Cite as: 536 U. S. 639 (2002)
Breyer, J., dissenting
for primary religious education will require criteria. And the selection of those criteria, as well as their application, inevitably pose problems that are divisive. Efforts to respond to these problems not only will seriously entangle church and state, see Lemon, 403 U. S., at 622, but also will promote division among religious groups, as one group or another fears (often legitimately) that it will receive unfair treatment at the hands of the government.
I recognize that other nations, for example Great Britain and France, have in the past reconciled religious school funding and religious freedom without creating serious strife. Yet British and French societies are religiously more homo-geneous—and it bears noting that recent waves of immigration have begun to create problems of social division there as well. See, e. g., The Muslims of France, 75 Foreign Affairs 78 (1996) (describing increased religious strife in France, as exemplified by expulsion of teenage girls from school for wearing traditional Muslim scarves); Ahmed, Extreme Prejudice; Muslims in Britain, The Times of London, May 2, 1992, p. 10 (describing religious strife in connection with increased Muslim immigration in Great Britain).
In a society as religiously diverse as ours, the Court has recognized that we must rely on the Religion Clauses of the First Amendment to protect against religious strife, particularly when what is at issue is an area as central to religious belief as the shaping, through primary education, of the next generation's minds and spirits. See, e. g., Webster, On the Education of Youth in America (1790), in Essays on Education in the Early Republic 43, 53, 59 (F. Rudolph ed. 1965) ("[E]ducation of youth" is "of more consequence than making laws and preaching the gospel, because it lays the foundation on which both law and gospel rest for success"); Pope Paul VI, Declaration on Christian Education (1965) ("[T]he Catholic school can be such an aid to the fulfillment of the mission of the People of God and to the fostering of dialogue between
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