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 ══

 

General Principles  

Church-State Considerations

Education and the First Amendment

Learning

Decentralization

Normative Teaching

 

Specific Provisions

Private Schools

Public Schools:

The Ten Commandments and Scripture Posters

Quartet of Checks

Bible Reading

Prayer

 

Conclusion

  APPENDICES

                                                                                                                                             

 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

 

Church-State Considerations

            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]

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.

John Courtney Murray, S.J. (1904-1967)

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 would have said in 2005, when as Russell Shaw put 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.  

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

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]

 

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]

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]

 

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]

OFFEND NO ONE “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.

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

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 (section 12:5).

The spiritual intimidation of teachers today may partially account for that “rising tide of mediocrity” in U.S. education which was noted some two decades into the postmodernist revolution.  In A Nation At Risk,[77] (1983) the National Commission on Excellence in Education went beyond the commercial and technological shortcomings of the U.S.A. by warning of declines in “the intellectual, moral, and spiritual strengths of our people.”[78]  Unfortunately the report opened no wellsprings of reform.  Instead the spiritual desert got dryer, and arid government schools continued to dike out the springs of living water.[79]

Reopening schools to the expression of spiritual conviction holds promise in terms of morale and incentive to teach – teacher traits impossible to achieve merely by throwing money at the problem of educational mediocrity.  Intimidation of spiritually minded teachers can tend to quench the idealistic flame that motivates people to devote their lives to teaching in the first place.  Minds gifted enough to succeed elsewhere may regard a school system that is dehydrated of spiritual and moral essence, as too stifling and scorched to justify the sacrifices one makes to be a teacher.  The burned out teacher may be like the Vietnam veteran who lamented, “a nation that no longer embodies a moral order, but merely represents material and secular interests, is 'not worth dying for.'”[80]

 

To live without faith,
without a patrimony to defend,
without a steady struggle for truth,
that is not living, but existing.[81]

 

Section 12 does not represent a mobilization of teachers by the state for moral / religious purposes, but rather a limitation of the state, depriving it of the authority to intervene and secularize the whole public school teaching profession.

 Neither does the constellation law overturn the 1948 McCollum decision against released time arrangement.   Under the outlawed released time formulas, clergy representing various faiths conducted classes in public school buildings during regular class time.  Not that this system has failed where tried in the United States, nor been less than successful abroad.[82]  But as a concession to the strong feelings of separationists in the United States, prudence will be served by drawing the line at clerical visits on a regular basis to public schools.  Although McCollum would remain untouched by section 12, the constellation law would reopen public schools to religious ideas that surface voluntarily via the teaching laity.

Apollo 8 astronauts Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and William Anders, 1968

Although public schoolteachers are government employees, they are too low in the political strata to be realistically ranked as statesmen or politicians.  Rank in the body politic (the state) hardly includes the mailman who tarries for a friendly conversation about religion, nor conductors on Amtrac trains.  Neither did the ten Biblical verses which Apollo 8 astronauts broadcast from lunar orbit in 1968 proceed from people in the political hierarchy.  Although American astronauts do receive government paychecks and did broadcast with public facilities, the Bible was their choice as individuals not as state functionaries. 

Indeed the Federal Courts made this very point in rejecting a lawsuit filed against NASA months after the first lunar voyage.  Flushed with her success of 1963 in convincing the courts to ban the Bible from public schools, Madelyn Murray O'Hair tried to secure a similar ruling against Bible reading in outer space.  The Federal court decision of 1969 (upheld the following year by the U.S. Supreme Court) stated that, “the religious statements of the astronauts while on television were made by the astronauts as individuals and not as representatives of the United States government.”[83]  What a pity that the wisdom applied to this cosmic case was not brought down to earth and applied to the mundane public schoolteacher.  He or she has convictions and feelings of a religious nature.  Such feelings and opinions are not only appropriate to express in an educational setting, but as desirable for students to hear as it was for listeners to the lunar broadcast.

Schoolteachers like Mrs. Esther Watne are agents of the state only when carrying out policies made above them at the state level.  When religious conviction is volunteered independently of curricular decisions made by superintendents, schoolboards, or high state policy makers, then the opinions originate not from the state but from the culture – i.e. from rank-and-file Americans.  Writing the majority opinion in the 1990 Mergens case, which approved religious clubs in public schools, Justice Sandra Day O'Conner articulated the key distinction. 

...there is a crucial difference between government speech endorsing religion, which the Establishment Clause forbids, and private speech endorsing religion, which the Free Speech and Free Exercise Clauses protect.[84]

 

The teaching profession is therefore the appropriate channel to be cleared constitutionally so that spirituality can reenter the curriculum without church-state entanglement.  Public education in this country cannot, of course, attempt the broad and unified spiritual formation of youth that is possible in religious schools.  But despite this limitation, the public school can allow for the occasional teachers who are able to serve as virtuous role models, and who are willing to exemplify and to articulate their own sources of spiritual inspiration and moral order.

