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Chapter Eleven_
NURTURING MANNERS & MORALS:
Restoring Religious Liberty to Schools & Public Life
America needs much prayer, lest it lose its soul.
Pope John-Paul II, 1993 in Denver
America will remain a beacon of freedom for the world
as long as it stands by those moral truths which are
the very heart of its historical experience.
John Paul II, 1999 in St. Louis
The writers of the Constitution meant freedom
of religion, not freedom from religion.
Rev. Billy Graham
… the general attack coming from many quarters against the
genuine
American concept of freedom of religion, which aims to substitute
the destructive concept of freedom from religion.
John Courtney Murray, S.J.
Politicians tend increasingly to look upon religion
as a source of divisions and violence, tending
to upset the peace of society.
Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger
2/13/2004[1]
══ INTERACTIVE CONTENTS ══
Education and the First Amendment
Public Schools:
The Ten Commandments and Scripture Posters
Chapter Eleven_
NURTURING MANNERS & MORALS:
Restoring Religious Liberty to Schools & Public Life
In the Twentieth Century, a secular tyranny overwhelmed much of Europe.
There, tyrants built a Wall of Separation. (The Iron Curtain) It has now
fallen. The Wall of Separation erected by the United States Supreme
Court still stands. It separates the people of the United States
from their Constitution and from religious freedom. Let it fall.
Gov. Fob James of Alabama, 1997
The church has the responsibility to promote
family life
and the public morality of the entire civil society
on the basis of fundamental moral values.
The
Vatican[2]
GENERAL PRINCIPLES
When the French writer, Alexis de Tocqueville, visited this country in 1831-32, he found that clergy as well as the laity attributed much of America's religious vitality to the lack of union between church and state. And yet the disconnection between the two was then a distinction not an antagonism as he had witnessed in his home country. Tocqueville discovered instead that in America the spirit of religion and the spirit of political freedom “held common sway over the same land.”[3]
The twentieth century French philosopher, Jacques Maritain, taught for a number of years at Princeton and other American universities. Like Tocqueville a century before, Maritain was struck by the contrast between European and American forms of church-state separation. Some countries, including England, retained an established state religion. On the other hand, as Maritain noted in 1951, where separation had established itself in Europe, it denoted a “complete isolation” most unfortunate in its results.[4]
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Jacques Maritain[5] (1882-1973) |
At mid-twentieth century America Maritain found separation of church and state still “compatible with good feeling and mutual cooperation.” America's historical treasure, said he, was the ability to maintain sharp distinction simultaneous with cooperation between the religious and secular spheres. “Please to God that you keep it carefully, and do not let your concept of separation veer round to the European one,” urged Maritain.[6]
Such was our church-state situation as late as Harry Truman's Presidency and that of his successor, Dwight Eisenhower. Decisions of the 1960's and 1970's sought, however, to make the so-called wall of separation between church and state higher and yet more impenetrable. The Judiciary purged prayer exercises from public schools, banned Bible reading in the classrooms, and outlawed posting of the Ten Commandments on classroom walls. The net effect was indeed to veer America into the extremist course taken earlier in Europe, confirming G.K. Chesterton’s maxim that the great lesson of history is that mankind tends to forget the lessons of history.
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John Courtney Murray, S.J.
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At the same time we ignored another adage, “if it ain't broke, don't fix it.” At most our “wall of separation” required routine maintenance, or an occasional new section to demarcate boundary adjustments, but not radical redesign. The transition from a friendly fence to hostile fortifications has been feverishly underway since the 1960's, and has greatly undermined what John Courtney Murray lauded in 1954 as the “almost Utopian” church-state relationship enjoyed by the United States for the 150 years previous.[7] Father Murray, who was by no means an archconservative, saw church-state hostility this way:
In its original conception, the spirit of the First Amendment was the spirit of a friendly separation between church and state. It was a friendly separation because it allowed latitude for cooperation between church and state in many matters, and notably in the field of education.... Cooperation in matters of common concern is the fruit of friendship. But the interpretation of the First Amendment that we now have makes separation of church and state less friendly than it was before; for it diminishes the possibility of cooperation between these two agencies that, each in its own way, serve the public welfare. Church and state now stand farther apart than ever in American history – at a time when the crisis of our times demands that, especially in what concerns the religious upbringing of our youth, they should stand closer together....[8]
Fr. Murray made these observations in 1948, the year the Court first introduced the “wall of separation” metaphor into American jurisprudence. Imagine what he would say now, in 2005, when as Russell Shaw puts it:[9]
Reasonable people might wonder whether, in barring a government-sponsored church, the founders really sought to exclude the Ten Commandments from courthouse walls.… But this is the point we've reached thanks to the secularizing thrust of Supreme Court decisions extending back many years that place virtually any friendly interaction between religion and the public sphere under a heavy cloud of constitutional suspicion.
A country which suppresses religious expression is in bad historical company. France did so in its public schools during the anti-clerical phase of the Third Republic (legislation of 1882) creating a spiritual void in the curriculum which was soon filled by anti-religious propaganda in schools.[10] In post World War I Germany, the Weimar Republic made religion a regular subject in public schools, but the subsequent Hitler era saw public school teachers pressured or forbidden to deal with religious topics, and required to teach state approved social theories. At the behest of the state a bust of the Fuehrer replaced crucifixes in all schools that contained them, including parochial ones.[11]
In the Soviet Union, even under the Gorbachev reforms prior to the ascendancy of Yeltsin (as late as 1990), education sanitized of religion was at the heart of the continuing promotion of atheism.
