A Look at the Future of Prayer in Public Schools
Freethinkers United! Conference
Orlando, Florida 1997
John Xanthopoulos and I are both educators and we thought we would talk about education and the future. And, I have chosen a small narrow segment to discuss with you. I am trying to take a look at the future of prayer in the public schools.
The Bill of Rights begins with these words: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." But when the First Amendment was adopted in 1791 it was then interpreted to mean that it was limited to the Federal Government. "Congress," meaning the Federal or National Congress, "shall make no law" and so on. For 77 years the states were allowed to have established churches and to restrict religious freedom in ways not open to the national authorities. Massachusetts, for example, continued taxing people to support church institutions until 1833. The interesting point here is that all the states on their volitions did away with established churches and stopped giving tax money to religious groups.
It was not until after the civil war that the Bill of Rights was declared to be applicable to the individual state governments. In 1868 the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted, which declared,
"All persons born or naturalized in the United States are citizens of the United States and the state in which they reside. No state shall deprive any person of life, liberty or property without due process of law, or deny any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."
The original intention of the Fourteenth Amendment was to protect the welfare of those who had been slaves.[1] They were then, in the year 1868, declared to be full citizens of the United States, but it was not immediately obvious that the Fourteenth Amendment had a much broader application.
It was not until 1920 that women were also found to be full citizens of the United States and given the right to vote. But their right to vote was not seen as something that was included in the Fourteenth Amendment. Women were granted the right to vote under a different amendment, the Nineteenth Amendment.
The religious implications of the First and Fourteenth Amendments became apparent after World War II. In 1947 the Supreme Court decided in Everson vs. the Board of Education what is now considered to be a leading case. The question was whether public money could be used to pay for transporting students to parochial schools. Justice Hugo Black, writing for the majority, drew on Thomas Jefferson and others to declare that the Establishment Clause erected a wall of Separation between church and state and nine justices agreed with this principle and this remains settled law, so far as I know. Justice Black declared:
"The establishment of religion clause in the First Amendment means at least this: Neither state nor federal government can set up a church. Neither a state nor the federal government can pass laws which aid one religion, aid all religions, or prefer one religion over another. Neither state nor federal courts can force nor influence a person to go to or to remain away from church against his will or force him to profess a belief or disbelief in any religion. No person can be punished for entertaining or professing religious beliefs or disbeliefs, for church attendance or non attendance. No tax in any amount, large or small, can be levied to support any religious activities or institutions whatever they may be called or whatever form they may adopt to teach or practice religion. Neither a state nor a federal government can openly or secretly participate in the affairs of any religious organization or groups or vice versa. In the words of Jefferson, the clause against establishment of religion, by law, was intended to erect a wall of separation between church and state."
This is a wonderful quotation, a beautiful quotation. We should have our children memorize this while their classmates are memorizing the Twenty-third Psalm.
However, despite this wonderful paragraph, the court decided, five to four, to allow New Jersey to pay for the trans-portation of parochial students. The Supreme Court based its split decision on one of the vaguest of all phrases in the Constitution, "general welfare." Five out of the nine justices found that general welfare benefits could not be withheld from parochial school children. Justice Robert Jackson, in his dissenting opinion, found the actual decision "discordant" with the broadly stated wall of separation, however. He wrote that Catholic education is the rock on which the Catholic Church is founded, and aid to the school is not different from aid to the church itself. Fifty years now separate us from this five to four split decision, Everson v. Board of Education, and today, the last half century, could be seen as the working out of the implications of these principles, church and state separation, and general welfare benefits.
The following year, 1948, the Supreme Court held in McCullough v. Board of Education that religious groups were not allowed to teach their religion in classrooms during regular school hours. In 1952, Zorick v. Clausen, the court found six to three that after-school release time was permissible. In 1962 the court ruled in Engle v. Vitale that public school prayers were unconstitutional. The following year, 1963, the court ruled on two similar cases. Abington School District v. Shimp and Murray v. Catlitt, finding that Bible reading and the recitation of The Lord's Prayer and other prayers in public schools were unconstitutional. However, students have always been able to pray silently. Grace before a meal, or when taking an algebra test, has always been allowed. In 1985 the Court ruled in Wallace v. Jeffery that a moment of silence in Public Schools was unconstitutional. A moment of silence is too much like a prayer. We already have a period of silence, but that's called a study period.
It was estimated that since 1947[2], the Supreme Court has rendered over 75 decisions in this area. The Radical Religious Right, which I call the Religious Wrong, could not and can not accept the principle of the religiously neutral public school system. They want America to be "a Christian Nation." And the next fifty years will likely continue this struggle. It does not take an Einstein to predict that state governments will continue to play games with the First and Fourteenth Amendment and with the Constitutional stipulation that there be no religious test for office. And while this school prayer struggle is continuing, there will be other battles just as important: a woman's right to chose an abortion, a person's right to choose a dignified death as painless as possible, a student's right to a thorough and meaningful education, and the elimination of racial injustice.
