The Role of Religion in Education for Democracy: the case of Cold War Chicago and Roman Catholicism

“Religious and non-religious communities in the United States together have an increasingly urgent need to understand the dynamics of religious ideas and values in the public sphere, and the history of moral education can be a window onto those dynamics. ”

Team Members/Contributors

Jane McCamant University of Chicago Contact Me

About this dissertation fellowship

How can Americans maintain a national discourse in the face of increasing cultural, moral, and religious pluralism? What can we learn from the history of American national and religious identity that might help us answer this question? If we are to discern the proper role of religion in public life, we must first understand the processes through which religious ideas move and function within the public sphere.

In this dissertation I use education for civic and moral values during the Cold War as a case study of these processes. I am studying the flow of ideas about civic and moral development through two organizations: the public and Roman Catholic school systems of Chicago. I am conducting archival research in the administrative records of both school systems and in published curricular and educational philosophical materials. Through the analysis of these documents, this dissertation describes and explains how value systems are manifested in—and transformed by—organizations.

In this historical period, ideas about moral education moved across organizational boundaries, gaining and losing religious justifications. The convergences and divergences of moral education practices in the public and Catholic schools reveal a complex negotiation between religious and secular—and private and public—that overturn the conventional wisdom about the twentieth century process of the secularization of the public sphere. This research makes theoretical contributions to debates about secularization and civil religion, which are themselves key to the just determination of the role religion and religiously ­grounded value systems ought to play in the public sphere.