A factor in the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War was the government decree, five years before the war, ordering an end to all religious education in schools.[12] And in our neighbor to the south, Mexico, where church-state relations were radically adversarial until 1991, separation of church and state excluded religion from Mexican public schools. In Nicaragua which overthrew Communism after a decade under the Sandinista leader, Daniel Ortega, the Sandinistas – who still held seats in parliament – worked against the introduction of religion into public schools on a voluntary basis, using much the same arguments in 1998 that were fielded by the U.S. Supreme Court.[13]
The U.S. church-state rift is widening, and the regime seems hell-bent on pursuing policies that have yielded misery and mayhem in the past. To the lessons of the past they pay little or no attention. Like the Jacobins in revolutionary France, postmodernists in America disdain and disregard historical experience.[14]
Americans United for Separation of Church and State, and likeminded political / cultural groups like the ACLU, see secularism as a check against some present or potential dominance of church over state.[15] In reality the problems in that area are about as recurrent as tonsils taken out during childhood. Today, church-state union is the least of our worries. As Alexander Solzhenitsyn said the principal trait and central factor in the ills of Western Civilization is that people have forgotten God and that society is being sucked down into the vortex of atheism.[16]
Atheistic values manifest themselves in a host of evils suffered by Americans, including the rash of violence that has made school buildings into killing zones. Even the infamous murders at Columbine High School in Colorado, April 1999, proved insufficient to awaken ideologically bedazzled school officials from their stupor. There would be no posting “thou shalt not kill” in the library and the lunchroom, along with the rest of the Ten Commandments. By no means! School officials also
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Danny Rohrbough (1984?-1999) |
denied free exercise of religion to several parents who had sought to include religious themes on the ceramic tiles they submitted for the memorial to the slain. One such parent, Brian Rohrbough, lost his son Daniel on that tragic day. The bereaved father painted the tiles, depicting 13 red crosses and a scripture verse (Isaiah 48:22).[17]
But school officials have, like most Americans, been blitzed for decades by the notion that religion is suspect. The stated policy at Columbine High was so undiscerning and insensitive as to include religiosity in the same breath with obscenity:
A meeting was held in early September (1999) with the Plaintiffs and families of the victims, during which Ms. Monseu relaxed the restrictions that had previously been imposed, telling them that they could paint tiles with their children's names and initials, dates other than 4-20, and the Columbine ribbon, but that they could not paint religious symbols, the date of the shooting, or anything obscene or offensive.[18]
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Banned Tiles, both painted by Daniel’s Dad |
Public school officials were evidently of the view that religion is the enemy of peace, and that to invite the Prince of Peace into public life is equivalent to a declaration of war. Never mind that warfare had already broken out in their school, with real bullets crashing into the skulls of innocent students, killing 13. Never mind that the sword of the spirit, the word of God, might have deterred the demented students from firing in the first place. So in the end school officials put spiritual obtuseness on display by dissuading grieving parents from painting symbols that were religious. If parents painted them anyway, the administrators refused to let the religious tiles join thousands of secular creations mounted on the school walls after the Columbine attack.[19]
In school officials’ defense, they do labor under intense scrutiny by ACLU sympathizers. It would be a careless principal who failed to look over his shoulder where, like Big Brother, the courts are ready to slap down religion wherever it dares to propose a pious thought in schools. Rarely do Federal Circuit judges give expressions of faith a pass in public classrooms or hallways, and when they do they’re liable to get overruled on appeal.
Columbine parents brought suit on grounds that the First Amendment makes it unconstitutional to prohibit the free exercise of religion. In October, 2001, Federal district judge, Wiley Daniel, ruled in the parents’ favor. But the following June, the Federal Appeals Court overruled Judge Daniel, reinstating the ban on tiles with religious themes. Like the proverbial nail in the coffin, the U.S. Supreme Court memorialized the 13 murdered students on 13 January 2003 by upholding the ruling against the religious parents of the victims.[20]
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Federal Judge Wiley Daniel |
In this decision the lamentable condition of American jurisprudence is on display, as witnessed by the Federal Circuit judge, David Ebel of Denver, who writes the lengthy ruling. Judge Ebel finesses the free exercise of religion clause of the Constitution, while reinforcing the school officials at Columbine. He argues that the educators would, if required to be “viewpoint neutral,” have to “post tiles with inflammatory and divisive statements, such as ‘God is Hate,’ once it allows tiles that say 'God is Love.'”[21]
This argument testifies primarily to the besieged and demoralized condition of Godly people in a culture that is rapidly degenerating into paganism, to the extent that Christian plaintiffs are reduced to arguing that “viewpoint discrimination” is unconstitutional. We find ourselves pleading for conceptual and ideological neutrality rather than making our case on the principle that good and truth have natural prerogatives that justify discrimination against evil and falsehood.[22]
A healthy jurisprudence would invite appeals to high morals: The point would be that good ideas should take precedent over evil ones –– quite the opposite of the “viewpoint neutral” stocks into which religious plaintiffs felt compelled to position themselves in the Columbine case, and onto which Judge Ebel adroitly fastened the padlock. The high morals approach would continue logically that a ceramic tile containing 13 crosses memorializing the 13 innocent victims is intrinsically worthwhile, and quite unworthy of comparison to anomalies dredged up by Judge Ebel –– like a tile featuring gang graffiti, or one depicting a skull dripping with blood.”[23]
In the body politic as in the human body, phantom dangers can become political issues that obscure the real dangers. Long after amputation of a leg an old soldier will often feel pains in his phantom limb.[24] Likewise in this era of our country’s apostasy, Americans who are terrified lest a church-state union obtain sway are hardly less disoriented than the amputee who attends to the pain in his missing foot while ignoring the battery acid that just splashed in his eyes; or the Girondin at the guillotine who worries about his mustache when they’re about to take his head; or the householder who swats insects on the front porch while armed robbers are entering the back door; or the motorist who cleans his taillights after a head-on collision. When you’re a candidate for a heart transplant the tonsils removed during childhood are hardly a priority.
