News Articles

Prayer as subterfuge
Daytona Beach News-Journal, March 29, 2010

Florida legislators are at it again, taking cross-encrusted sledgehammers to the wall separating church and state. The angle this time: A proposed law that would let students lead "inspirational" prayers at school-sponsored events such as graduations, ballgames and other after-school activities -- and let teachers pray with their students. The proposal masquerades as a guarantee of constitutional freedoms even as it flouts them.

Students, teachers and anyone else in schools, during school hours or not, are free to pray already. They're free to pray on their own or in groups as long as prayers don't interfere with the school day or school-sponsored activities, and as long as school officials aren't, in any capacity, encouraging or instigating student prayers. The notion that praying was thrown out of public schools when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against school-sponsored prayers in 1962 is preposterous. What the court threw out was the presumption that a school could impose one religion over another on its student body and coerce all students to go along. No school should, not directly, and not indirectly.

Yet the complaint among proponents of untrammeled worship in public places like schools or government events still blares with the frequency of a muezzin's call to prayers: Why pick on religion?

The question misses the point of the First Amendment's establishment clause. Those who are fighting to keep prayers out of schools aren't "picking on" religion. The Founders did. When they wrote the First Amendment, they singled out speech and religion and explicitly prohibited government from constraining one or favoring the other. The aim was to ensure that both would best flourish free of government's reach. They have. Free expression is a hallmark of American culture.

Religious expression is equally so. No country on earth can claim to have as diverse a religious make-up and as diversely devout a population. Some 87 percent of Americans consider themselves religious, a higher proportion than any other western democracy, and a proportion closest to theocracies like Iran and Saudi Arabia, where supposedly everyone is a believer (but in only one "true" religion). The combination of belief and diversity of beliefs in the United States would not have been possible without the protections afforded religion, especially protection from government interference.

Sponsorship of any kind would be interference, and it would be injurious not only to individuals' free exercise of their beliefs (or non-beliefs), but also to the principle of letting diverse sets of beliefs (or non-belief) thrive equally. Rep. Greg Evers, R-Baker, a co-sponsor of the bill enshrining protection for "inspirational" messages, claims the bill "is not necessarily a prayer bill" but a "rights bill." The rights he speaks of exist already. Only the favoritism he is cleverly cloaking in inspiration's euphemisms isn't.

Would Evers, who championed the adoption of "in God we trust" as a Florida state motto, be comfortable with a pair of atheists commanding the silence and attention of a graduation ceremony for them to project their inspirational message? How about adherents to the Nation of Islam? How about funky agnostics discoursing on the spirituality of skepticism? And if some inspirational messages are acceptable but not others, as would inevitably be the case at one point or another (adolescent judgments about "inspiration" being the loose cannonade they are) who would make the determination between the appropriate and the inappropriate? No one should. But no one should be placed in the role of judge, either. That's why school officials should play no role -- none at all -- in sponsoring, allowing or enabling religious activity in school or at school-sponsored events. That's why the bill is trouble beyond the implicitly hypocritical claim that it is a "rights bill."

The strength of the American system, enshrined in the First Amendment's establishment clause, is its recognition -- unique in the world -- that no religion warrants more recognition than another. Catholics are not more important than others for being the single largest sect in the United States. Christians aren't owed more say because they form the single largest religion in the country. Jews or Muslims, whose numbers are beginning to correspond, aren't owed less respect because they're in the minority. The same can be said of atheists, agnostics, or those who choose to define belief in their own way, independent of an institution. Leave it that way -- in public schools or anywhere else government's hand risks lording it over beliefs between individuals and their deities. Or lack thereof.

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