After the Supreme Court incorporated the Establishment Clause against the states in Everson v. Board of Education (1947), raucous national debates broke out between Protestants, Catholics, and Jews about the constitutionality of government aid to parochial schools. This article offers the first account of how these interconfessional hostilities shaped the Catholic Church’s parochial school litigation strategy after Everson.

To undercut claims that government aid to parochial schools would perniciously enrich the (Roman) Catholic hierarchy, the Church’s public spokesmen increasingly framed debates about parochial school aid after Everson as implicating the constitutional rights of American parents to direct the religious upbringing of their children. In so doing, these figures eschewed arguments made in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that the government has an obligation to fund institutional religion. Moreover, to prevent anti-Catholic prejudice from impacting the disposition of discrete church–state disputes, lawyers associated with the Catholic bishops’ official episcopal organization sometimes refrained from publicly involving themselves in local litigation, all while privately supplying litigants with strategic counsel.

In concluding, this article suggests that the Church’s post-Everson approach to defending the constitutionality of parochial school aid was motivated by a consistent conviction that parents who sent their children to Catholic schools ought to be treated in the same manner as parents who sent their children to other nonpublic (but non-Catholic) schools. When the scope of government aid to nonpublic schools grew in later years, this argument could therefore be invoked to support parochial schools’ equal inclusion in more robust aid programs.

While scholarship on the Bible’s reception in the United States has frequently engaged with modern translations of the text, the popularity of abridged Bibles during the first half of the twentieth century represents an overlooked chapter of this history. This essay takes up one of these shortened Bibles, The Living Bible (1928), edited by the lawyer and back-to-the-land advocate Bolton Hall, as a window into the larger significance of these abbreviated versions for American religious history. Though not a biblical scholar or clergyman, Hall was confident that he had successfully condensed the substance of the canon into a text a third of its size, which he proudly proclaimed as the first “readable” Bible. Together with Hall’s other abridgment projects and his advocacy for single-tax proposals, this Bible reflects a larger optimism in this period about the power of simplification—what the historians Kenneth Cmiel and John Durham Peters aptly call the “culture of happy summary.” This article examines Hall’s condensed canon in relationship to his advocacy for the simplification of government and his abridgment of other classics by Henry George and Leo Tolstoy as artifacts of a hope shared by many in this period that the truths of an increasingly complex world could be reduced without remainder.