I am reminded of that wartime work by the Cambridge University professor, C.S. Lewis. One of his Screwtape Letters, gives the spiritual underworld's strategy for mankind's ruination:[25]
The use of fashions in thought is to distract the attention of men from their real dangers. We [the demons] direct the fashionable outcry of each generation against those vices of which it is least in danger and fix its approval on the virtue nearest to that vice which we are trying to make endemic. The game is to have them all running about with fire extinguishers whenever there is a flood, and all crowding to that side of the boat which is already nearly gunwale under. Thus we make it fashionable to expose the dangers of enthusiasm at the very moment when they are all really becoming worldly and lukewarm....
It is a measure of man's predilection for formulas, that incantations about church and state can enchant people afflicted with a soundbite mentality into supporting policies which are ridiculous on their face. In March 1969 American military authorities repeatedly denied the request of South Vietnamese villagers to rebuild a church which American warplanes had razed to the ground. Our military feared the act of rebuilding a church would somehow violate U.S. separation of church and state. Never mind that state policy had demolished the church in the first place. Eventually the sheer absurdity of the situation and the persistence of the villagers broke the spell, releasing Americans to perform the simple justice of replacing what they had destroyed.[26]
Without doubt, abstract ideologies are mental tools of great value. And yet the mechanical and unreflecting application of pre-packaged formulas has a way of reducing intelligent people to mental paralytics. Abraham Lincoln's Civil War appeal to “disenthrall ourselves” rings with a new and pressing pertinence in today's church-state conflict.[27]
A case of bedazzlement that cannot be dispelled too soon is the policy which muzzles those of us who teach in a public school. Better to gag teachers, the ACLU seems to feel, than let a penny of public money be construed as supporting religion. Beware lest we be honest and straightforward with our students. Revoke our teaching certificates if we dare tell them the truth as we perceive it, whenever that truth happens to rest on religious rationales. As noted by Frances Canavan, S.J., a constitutional scholar at Fordham University, church-state innovations have silenced those whose moral positions coincide with their religion, so that, in a strange twist, only those without religion are allowed to make moral judgements in public schools and explain them.[28]
To be sure the secular sphere has no monopoly on truth. Great minds down through the ages have searched the spiritual realm and filled volumes with their findings. While the late Madalyn Murray O'Hair was not alone in regarding all this as based on a delusion, hers is still a minority view in society at large. Assuredly she did win the landmark Bible reading case of the early 1960’s, but why should her perception of the philosophical-intellectual landscape become an imposed paradigm over the whole system of public education and the posterity it trains?
Not that her out-of-the-courtroom repugnance for religion has been formally institutionalized (“I detest all religions equally,” said she on the radio in 1975). There are no such phrases to be found in written court opinions. And yet actions speak louder than words, and policy backed by power can be far more poisonous than the most venomous verbiage. The net effect of court manufactured policy is to magnify the influence of materialistic and amoral thought patterns upon youth, by reducing exposure to the Judeo-Christian alternative. Opportunities are fewer for a teacher to uplift the spiritual level of the subcultures centered in public schools.
The longstanding policy of church-state rapport – the cooperation and mutual assistance witnessed by Maritain[29] in mid-twentieth century America – has been shattered and trashed. In its place the courts have substituted a policy of de facto if not formal hostility, with the state playing the adversarial role of defending the public sphere against formal religion.
We can take some consolation from the high quality (if not quantity) of resistance to such a policy from within the ranks of the judiciary itself. Great jurists like Byron White, Warren Burger and Robert Bork have written erudite dissents. And although Madelyn Murray-O'Hair won decisively in the U.S. Supreme Court, her case had lost during the previous year in her home state. “As we see it,” said the Appeals Court of Maryland in 1962, “neither the First nor the Fourteenth Amendment was introduced to stifle all rapport between religion and government.”[30]
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Children flying U.S. distress signal |
Education and the First Amendment
Like a female Gavrilo Princep, Madelyn Murray (O’Hair) sparked a great war. A difference is that under the Schleiffen Plan as executed in 1914, the German offensive failed; whereas the onslaught since 1962/63 against church-state rapport and cooperation has carried all before it. It crossed (to press the WWI analogy) the Belgian border in 1962 when school prayer was purged from public schools. In the following year, 1963, Bible reading was banned. In 1971 direct aid to parochial schools was outlawed nationally. The 1980's began with a decree against the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms, and by 1985 even so much as one minute of silence, for meditation or prayer by students, became taboo.
By the turn of the 21st century the extirpation of piety from government schools had been consolidated, and the assault on religion in public life fanned out into society at large. Edicts were issued exalting vice and suppressing virtue. The year 2004 saw the abomination of desolation, sodomy, elevated to a “full right” under the Constitution, even as God’s Ten Commandments were driven off public property. In the supreme court of Alabama the Chief Justice dared to resist, and was stripped of his office.
The judicial oligarchy imposed all these changes in the name of the Constitution. The school cases were specific to the establishment clause of the First Amendment. Yet the same Amendment has a free exercise of religion clause, which the politburo of nine has elected to downplay or simply disregard.
