conservative manifestos he wrote in the early 1980s. While her husband was writing
these tracts, Beverly LaHaye founded a conservative women’s group known as
Concerned Women for America (CWA). In 1983, CWA became a participant in a highly
publicised court case that dealt with a dispute over the use of Holt, Rinehart and
Winston’s series of reading textbooks in Church Hill, Tennessee. While several other court
cases involving conflicts over textbooks occurred during the 1980s, this case had the
most direct impact on children’s literature.
The Tennessee case began when Vicki Frost, a conservative fundamentalist and
mother of four children who attended the Church Hill schools, complained about the
opening story in Riders on the Earth, the reader used in her daughter’s sixth-grade
class. The story deals with telepathy, and Frost felt that this subject contradicted her
religious beliefs. After filing her initial complaint, she went on to read the rest of the
stories in the reader, and she found that she had religious objections to almost all of
them. Many of the stories mention myths or non-Western religions, and she felt that
these stories taught ‘false religion’. Other stories include references to magic, and Frost
saw this as being anti-biblical. Still others portray girls in non-passive roles, and this,
according to Frost, violates the roles that God set forth for the sexes.
She decided to take her daughter out of class every time the book was used, but the
school principal felt that such actions would be disruptive. Frost went ahead any way,
and she was eventually arrested for trespassing on school property. After Frost’s arrest,
several people in the community came to her support, one of whom contacted CWA. The
leadership of CWA agreed to provide Frost with free legal assistance.
Michael Farris, the lawyer that CWA sent to Tennessee, hoped to turn this conflict into
a test case and have it heard in federal court. Farris thought that the best way to
accomplish this goal was to argue that the case involved constitutional issues. He
decided to base his argument on the free exercise clause of the First Amendment, which
guarantees the right to exercise one’s religion without governmental interference. As
Farris saw it, requiring students to read stories that offended their parents’ religious
beliefs could be interpreted as a violation of their and their parents’ right to exercise
their religion. He knew that if the court agreed to hear his argument, it would be a
landmark case.
After many delays and complications, the case finally came to trial in 1986. The judge
found in favour of Frost and her supporters. The school system, he wrote, ‘burdened the
plaintiffs’ right to free exercise of religion’ by requiring ‘the plaintiffs’ students to read
from the Holt series’. The school board, however, appealed, and in August 1987 the
United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth District overruled the original decision. As
the chief judge for this court explained in his opinion, ‘The requirement that public
school students study a basal reader series chosen by school authorities does not create
an unconstitutional burden under the Free Exercise Clause when the students are not
required to affirm or deny a belief’ (West 1988a: 85–96).
Even though Frost and the CWA did not ultimately win their case, the publicity and
controversy surrounding the lawsuit succeeded in intimidating the publishers of the
Holt series. Shortly after the case ended, Holt, Rinehart and Winston edited its reading
series in an effort to make it more attractive to fundamentalists. In explaining this move,
one of the publisher’s representatives stated, ‘When you’re publishing a book, if there’s
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