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The First Amendment and State Bans on Teachers’ Religious Garb: Analyzing the Historic Origins of Contemporary Legal Challenges in the United States. By Nathan C. Walker. New York: Routledge, 2020. Pp. 262. $155.00 (cloth); $52.16 (digital). ISBN: 9780367188306.

“If we were being indoctrinated now, at this very minute, would we know it?”1 So asked Terence Copley, professor of religious education and theology at the University of Exeter in 2005. Copley raised the question in the context of England’s approach to religion and ethics in the K-12 classroom. In the process of examining the strengths and weaknesses of the program of study, Copley noted that omissions are as instructive as commissions. When schools avoid teaching about the variety of religious and non-religious beliefs according to which human beings shape their lives, “Surely this [avoidance] too is indoctrination, as it has very effectively xed habits and dispositions without engaging the child’s active powers. Even if by omission, and with no intention . . . the end result is the same—a closed mind, which sincerely believes in its own programming.”2 For this reason, Copley spent most of his professional life designing and eld-testing K-12 courses about religion, which are mandated by statute in the United Kingdom and required in most European countries.3 Readers in the United States should note that K-12 coursework in religion and philosophy, the value of which forty-seven nations in the Council of Europe afrmed as recently as 2008,4 exists in addition to the pluralistic school structure in most democracies in which the state funds a variety of school types, including religious schools.5 Most modern democracies, in other words, acknowledge religion in both the structure and the content of public education. (The United States is thus an outlier in both respects.) More diverse provision of education and a richer curriculum, however, have not resolved the issue of teachers’ religious garb in these countries. Indeed, this issue has exploded in recent years, with courts from Pakistan to the United Kingdom adjudicating between competing rights—and often coming to completely different conclusions.6 The matter of teachers’ religious garb is separate from educational structure and content, but it is certainly related to the larger question of what counts as indoctrination. Teachers’ religious garb is the focus of Nathan C. Walker’s First Amendment and State Bans on Teachers’ Religious Garb