Probably not all the offending federal judges were revolutionaries aiming to push the postmodernist agenda. Some might have drifted with the postmodernist flow because they had too little experience with the adolescent subcultures as they existed and still exist in public schools. Each subculture has its own network of social interactions, values, and peer group pressures, with the school grounds and buildings being its heartland. With technological revolution and urbanization, and with both parents often occupied on full-time jobs, the adolescent subculture has become more and more independent of adult society.[31] The Justices may have little realized that they did not merely relocate religion to a place more convenient for the courts; they drove it out of an increasingly self-contained world – out of an ever more independent environment. They created a spiritual desert whose arid influence upon youth is being projected over time into adult society.
So far the state remains dutiful to its responsibility of deterring anyone who would blockade or disrupt church services in American society at large (though what your pastor utters from the pulpit is under increasing scrutiny by the “hate-speech” police). Down in the sub-cultures where youth feel, think, act, and prepare to shape America's future, however, the judiciary sees fit to impede expressions of reverence whether initiated in the classroom by students themselves or by teachers. The Supreme Court went so far as to ban one minute of silence in public schools partly because the pertinent State statute dared to mention silent prayer along with meditation as among the options during that 60 second interval.[32]
Thus, instead of helping to remove obstacles, the state continues to powerfully impose obstacles to the dissemination of Judeo-Christian values and principles. In each sub-culture whose heartland is the public school, government is no longer opening but closing and locking doors to religion, and shuttering the windows as an extra precaution.
It is no surprise that this policy spills over into the adult culture as well. What is to be expected of a generation reared in a sub-culture where religion is taboo; and where, as Judge Robert Bork indicates,[33] court orders imply “that religion is dangerous, perhaps sinister”? Naturally as adults such a generation will be uncomfortable with America’s religious heritage. Products of public education are induced to view religion through the lens of the sub-culture whence they sprang.
Not to be alarmist, but the inconsistency of constitutional policy vis-a-vis the two cultural patterns creates a tension which society will resolve in the long-term. Consistency will evolve, and not necessarily for the better. In 1994, for example, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) began looking into “religious harassment,” which critics argued would lead to the creation by law of religion free zones in the workplace, (much like public schools?) with borders patrolled by the feds and the ACLU.[34]
Shortly after the church-state revolution began with a vengeance in 1962-63, Cardinal Cushing of Boston called for “an amendment to clarify the church-state relationship.”[35] His desire was shared in many quarters, including the U.S. Senate where a 58 percent majority (short of the required two-thirds) backed Sen. Everett Dirksen's efforts to reinstate school prayer.[36] During the 1962-63 church-state decisions, the dean of the Harvard law school, Erwin Griswold, spoke out against the “mechanically absolutist approach” which he said was characterizing the Supreme Court in its constitutional rulings. He urged a return to the moderate and balanced spirit exhibited by the Supreme Court in Barnette, the celebrated flag salute case, where religious minorities were guaranteed the right to refrain, even as the majority kept its right to salute the flag.[37]
Because of the admirable balance between majority and minority rights, or between individual and community, the Barnette case warrants our closest attention. The opinion of the Court was delivered in the year of my birth, 1943. World War II was raging with D-Day yet twelve months away. Refusal to salute the flag under which thousands of GI's were giving their lives was an untimely and unpopular cause for the Court to defend. Nevertheless the Court held religious rights to be “beyond the reach” of majority demands, and issued its laudable dictum that fundamental rights “depend on the outcome of no elections.”[38]
The plaintiffs, primarily Jehovah's Witnesses, were freed from the obligation under West Virginia law of saluting the American flag and reciting the pledge. And yet the Court chose a balanced formula, siding with the sensibilities of the minority, but not to the extremity of gagging the majority. The Barnette decision was wise in reflecting a governing principle that guided our ancestors in earlier church-state controversies: “it is idle and vain to say that liberty of conscience in one citizen means the submission to his scruples on the part of all others.”[39] A wise policy would have the law protect the beliefs of religious minorities. It would not, however, hush or gag the majority lest what they value be heard by dissenting minorities.[40] The majority too deserves consideration.
It is in the very nature of religious minorities that they are different and distinguishable from their contemporaries. By trying to conceal the differences, law exceeds its proper role and goes far beyond its competence. The misguided attempt to mask the dissimilarity distorts the school age subcultures and deprives children of probably their best chance in life to learn tolerance and understanding of the religious varieties that exist in American society. Fraternization with the varied groupings of peers encountered in school is indeed a once in a lifetime experience for many people. According to a professor of education at the University of Virginia, Michael McMahan, to relegate religion to the home or confine it to the church “is to deny the student the opportunity to clarify his beliefs – and concomitantly his self-image in juxtaposition to beliefs unlike his own.” McMahan cites the experience of Americans who discover new meaning in their citizenship by travel to foreign countries.[41]
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“Please all and you please none,” A proverb by that ancient Greek, Aesop of wise fables spun, On merits bright and evils bleak.
But ‘tis taboo today to offend Trevor, Politic rather to honor or flatter, Tho’ loving rebukes surely can sever From sin, heartbreak, and beguiling blather.
With Winthrop and Mather ‘neath the sod, Better in Boston to spare the rod. Religion offends; righteousness rends: So Ted contends as Sodom descends.
Thought-police feign to fight offense, Pretend to defend the hapless few, Who never see, nor ever sense The true agenda that false friends brew –
To have virtue obscured and rarely nigh, With prudence only for the money supply. To get vices approved, lifted high, Lest faith and morals be abided by.
