Smith v. Board of School Commissioners of Mobile County

Ishmael Jaffree sued the Mobile County School Board (board) (defendant) and the State of Alabama (state), arguing that statutes and practices advancing prayer in school violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the United Sates Constitution. The district court initially ruled in favor of the state but was overturned by the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals. The Eleventh Circuit was affirmed by the United States Supreme Court, and the matter was remanded to the district court. The district court interpreted the Supreme Court’s ruling to mean that because Christianity was impermissible in the curriculum, then so must be any religious content, including content advancing secular humanism, which the district court considered to be a religion. Following that interpretation, the district court, on its own initiative, rearranged the postures of the parties so as to make the case’s plaintiffs a group of intervenors (plaintiffs) who had initially joined the litigation as defendants seeking to enjoin the board from using textbooks that advanced secular humanism. The challenged textbooks included a home economics textbook and history and social studies textbooks. No textbooks invoked secular humanism by name. The home economics textbook contained passages that analogized moral decision-making to decisions about mundane tasks and promoted the use of personal experience to guide children’s senses of right and wrong. The district court found that, because the textbook failed to supplement its relativistic and individualistic moral justifications with supernatural or theistic ones, its use was unconstitutional. Similarly, the district court found that the history and social studies textbooks inaccurately presented theistic religion as incidental rather than central to American history and culture. The district court found such deemphasis of theistic religion to constitute ideological promotion of secular humanism and held the use of the history and social studies textbooks also to be unconstitutional. The board appealed.