I do not think that this continuing conflict will be a straight-forward religious or philosophical argument. The Nazis did not have an open public discussion on persecuting the Jews. They just did it. Our continuing conflict will not be simply an intellectual discussion of the issues. Priests and pastors will not invite atheists and humanists into their pulpit to present another point of view. Nor will priests and pastors be willing to appear on our turf, though we would welcome a public discussion. The Radical Religious Right does not now engage us in intellectual discussions. Their basic response is name-calling. They crowd around the entrances of abortion clinics, blocking them with their bodies, shouting--sometimes with loud electronic speakers--"baby killers!" "baby killers!" They call all humanists, atheists, agnostics and freethinkers "anti-Christs" and "servants of Satan." We are labelled as prejudiced against Christians and biased against Catholics. Their technique for relating to us is name-calling.
Prayer in the public schools is a "club" with which to beat us over the heads. Engle v. Vitale, which first excluded public prayers, finding them unconstitutional in 1962, is cited as the beginning of the downfall of the public schools and the moral collapse of our nation. The lack of prayer and Bible reading in the public schools is touted as the basic reason why public schools are no good. Pat Robertson said on television on the 700 club[2]: "The breakdown of the morality in the schools is the result of a Supreme Court decision," (By this he meant Engle v. Vitale.) "Public School teachers don't care if children can read or not. They just want to take them away from traditional Christian morality." Can you imagine a man saying that over television? Robertson claimed that school teachers didn't care if children read or not. How did he know that? On what data is that based? And the answer, of course, is that he has no data, no information, no evidence. His opinions and the rest of the Religious Right are based on his own imaginary theology. The fact that public schools do not have regularly-scheduled, spoken prayers as part of their daily curriculum is why the public schools and the teachers are no good. They are godless. Pat Robertson and the other members of the religious right use prayer as a club to take over the public schools and the whole country. He and the Vatican want to get the government out of the business of educating kids.[3]
Now, I know something about this practice because I taught in a public school in New Jersey before prayer and Bible reading were declared unconstitutional. We had a twelve-minute homeroom period. I had to check the roll, check yesterday's absentees for their admit slip from the office, make announcements, then the loud speaker came on and the principal or vice-principal made his announcements. Then a student's voice led the Pledge of Allegiance, usually with negligible participation. Then four verses of scripture taken from the Hebrew Bible, frequently chosen at random, and then the Lord's Prayer, in either the Catholic or the Protestant version. Then the bell rang and the students rushed out. If you think that this homeroom period was religiously or morally meaningful, please see me after this speech. I think that many legislators stand for school prayer because it is the only alleged educational reform that they can advocate that won't cost money. So instead of buying new textbooks they recommend prayer. Marvelous! I attended Fordham University, the voice of the Jesuits, in New York City for ten years, going nights and summers. And during that time, I had one teacher in one course--statistics--that opened his class with prayer. One out of ten years of schooling.
The Radical Religious Right does not really care about prayer in schools, per se. School prayer is seen primarily as a wedge to bring religion, their true religion, into the schools. They want tax money to support their parochial schools. They want some sort of conservative Christianity to become the established religion, perhaps two established churches, Protestant and Catholic. The crisis in public education is a manufactured crisis. National test scores are not down. Yet, school bashing is so prevalent that I am afraid that there are some people here that actually believe that public education is not worth saving. The history of philosophy holds six or seven arguments for the existence of God. Every person has a right to study these arguments and determine if they are reasonable. I have not found any of them persuasive, but the Radical Religious Right would solve this perennial puzzle of philosophy by a vote of Congress. Once prayer becomes a part of the public school curriculum, the existence of God would be officially and legally determined. And that would mean in the future, when a board of education is about to hire a teacher for the third grade, the principal would say: "Mr. Tzanetakos, we are going to have a word of prayer each morning in the third grade. You got a problem with that?" And if the candidate has some problem, that person will be passed over and there will be no freethinkers, no godless teachers in the schools in the future.
After school prayers comes school vouchers. For the Radical Religious Right, school vouchers are seen as a way to pay for parochial schools. I see them as a way to destroy public education and further divide the country. The Radical Religious Right will not allow evolution to be taught, nor will any student ever learn anything derogatory about the Christian Religion. Teaching students to think for themselves is not their goal. Every alleged revelation or Papal pronouncement is a command to the mind to start believing and stop thinking. Indoctrination will take the place of education. The Radical Religious Right is trying desperately to take over the Republican Party. If we freethinkers do not join forces with other like-minded people, we shall see our country repudiate Jefferson's Wall of Separation in favor of a Christian Nation. The Vatican, defending Papal infallibility, will control sex education, outlaw effective contraceptives, and eliminate legal abortions. Some of us here will die in agony because the Radical Religious claims that God wills it. Kevorkian will be put in prison and Mother Teresa will teach us the beauty of suffering. School textbooks will be censored even more than now and religious freedom, which includes the freedom from religion will be lost.
But I say: No this shall not happen. Though the Radical Religious Right is wealthy and more numerous, they shall not succeed. We will not be silenced. We will oppose them in the courts, in the newspapers, and in whatever battlefield we can find. Truth is on our side and we shall ultimately win. [applause]
1 This protection was shared by the 13th (1865) and the 15th (1860) Amendments.
2 1947 is the date of Everson v Board of Education.
3 Broadcast on 2 July 1982. The tape is available at the Offices of People for the American Way, cited by Robert Alley in Public Education and the Public Good, 1996, p. 97.
4 "...to get the state out of the business of educating kids at the primary and secondary levels." from The Two Faces of the Christian Coalition, (People for the American Way, 1994), p. 12, quoting Pat Robertson.