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Pressing the analogy of foreign travel, suppose a tourist attends an overseas public function. Does not decorum require that he stand for the national anthem of the host country? At the opening ceremonies of the 1990 Goodwill Games in Seattle, Washington, a predominantly American crowd filled an entire stadium and, so far as we could see, not one person refused to stand for the national anthem of what was then the USSR, as well as for the Star Spangled Banner.
Similarly, do religious minorities who stand quietly during a flag salute, or during the Lord's Prayer, compromise their convictions? Neither in nationality nor religion does respect for the expression of differences threaten one's own position. If a man removes his hat and takes a respectful stance during religious ceremonies at variance with his own, he no more compromises his beliefs by respecting the majority's right to worship than does the dinner guest who sits quietly and respectfully while grace is said by someone of another religious persuasion. The man may well perceive a sinister influence, however, if he is oblivious to the distinction between congeniality and conformity.
Courts trying to intervene against any possible embarrassment of religious minorities in schools are like the reformers who want to eliminate competition and grades. They imagine that the right innovations in policy will prevent all pain in schools.[42] We live in an imperfect world. It is impossible to “Offend No One.” Life has many frustrations that will never be assuaged by enforcing silence on others, but rather by putting into true perspective one's own situation.
A discussion in religion class about one of my student's public school experiences, found students almost insulted when asked if they needed some authority to intervene against a Jewish teacher who chose to celebrate Hanukkah in the classroom. None of my outspoken Catholic school students felt state intervention was warranted in order to protect their Christian ears, as it were, from Jewish lyrics.
The situation of a minority varies intrinsically from that of the majority, and social peace lies in mutual respect and understanding, not in masking the differences between the respective positions. Griswold, the Harvard dean of law, spoke to this very point:[43]
The child of a nonconforming or minority group is, to be sure, different in his beliefs. That is what it means to be a member of a minority. Is it not desirable, and educational, for him to learn and observe this, in the atmosphere of the schools – not so much that he is different, as that other children are different from him? And is it not desirable that, at the same time, he experiences and learns the fact that his difference is tolerated and accepted? No compulsion is put upon him. He need not participate. But he, too, has the opportunity to be tolerant. He allows the majority of the group to follow their own tradition, perhaps coming to understand and to respect what they feel is significant to them.
Is this not a useful and valuable and educational and, indeed, a spiritual experience for the children of what I have called the majority group? They experience the values of their own culture; but they also see that there are others who do not accept those values, and that they are wholly tolerated in their non-acceptance....
The postmodernist policy not only deprives students of the opportunities described by Griswold, but it means that many students will grow up without seeing real reverence first hand. They may go through life with an abstracted and distorted view of the very concept of religion, gleaned perhaps from the distortions disseminated by Hollywood.
The balance exhibited in the 1943 Barnette decision on the flag salute issue is upset and ruined in the 1992 judicial decree against prayer led by a Rabbi at graduation exercises. The majority opinion actually argues explicitly (one might say brazenly) that the Constitution, as interpreted by their precedents, “rejects the balance urged upon us” by logic and fair play.[44] We submit that if the Establishment Clause has come to be interpreted in an illogically doctrinaire fashion — or rather rewritten between the lines to satisfy the imperatives of the postmodernist revolution — then the only solution is correction and clarification in the written constitution itself. An amendment is the only authoritative way that we the people can set the courts back onto a reasonable, fair and non-usurpatious path.
The admirable balance set forth in Barnette is manifestly missing in current policy. Attempting to mask spiritual differences in schools has in practice had a host of unintended consequences. The Supreme Court banned religion in order ostensibly to shield the non-participating minorities. In so doing, the Justices removed the spiritual check to a host of evils which have now penetrated deeply into the school age subcultures.
Teaching / coaching experience in the public, private and parochial schools leads me to conclude that for every public school pupil spared the embarrassment or the social suasion that might accompany Bible reading or school prayer, there are probably hundreds of children who must daily suffer the searing heat of hedonistic peer pressure. Try walking down the hallway of a government school when students are between classes. On display is a sub-culture approximating the polar opposite of Judeo-Christian culture.
Where the spirit of reverence is suppressed another spirit will fill the void. Let the impious spirit be judged by its fruits – drugs, sexual license, violence, murder and terror inflicted by students during school. And more frequently as an everyday feature of the American educational environment: vandalism, vulgarity, disruption of the learning environment, and contempt for legitimate authority.[45] This wicked spirit has existed in the world from time immemorial, but its influence deepened and grew more pervasive after the federal government removed the check, i.e. outlawed the sword of the spirit [Ephesians 6:17] in government schools.
A decade and a half before the postmodernist onslaught began in earnest, the Judiciary made a few tentative moves toward forcing the sword back into its scabbard. Even at that early date, John Courtney Murray, S.J. perceived the danger:
“Does he [Justice Felix
Frankfurter] suppose that in removing from the child pressure toward
religion, he has removed all pressure from the child? Has he
created a vacuum? And rendered the child immune from anti-religious
pressures? He does not want the ‘momentum of the whole school atmosphere’
put behind religious instruction; has he thereby deprived the school atmosphere
of all momentum – brought it, as it were, to a standstill, so that it no longer
‘moves’ the child in any direction?
This is
unrealistic...the sheer omission of religion from public schools creates a
pressure on the child against religion, and puts a constraint on him to believe
that what is not important enough to be taught in school is not important at
all.”[46]
Reopening schools to reverence will have a soothing and consoling effect on many students, and will counter the darker trends in their subcultures. Increasing exposure to religion will also occasion growth in forbearance and understanding – essential qualities for a pluralistic society. Exceptional school districts which see strife of a sectarian nature, or because of militant pagan opposition, will come under special provisions whereby school boards and principals can moderate or minimize religious exercises. But the balance we seek would be seriously skewed by negating the salutary effect of faith and morals in most of America’s c.15,000 school districts simply because problems develop in a few.
