strong distinctive mission must not be punished for it. This recognition should, in turn, renew the commitment of those working in or supporting a school with a religious mission to ensure that the mission is evident in every aspect of the school’s life and work.

This week, the U. S. Supreme Court ruled 6–3 in Carson v. Makin that a Maine program that bars “sectarian” schools from receiving state-funded tuition assistance is a violation of the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment. The decision is a welcome acknowledgment that religious schools must not be penalized for loyalty to their faith tradition nor tempted by government into conformity with public schools.
Many rural communities in Maine do not have public schools. Since the nineteenth century, Maine has had a program under which families in such communities (more than half of school districts in the state) may receive grants to send their children to public schools in other districts or to private schools of their choosing. But since 1980, state officials have excluded schools that they consider “sectarian” from this program. The state defines a “sectarian school” as “one that is associated with a particular faith or belief system and which, in addition to teaching academic subjects, promotes the faith or belief system with which it is associated and/or presents the material taught through the lens of this faith.” The Carson v. Makin case was brought on behalf of Amy and David Carson and other parents who sought state funding to send their children to private schools that reflected their religious convictions.
In a dissent, in which he was joined by Justices Kagan and Sotomayor, Justice Breyer insisted that “government neutrality” on religious matters was essential, and thus Maine was justified in excluding schools seeking to “teach and promote religious ideals.” The majority opinion points out, however, that “there is nothing neutral about Maine’s program. The State pays tuition for certain students at private schools—so long as the schools are not religious. That is discrimination against religion.” The Court’s majority opinion in Carson notes that “we have repeatedly held that a State violates the Free Exercise Clause when it excludes religious observers from otherwise available public benefits.” It adds that “a neutral benefit program in which public funds flow to religious organizations through the independent choices of private benefit recipients does not offend the Establishment Clause.”
Significantly, the majority opinion rejects the state defendants’ attempt to make a distinction between the religious identity and the educational practice of faith-based schools.
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I find it very moving to see how Newton never gave up on Cowper spiritually but encircled his friend’s mental illness within a larger faith perspective. It was like he held on for him. In 1780, Newton wrote from London to his friend, “How strange that your judgement should be so clouded in one point only, and that a point so obvious and strikingly clear to everybody who knows you!” He wasn’t about to share in Cowper’s spiritual despair. No, he added, “Though your comforts have been so long suspended, I know not that I ever saw you for a single day since your calamity came upon you, in which I could not perceive a s clear and satisfactory evidence, that the grace of God was with you, as I could in your brighter and happier times.”

Just over 250 years have passed since John Newton wrote “Amazing Grace” and introduced it for his congregation for New Year’s Day 1773. He had been a pastor in the quiet market town of Olney for almost a decade, but his earlier life had been anything but quiet.
He had passed through many dangers, toils, and snares: reckless decisions and a reckless love affair; trauma and kidnapping; near shipwreck, near starvation, and near-death illness; enslaved and then a slave trader. But by the end, he was a transformed man. He became a wise spiritual counselor, a powerful preacher, a popular hymn-writer, and in due course a courageous abolitionist. When his autobiography was published, shortly after he was ordained, the people of the town used to stare at him when they saw him in the street. Amazing grace, indeed.
Of the many surprising stories behind the song, one of the most poignant concerns Newton’s friendship with the troubled poet William Cowper. The day the congregation sang “Amazing Grace” was Cowper’s last day in church.
Golden Years of Friendship
William Cowper had suffered great mental anguish and had even been suicidal ten years earlier. At an asylum just outside London, he recovered, by the grace of God, right around the time when Newton arrived at Olney as a pastor. The two met three years later and became fast friends.
Indeed, Newton invited Cowper to move to Olney, and for about twelve years they were pretty much neighbors, with just a small orchard between the vicarage and Cowper’s home on the market square. Cowper had been living in Cambridgeshire with the widow Mary Unwin and her household, and they all moved together into the home they called “Orchardside,” pleased to think they would be in a place where the gospel was preached and loved.
Cowper and Newton had much in common. Both men had lost their mothers when only six years old, both had suffered abuse at boarding school, and both were “men of letters” with literary interests. But most of all, they were both serious about their faith in Christ.
For six years, their friendship grew. Newton, about six years older, encouraged the bashful Cowper to share in the work of pastoral care, prayer meetings, and hymn-writing. These were the golden years of their friendship. Newton admired his friend’s poetic gifts, and one or the other wrote hymns each week for the parish services. Olney knew something of a local revival. When a new building was opened for prayer meetings, Cowper wrote with a real sense of God’s presence,
Jesus, where’er thy people meet,There they behold thy mercy-seat;Where’er they seek thee thou art found,And ev’ry place is hallow’d ground.
There were hints, though, that Cowper still struggled with soul distress from time to time. When Mrs. Unwin, like a mother to him, was seriously ill, he wrote with some melancholy of an “aching void” in his spirit, compared to just after his conversion:
What peaceful hours I then enjoy’d,How sweet their Mem’ry still!But they have left an Aching VoidThe World can never fill.
Still, remarkably, he could turn this spiritual melancholy into an exemplary hymn of prayer for a closer walk with God. This was a prayer for all of us.
A Chasm Opens
Writing this way would become more difficult later. In 1771, he felt a profound disquiet and told Newton, “My Soul is among Lions.” A year later, Newton observed, “Cowper is in the depths as much as ever.” But truth be told, none of these troubles predicted what would happen on the second day of January 1773. This was altogether unexpected.
The day after “Amazing Grace” was sung in church, Newton was called urgently to Orchardside. Cowper had collapsed back into a dark depression and was suicidal. It was a complete breakdown.
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Written by Samuel D. James |
Wednesday, June 15, 2022
Whatever we’ve been doing isn’t working. Even granting that the temptation in moments like these is to overstate the frequency of mass killings, the fact remains that the social and spiritual condition of young American men accords perfectly well with their ascendant role in these horrific events.

Ted Kaczynski, aka the Unabomber, was thirty-six when he began his bombing campaign. Charles Manson was likely at least that age at the onset of his murders. John Allen Muhammad, aka the D.C. Sniper, was about forty-two, and Timothy McVeigh bombed the Oklahoma City Murrah building at the age of twenty-seven.
Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold entered Columbine High School at eighteen and seventeen, respectively. Adam Lanza was twenty when he murdered twenty children and six staffers at Sandy Hook Elementary. Dylann Roof was twenty-one. Payton Gendron opened fire at the Tops Friendly Market in Buffalo at eighteen, the same age as the alleged shooter who murdered nineteen children and two teachers on Tuesday in Uvalde, Texas.
The ages of these two groups are far apart, and their distance expresses a hemorrhaging wound near the soul of contemporary American culture: We have become a society filled with very young men who are ready and willing to throw away their lives and the lives of others.
Yes, America has experienced a meaningful decline in violent crime from the chaos of the ’70s and ’80s. But the value of this decline is obscured by ever-younger killers and their ever-younger victims. The designation of eighteen as legal adulthood is a misleading technicality. We are living in an age of literal child-on-child murder. What can make the conscience tremble if not this?
There are some who sneer at people, like me, who offer prayers in times like these. Prayer, they say, is non-action: an ineffective, meaningless piety meant to maintain the status quo on gun control. Yet it’s these same scoffers who instinctively pivot to the topic of gun control whenever a child takes the lives of other children, and their political rage is no less a religious recitation simply because they confuse Congress for God. An inability to talk about anything other than gun control threatens to deaden our lament and neutralize a vital conversation about why so many of our country’s most lost, most hateful people are boys with their whole lives ahead of them.
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