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When it came to religion in public schools, they
didn’t agree on much else. Some prominent Founders, like Philadelphia’s
Benjamin Rush, thought American public schools could only fulfill their mission
if they inculcated children with religion. And not just any religion—Rush
insisted in 1786 that schools should teach evangelical
Protestant Christianity, “the religion of JESUS CHRIST.”

Other Founders disagreed. Thomas Jefferson imagined a
flourishing system of free public schools for white children. His
public schools, however, would explicitly replace “the
Bible and Testament” with “the most useful facts from Grecian, Roman, European
and American History.” Some founders went even further. Noah Webster, the
textbook and dictionary author, purged religious language from his early
schoolbooks. Instead of the old Puritan line that had taught earlier
generations their alphabet—“A. In Adam’s Fall, We sinned all”—Webster put in a
secular one: “A. Was an Apple-pie made by the cook.”

For DeSantis or anyone to say, then, that the Founding
Fathers wanted religious public schools is simply false, a MAGA delusion. There
were, however, some general principles upon which the Founders tended to agree.
For one thing, they felt that public schools had to teach children how to be
moral citizens, and that might include teaching religious ideas—but schools could
never teach any one religion as the
American religion. The word they used at the time was “non-sectarian,” and they
meant that the goal of public schools was to make moral, thoughtful citizens, not better Presbyterians or Baptists
or Catholics.