A high schooler whom I coached, and who happens to be Buddhist, told me that his fear of free speech on the subject of God is that a teacher might disprove someone’s religion. The best response to this concern is that freedom has often been abused, in many forms, but that freedom is risky hardly justifies the abolition of liberty. Instead, fight the abuse. If a teacher fails to temper zeal with prudence, and abuses the freedom that would accompany the restoration of religious discussion in schools, then the teacher needs to be called on the carpet. Gagging faith filled teachers has been a “solution” far worse than the malady.
A principle at stake is connected with the origins of the American form of church-state relationship. The principle is stated in the famous Virginia Statute of Religious Liberty (1786) penned by Thomas Jefferson, and enacted into law through the efforts of 18th century progressives like George Mason and James Madison. Virginia's celebrated legislation outlawed the old obligation of taxpayers to support an established church and of officeholders to profess the Christian religion, and declared any such civil requirement to be “an infringement of natural right.” And yet one finds in this document the spirit of balance and wisdom which has been conspicuously absent during the postmodernist era: (italics added)
...truth is great and will prevail if left to herself,...she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict, unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons, free argument and debate, errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them.[47]
It is precisely by depriving religious truth of her natural weapons – by sheathing the sword of the spirit in schools where ideas clash in quest of posterity's allegiance – that absolutist separation diverges from the principles stated by Jefferson. The Virginia Statute of Religious Liberty freed truth and error to demonstrate their worth or weakness in the marketplace of ideas. The absolutist separation since 1962-63 has intervened in this competition, shackled one side, and slanted the playing field in favor of paganism.
Just after World War I, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., wrote that “the theory of our Constitution” is based on a belief that good is most attainable “by free trade in ideas – that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.”[48] Contrary to Holmes' dictum, the post-1960's Court has forbidden God-fearing folk from the fray, muzzling schoolteachers who would advocate the Judeo-Christian worldview.
Learning
To revive the formerly high quality of the American public school system will require more than new appropriations of money, or innovative lesson plans. We live in a society where in excess of 90 percent of the people profess belief in the Supreme Being. Few countries in Western Europe and the Western Hemisphere (excepting perhaps Poland and Ireland) are more Christian. There are more Jewish Americans than Israelis. Nonetheless the adolescent and younger portion of our relatively religious society is asked to seek and acquire knowledge of the world without any reference whatsoever to a Creator. The political, economic, technological and cultural progress achieved by the human race since the days of Moses is a package presented to students without an ultimate reference point. The body of knowledge with which students are asked to identify, is a kind of dangling modifier, severed from the Supreme Being most of them acknowledge and many of them reverence.
Is it any wonder, then, that so many students in America cannot or will not relate to the academic curriculum? Coursework lacks a satisfying unity and completeness, because it is illegal to tie it all together and relate what is being learned to that basic perception of reality that abides within the human heart. Instead we propose to pupils a disjointed jumble of disciplines and discoveries without an integrating and evaluative principle.[49] We are repeating in America an old error, namely:
Marxism had promised to uproot the
need for God from the human heart, but the results have shown that it is not
possible to succeed in this without throwing the heart into turmoil.
[Pope John Paul II, encyclical Centesimus Annus 24 (May 2,
1991)]
Teaching has been defined as “the act of transmitting to the young the intellectual content of civilization.”[50] Putting a damper on religion – particularly the Judeo-Christian tradition – is to dilute the transfer. For a social studies teacher it is like stealing basic colors from the artist's easel. He is asked to be evasive and less than honest about certain fundamentals of his topic. This posture discredits both himself and his presentation in the eyes of students. For example, suppose the history teacher believes in the role of Divine Providence down through the ages. He can hardly do justice to the topic of historical cause and effect if the great Helmsman of history is a forbidden topic.[51] Curricular bias against God lobotomizes history.
What the courts have imposed upon the educational system is a policy which may reduce tension and trouble in the courtroom, but in the classroom it numbs young minds. The made-for-the-courtroom approach encourages intellectual timidity according to Robert Lynn, and gives America the “flatlander version” of education making it tepid and uninteresting, a dull process of acquiring skills and ostensibly neutral information.[52] Philip Phenix argues that “creative tension is an important value in education,” and that building upon religious differences can help sharpen insight and can be constructive and enriching for students.[53] Also Harvey Cox, pillar of the Harvard Divinity School, has decried the “pabulum of tedium” in public education. In his “The Relationship Between Religion and Education,” professor Cox maintains that if religion is a point of strong conflicting views between people, that is not reason to exclude it but a very good reason to include it in the public school classroom.[54]
In terms of motivation and interest then, the attempt to create a religiously sterile bubble has helped alienate students from the learning process, whereas reopening the classroom to spiritual wisdom would serve a stimulating pedagogical purpose. As professor of education Michael McMahan puts it, “students are interested in religious issues and interest is a powerful vehicle for learning.” McMahan mentions that during the years he taught English, “few topics were capable of garnering the rapt, almost eerie attention that accompanied interchanges relating to such subjects as the origin of existence, the source of moral guidance, the meaning of life, and the existence of God.” McMahan concludes that taking the keen interest that students show for religious themes, and linking it with their coursework in literature, social studies and the arts “makes sound pedagogical sense.”[55]
Decentralization
But who shall establish such a link? Will it be the teacher, the principal, the school board, the State legislature, or the Congress? Before the judicial decisions of 1962-63, the task often fell to some central authority, and the more centralized the policy the closer is society to having religion prescribed by the state – the state being defined simply as positions of rank and power in the body politic. In the regents’ school prayer case of 1962, it was just such a centralized policy that the U.S. Supreme Court negated.[56] The New York State Board of Regents had composed a 22 word prayer which public school children throughout New York State were to recite daily. The Court majority argued – and not without some truth – that the seeds of a politically directed cult or ersatz religion are contained in any state composed prayer.
