Religion In Schools Religion Is Returning To The Classroom - And Without The Help Of Congress Or The Courts

Look what’s happened to the impenetrable, unsolvable, impossibly non-negotiable school-prayer fight.

The National Association of Evangelicals and other conservative Christian groups now praise the Supreme Court’s 1962 ban on teacher-led prayer.

“The Christian church has awakened to the fact that the job of spreading the Gospel belongs to the church, not the government or schools,” says Steve McFarland, general counsel for the Christian Legal Society in Annandale, Va.

And the American Jewish Congress acknowledges the right of Christian children, under certain circumstances, to proselytize classmates.

“There is a growing understanding across a very wide spectrum of what is permissible and what is not,” says Marc Stern, an attorney for the American Jewish Congress in New York.

Both sides use the word “sea change” to describe their shift in thinking.

The result: The school-prayer fight is no longer about recitation of the Lord’s Prayer after the Pledge of Allegiance. Without a constitutional amendment, nativity scenes and menorahs are turning up again in classrooms - along with Sikh turbans and displays of Islam’s Ramadan feast. So is discussion of religious beliefs, icons and rituals as they pertain to historical events.

People still focused on teacher-led school prayer are caught up “in old Reagan language,” says the Rev. Louis Sheldon, head of the Traditional Values Coalition based in Anaheim, Calif., and a leader on the religious right.

All this has less to do with conciliation and accommodation and more to do with new realities in American life.

The leading new reality is multiculturalism. Schools - particularly in growth states like Florida and California - have become conglomerations of minorities, all competing for recognition.

“The job of teaching our children to understand all this diversity has fallen to the schools almost by default,” says Margaret Hill, social studies director for the 725-school district in San Bernardino, Calif., which has “every ethnic group you can think of.”

“Before, we looked at religion from only a litigious perspective,” Hill says, “but now we need to know how we can bring voices together.”

Other factors in shift

Quality education needs. Ignorant students were being turned out by lawsuit-wary schools that taught the Crusades and the Inquisition with little more than a cursory paragraph on Christianity, and the Holocaust with no explanation of Judaism.

Technology. The Information Age has ushered children into a global society as schools play catch-up. While educators lament a lack of texts that explain ethnic values and lifestyles, many students have free online access, where they can communicate with kids nearly anywhere on the planet.

The law. Three decades of Supreme Court decisions and congressional lawmaking have clarified the guidelines for teaching about religion and protecting students’ free-speech rights.

States with large immigrant populations - especially California - are adding more lessons about religion.

“It’s no easier and no less volatile than the old school-prayer issue,” says Hill, in San Bernardino. “It’s demanding more of us, and one group can’t win, but the only other option is disintegration. We saw that with the L.A. riots.”

Though there are the beginnings of a truce, both sides can still serve up no end of war stories:

From the right, there are published claims, true or not, of a Florida high school student admonished for wearing a T-shirt bearing a biblical inscription, and a St. Louis elementary school student given detention for praying over lunch.

From the left, there’s the July 10 testimony of Lisa Herdahl before the House Judiciary Committee that her family was ostracized in Ecru, Miss., because they objected to mandatory morning prayer and Bible classes.

But both sides generally concur that those are aberrations these days, and when outrages occur, the cause is usually ignorance of the law. President Clinton offered to clarify guidelines in July by ordering the Education and Justice departments to issue a book of do’s and don’t’s.

“It’s a big country, and not everything happens at once,” acknowledges Stern.

Adds McFarland: “Today, the old horror story that Johnny can’t bless his food at school is really no more than a sound bite and a headline catcher.”

The lack of clear divisiveness has muddled the current national campaign for a “Religious Equality Amendment,” supported by the right and backed by House Speaker Newt Gingrich.

No one can quite plainly articulate what the amendment is supposed to do that the First Amendment does not - other than reaffirm guarantees of individual expression and possibly validate income tax vouchers for parents who pay private-school tuition. And as a battle cry, “tax voucher” lacks the zing of “school prayer.”

Areas of common agreement

Students have the right to pray individually or in groups or to discuss their religious views with their peers so long as they are not disruptive.

Schools may not mandate prayer at graduation, nor organize a religious baccalaureate ceremony, but they may rent school space to privately sponsored baccalaureates on the same terms they rent to other private groups - provided the schools disclaim any endorsement.

Students may be taught about religion, but public schools may not teach religion.

Students may express their religious beliefs in the form of reports, homework and artwork. Teachers may rule as out-of-order religious remarks that are irrelevant to the subject at hand.

Students have a right to speak to, and attempt to persuade, their peers about religious topics just as they do with regard to politics. But repeated invitations to attend church in the face of requests to stop constitute harassment.

Says Haynes: “For the first time in the history of public education, a broad spectrum of religious and educational groups have agreed on at least some of the religion-and-schools issues that have divided us for so long. Their statements acknowledge the importance of study about religion in public education, and warn against both religious indoctrination and hostility to religion in the policies and curriculum of the schools.”

That point of view is not universal, Haynes acknowledges.

“There are Protestant Americans who feel the schools they helped to found aren’t there anymore. For them, the Lord’s Prayer at the start of the school day was a reminder of how this country was blessed. The removal of those symbols was painful and traumatic and they equate it with a moral breakdown.”

But Haynes contends that there is enough common ground among the majority of parents and educators - motivated by the conviction after three decades that neither the courts nor Congress can solve their differences for them - to enable schools to move forward.