THE JUDGE FOUND nothing wrong with the textbooks. He found that many people, even those with more orthodox religious convictions, might find the plaintiffs' beliefs "inconsistent, illogical, incomprehensible, and unacceptable." But he also found the religious beliefs of a group of fundamentalist Christians in Tennessee to be "sincere"--that is, to warrant excusing the parents' children from having to read the local school system's text-book series.

The alarm has sounded among educators and civil libertarians. They see the decision handed down October 24 in a federal district court as tantamount to turning the schools into a smorgasbord from which parents pick and choose their childrens' education. The real impact of the ruling, however, may not be felt in the nation's schoolrooms, but in its courts.

Though the textbooks are part of a reading series used by 15,000 school districts, this first federal ruling to shelter school children from educational materials is a landmark not for the precedent it might set for schools across the land. Rather, it is important precisely because the ruling specifically limits its application to this particular fundamentalist group's complaint. The decision was not so much a ruling as an exception to the rule. The court seems to have abandoned its function of establishing the law.

The court judged neither the text-books, nor the coherence of the convictions from which the fundamentalists' argued--only the "sincerity" of their beliefs. In any normal case, say a murder trial, evidence is presented to reconstruct what happened outside the court and who was in the wrong. The deciding factor in the textbook case, however, was not a comparison of textbook content and a system of belief like Christianity or creationism, but a judgment of the authenticity of whatever the plaintiff chose to present. That is, the evidence was the proceeding itself.

Because of the incoherence of the plaintiffs' claims, the only possible evidence for their sincerity was the determination the fundamentalist parents showed pleading their case in the courtroom. This boiled down to the determination shown by representatives like parent Vicki Frost, who stood at the witness stand for hours on end detailing a hodge-podge laundry list, citing textbook examples of everything from scientific explanations of tidal waves to witchcraft and astrology to pacifism and situational ethics.

The parents' determination to win the case resulted in the ruling that the plaintiffs are determined in their beliefs. This circularity does away with the all important relationship between a ruling and its context. It is the societal context, not the character of a court proceeding, that should be the measure of a case. But in this case the court merely judged how well the fundamentalists did on stage. The textbook case reduced the trial to a ritual. There is always an aspect of performance to courtroom proceedings, but in this extreme case the performance lost touch with the issues at hand.

IT HAS BEEN said that the problem with the fundamentalists' argument was that it complained against un-Christian, as opposed to specifically anti-Christian education. However, the most startling argument put forth in the case is that the school system teaches its own religion, "secular humanism."

At first double-take, calling secular humanism a religion seems a contradiction in terms. Here the fundamentalists, of all people, have made "secular" and "religious" interchangeable ideas, rather than antonyms. By putting them on a par, the fundamentalists betray their real agenda: not just sheltering their religious beliefs, but building a shelter of intolerance against a whole range of other values and social practices.

If the fundamentalists' indictment of humanists and alchemists alike sounds like a return to the dark ages, it is. Give or take a role reversal of church and state, the fundamentalists' case has a kind of precedent in what medievalists call the Condemnation of 1277. In that year the Church prohibited on pain of excommunication 219 propositions associated with the dominant--and Aristotelian at the time--teachings of Western culture. Though the Condemnation of 1986 exercises a completely different kind of censorship, it is analogous in the spirit of its sweeping indictment.

Why shouldn't the fundamentalist parents shelter their children? To quote Frost out of context, "Our children's imaginations have to be bounded." But what happens when the state--or a church or a group of parents--tries to shackle imagination?

Censorship is a game that makes for underground, intellectual, guerrilla warfare. It puts thinkers and artists in the position of continually devising a strategy to push the limits of what can be said. But for the other kind of censor--the limit of acceptability inside someone's mind--that "strategy" is just another word for innovation.

Historians have speculated that the Condemnation of 1277 had an ironic positive effect, as thinkers and students had to consider alternative ideas previously seen as absurd--if only to satisfy the Church. Ultimately, the case of the fundamentalist schoolchildren is also one of tradition and its challenges. Censorship worked like self-critique, spurring creative thought for those 13th century learners. We can only hope the same for those in this century.