Much the same concerns about state composition of prayer were cited thirty years later in the Lee v. Wiseman case. In 1992 the Court outlawed prayers at graduation exercises after a middle school principal gave certain instructions about the content of prayers to the rabbi who conducted the invocation and the benediction at commencement.[57] With the court we can rightfully look askance at having state functionaries instruct clergyman on how to pray.
It is light-years from there, however, to banning all adult led or supervised religious exercises in schools. The court has done precisely that by approving student led prayers at graduation, but disallowing the students or anyone else from inviting a chaplain to offer the invocation.
Even high school football games get targeted when they include religious exercises. In New Mexico students at Sante Fe High School voted for an invocation prior to football games and elected a fellow student to lead the prayer. “No way,” said the politburo of nine in a 6-3 decision prior to the 2000 football season. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that student-initiated and student-led prayer at football games violates the U.S. Constitution.[58] In his dissent, Chief Justice Rehnquist wrote that,
even more
disturbing than its holding
is the tone of the Court's opinion;
it bristles with hostility to all
things religious in public life.[59]
Neither on the playing field nor in the classroom does the postmodernist regime approve for students the freedom to pray openly.[60] Clearly a prayer chosen by students is decentralized enough in origin that it poses no danger of a state supervised religion – as indeed Courts until 1963 had ruled.[61] At particular issue then, at the outset of the postmodernist revolution, was the 14 word prayer which a New York City (Queens) kindergarten class had been saying as grace before the morning milk and cookies:
God is great, God is good, and
we thank Him for our food. Amen.
The decentralization of a prayer policy did not count for a whit, however, with our betters on the bench. Nor did decentralizing it to the teacher meet with the Court's approval. In 1968 the Supreme Court again denied certiorari (jurisdiction), thus finalizing a Federal Appeals Court ruling that a prayer initiated by a kindergarten teacher in Illinois was unconstitutional. The teacher, Mrs. Esther Watne, had gone so far as to delete the word “God” from an old prayer printed in several books, in a futile attempt to placate the parents of a pupil, Mr. and Mrs. Lyle Despain. The Despains had filed a complaint stating that they did not believe in the existence of a divine being who hears or responds to prayers.[62] The prayer consisted of four verses:
We thank you for the flowers so
sweet
We thank you for the food we eat;
We thank you for the birds that sing;
We thank you (God) for everything.
The lower (U.S. District) court ruled in favor of the kindergarten teacher, noting that her policy was her own and involved no law by a governmental body and no regulation by a school board or administration.[63] Nevertheless the U.S. Appeals Court overrode the lower court decision. The highest levels of the judicial branch being central authorities themselves, they disregarded the merits of decentralization. Teacher initiated prayer is just as taboo today in the government schools as if the U.S. Secretary of Education or some other central authority were directing religious exercises.
Sometimes, of course, a teacher will defy the law and lead prayers anyway. While teaching at Lewis & Clark High School in Spokane, I had the students stand and pray in the silence of their hearts for the President of the United States on the day that Ronald Reagan was badly wounded in an attempted assassination.[64] Fortunately for my career, my initiative escaped scrutiny. But for the most part the public system boasts precious few teachers willing to lead their students against the flow of secularism, especially in my state of Washington.
In 2002, I was visiting former colleagues on the faculty of a public high school where I used to teach in eastern Washington state. Cle Elum Washington, is an old mining and logging town, population about 1770. The whole of Kittitas county has some 33,000. Yet the long arm of postmodern paganism reaches out to the remotest towns and rural areas, and not even commemorating the first anniversary of 9/11 emboldened the administrators of Cle Elum School District to risk defying political correctness. The assembly of some 1000 students, grades K-12, featured the release of pigeons and brightly colored balloons. No prayers were allowed, however, unless you count the minute of silence.[65] No clergymen spoke.
So the message to youth in small town America, September 11th, 2002, was that even in a time of danger, peril and need, we must collectively beware of
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Washington at Valley Forge, stained glass window, capitol hill chapel, Washington, D.C. |
soliciting Divine Providence. My feeling is that we are about to pay a price much higher than a minute of silence, and that “forbidding the little children,” as per Mark 10:14, risks the withdrawal of Almighty God’s protection from the nation. The postmodernist regime thus puts us in a posture of vulnerability in a hostile world. No longer do we appeal “to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions,” nor do we demonstrate “a firm reliance on the Protection of Divine Providence” (Declaration of Independence).[66] Clearly it is no longer “in God we trust,” but rather in money and the might of the U.S. military. The US Bureau of Homeland Security is about to discover, I dare say, the meaning of the Scripture:
Except the Lord keep the city,
the watchman waketh but in vain.[67]
By pushing America in the direction of apostasy, the postmodernist regime jeopardizes the country’s well being – possibly even its survival.
With a centralized policy in the negative, the politburo of nine compels some 15,000 school districts to negate America’s religious heritage. This policy is oblivious to the wide variations in opinion and feeling from coast to coast and border to border. Here the genius for pragmatism long attributed to America is nowhere to be seen.
