Blaine Amendment

The Blaine Amendment was a failed amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would have prohibited direct government aid to educational institutions that have a religious affiliation. Most state constitutions already had such provisions, and thirty-eight of the fifty states have clauses that prohibit taxpayer funding of religious entities in their state constitutions.

The measures were designed to deny government aid to parochial schools, especially those operated by the Catholic Church in locations with large immigrant populations. They emerged from a growing consensus among 19th-century U.S. Protestants that public education must be free from "sectarian' or "denominational' control, while it also reflected nativist tendencies hostile to immigrants.

The amendments are generally seen as explicitly anti-Catholic because when they were enacted public schools typically included Protestant prayer, and taught from Protestant bibles, although debates about public funding of sectarian schools predate any significant Catholic immigration to the U.S. Thus, at the time of the Blaine amendments, public schools were not non-sectarian or non-denominational in the modern sense; nor were they completely secular. Despite his own mother and sisters being Catholic, Blaine was accused of anti-Catholicism during his political career, especially after he failed to correct a Presbyterian minister who had called Democrats the party of Rum, Romanism and Rebellion during a campaign speech when he was the Republican presidential nominee in 1884. This simultaneous angering of Catholics, anti-Prohibitionists, and Democrats who had supported the Union in the Civil War is believed to have cost Blaine the election.