Surely the safer and more sensible response to a religiously pluralistic situation is not to muzzle everyone associated with public schools, but to diffuse the decision making process to the localities. This modern (as opposed to postmodern) policy would abandon the one-size-fits-all approach to religion in schools. Thus the constellation law would let communities enjoying a consensus retain the spiritual dimension that areas in heated disharmony might forego for the sake of peace. Such a cultural armistice where called for would be readily available under a system in which decision making is dispersed to the local school district level.
Here decentralization is, from a functional point of view, superior to the current U.S. policy of centralism in the negative, and also to the European policy of positive centralism. In England, for example, Bible reading, hymn singing, or short sermons constitute the non-denominational “corporate worship” long required by law in the public or “county” schools. This centralized policy of infusing religion into the schools from the top down leads to the teaching of religion by non-believers, teachers often going through the motions merely for the sake of conformity to governmental mandates. Spiritual apathy and irreligion are said to be a result of the lukewarm presentation.[68]
The centralism in the negative imposed by U.S. courts does have the virtue of releasing the unbelieving teacher from his spiritual charade. However it asks believing teachers to play spiritual schizophrenics,[69] feigning neutrality with respect to the Torah or the Gospel or the Koran when in reality their lives are directed toward commitment. Why require a split personality of the teacher, be he religious or irreligious?
Instead of a centrally imposed uniformity, section 12: 2,11 of the constellation law would not mandate anything for teachers, but would permit each teacher some occasions for free exercise of religion. Teachers would have the option of making reference to the Ten Commandments and favorite Biblical passages, and of conducting entirely voluntary prayer exercises. Under section 12: 2-3, 11-12 it would be written into the Constitution, with all the authority and social impact inherent in that document, that no obligation whatsoever exists on the teacher's part to initiate anything religious, nor on the student’s part to participate actively. Thus, nothing religious in public school classrooms could take place except as the initiative proceeds from the grassroots, i.e. from volunteers among the nearly three million public schoolteachers in America, rather than from school administrators or political authorities. This teacher option will be subject to a system of decentralized checks (section 12: 4-7) available to parents and principals for the sake of peace whenever a community is polarized over the issue of religion in public life. Meanwhile the more united community will also have checks in the classroom so as to silence the occasional teacher / adversary of religion who seeks to propagandize, or the teacher / religious zealot who exceeds the bounds of prudence; while still allowing other teachers to exemplify the level of spirituality with which the community is comfortable.
Decentralization as built into the constellation law would thus depart from the British system as well as the pre-1962 American methods of religiously indoctrinating students through administrative decree. Instead of having a daily Biblical passage read to all homeroom classes over the school’s intercom, the teacher will be free to cite a Biblical verse in whichever class he chooses, fitted to the context of the regular coursework (section 12:12). Rather than indoctrinate public school pupils with the systematic letter of the Judeo-Christian tradition, the idea is to let the spirit come through and leave it to each youngster to pick up the letter elsewhere, perhaps in later years as an adult. The approach of section 12 in readmitting reverence to public schools is not systematic indoctrination. Rather it is contagion, as per the old maxim that love for God is caught not taught. Spirituality, and a religious way of looking at the world, may be more contagious if caught first and studied later, than when students are lettered in religion before they imbibe the spirit. “Example is notoriously more potent than precept.”[70]
Partly for this reason section 12: 11-12 reopens the primary and secondary schools (grades K-12) to school prayer – a spiritual example – whereas section 12:2 delays formal Bible reading until the secondary level, grades 6-12. Another reason for the delay until middle school is the Bible's complexity, containing as it does many nuances and shades of meaning. It requires a certain level of maturity to understand and follow Holy Scripture in the spirit of wisdom and prudence.
Normative Teaching
For youth to abide by the Bible should not, however be an objective at all according to George LaNoue, who claims that descriptive teaching about religion is acceptable but that public schools must steer clear of “normative teaching” for commitment. On the contrary retorts Robert Lynn, what LeNoue proposes is essentially the same dull, ostensibly neutral approach which encourages timidity and fosters boredom.[71] Not only would opportunity for normative teaching from the heart enliven the curriculum, it would expose students to the views of their various teachers over the years and broaden their personal experience in the realm of ideas and beliefs. Furthermore it would reaffirm the principle of the Virginia Statute of Religious Liberty, by making space within the curriculum for intelligent dissent against the all-secularized world view which pervades so much of the intellectual establishment.
Under the quasi-scientific approach that nixes normative teaching, any religious issues allowed to surface are, according to McMahan, “stripped of intuitive, spiritual, or experiential reality, and are submitted to a system of analysis which violates the integrity of the phenomenon.”[72] Blaise Pascal, one of history's leading lights in science, said: “'There are two equally dangerous extremes, to shut reason out, and to let nothing else in.'”[73]
As Cox of Harvard writes, “all good teaching requires fidelity to the phenomenon being taught.”[74] Like chemistry or drama, religion is taught poorly if there is no encouragement for pupils to practice it and act it out. Samuel Miller points out that the neutral approach to religion can promote cynicism. “An undiscriminating array of factual phenomena, presented from a pseudo-neutral point of view, usually has a rather cynical result.”[75]
The idea is not to eliminate the Bible-as-literature courses where they are offered today, but neither to let the state discourage the reverence and assurance that spring naturally from the convictions of students and teachers. Real neutrality on religious questions is a spiritual impossibility according to no less an authority than the Savior Himself.[76] Feigning neutrality or equal sympathy for all religions, including atheism and agnosticism, would require a self-transcendence enviable in Hollywood. For the vast majority of teachers, who are not great actors, it is best to let them speak reverently from the heart if the spirit moves them – as restrained, of course, by the requirements of peace in the locality where they teach (