It may be that only one in ten public schoolteachers, or one in twenty, will be inspired to recommend some features of the Judeo-Christian tradition.  That would be a vast improvement.  A little leaven or salt goes a long way.  If a Constitutional Amendment secures safe ground for religion in the classroom, a small percentage of teachers will suffice to point the way.  It will take but a few to wipe the slate clean of the official taboo against God and religion in public education.  Many students will welcome the good news that a spiritual alternative exists to the thought patterns of consumerism, hedonism and new age self-worship so pervasively promoted by peers, the media / entertainment industry, and the adolescent subculture in public schools.[85]

 

SPECIFIC PROVISIONS

Private Schools / Home Schools

            Not all schools are or ought to be government schools.  As in many sectors of life, competition generates productiveness whereas monopoly breeds corruption and allows laziness.  Section 12:8-9 of the constellation law, will make American education more competitive by leveling the playing field for religious and parochial schools, which will in itself promote a more competitive environment for public schools.

Just as the constellation law will irrigate the spiritual desert of public education from within, so will facilitating the prosperity of private / parochial schools provide external motivation, i.e. spur the public schools to shape up.  Indeed, an increased degree of salutary competition from private / parochial schools may be the key, even the prerequisite, to the revival of excellence in public schools.  Generally, monopoly is inefficient and gets worse the longer it persists.  Competition, on the other hand, promotes performance by rewarding excellence and punishing mediocrity.  This principle applies no less to education than to capitalism.  It would be enormously beneficial for the school age population as a whole if America doubled or tripled the availability of competitive alternatives as a way of spurring performance by public schools.  Government schools would experience some pruning, but usually it is best to trade quantity for quality.

Competition has been proven to work.  Caroline Minter Hoxby, an economist at Harvard, has studied the effectiveness of school-choice programs. She found that when private and public schools compete, there are substantial gains in educational achievement.[86]  Unfortunately most government schools have no major competition, so that mediocrity becomes pervasive without being punished.  Graduates get punished alright, but not the faculty or administration.  Part of the reason private / parochial schools outperform public schools is that non-public schools must survive a highly competitive environment.

At present about one-tenth of the nation's elementary and secondary students attend private schools, 84 percent of them religious in purpose.  This represents some 20,000 schools.  Clearly if children of all kinds stand to play a role in our future, then America's prosperity for years to come will depend on both private and public schools, to the exclusion of neither. 

At the State level public funds are forbidden to religious schools by some 30 State constitutions; whereas the other 20 or so States have constitutions which would permit such aid, were it not for recent Federal rulings.  The constellation law would do nothing to alter the three to two balance between the States on the issue of public funding.  It would, however, decentralize the issue from the Federal to the State level, allowing the localities and States to allocate their educational funds in accordance with their own constitutions.

Byron White, June 1962

 One of the constellation law's primary objectives is to promote a more cordial and cooperative church-state relationship.  Section 12:8 suppresses the hostility implicit in edicts like that issued in 1971 by the U.S. Supreme Court.[87]  In Rhode Island and Pennsylvania at that time, about one-quarter of the student population attended private and parochial schools.  Both States had a disproportionately large stake in private schooling, and both States had enacted legislation to help the private school sector meet secular expenses.  Because the great majority of these schools were religious in orientation, the Court majority cloaked their usurpation in the establishment clause of the First Amendment and outlawed the aid.  Dissenting was Justice Byron White, who defended the free exercise clause of the First Amendment.  Later, in a similar dissent, White wrote:

Positing an obligation on the State to educate its children, which every State acknowledges, it should be wholly acceptable for the State to contribute to the secular education of children going to sectarian schools rather than to insist that if parents want to provide their children with religious as well as secular education, the State will refuse to contribute anything to their secular training. [88]

 

White emphasized the free exercise rights of parents to choose religious education.  The impasse between defenders of the free exercise clause of the First Amendment, and those who obsess on the establishment clause, is resolved by the constellation law as follows.

At the Federal level the funding of religious schools would be forbidden.  Section 12:8 does, however, make exception for ancillary services such as special education and transportation.  Court rulings to date have allowed for similar exceptions.[89]  Under the constellation law, no Federal funds would be applied to the core activities of a parochial school, neither through regular tuition, nor salaries of regular teachers.  It would be left to statutory appropriations by Congress – potentially fine tuned by adjudication – to delineate the precise extent to which special education, school nurses, and etc. are auxiliaries that escape the ban on federal funding.  In any case the constellation law puts no obligation on Congress to provide even a penny for schools, be they religious or not.

Nor at the State level would there be any mandate for funding, but there would assuredly be a wider set of options.  Some twenty States like Rhode Island and Pennsylvania would be free to resume funding at once if they so chose, while in the rest of the States, like Massachusetts and Washington, their own constitutions would prevail.  At this writing, the latter two States do prohibit the use of public money for religious schools.[90]  If Massachusetts chooses to retain amendment 46 in its constitution, which forbids parochial school aid, certainly the constellation law would do nothing to change the Massachusetts constitution.  But neither would the approach mandated in Massachusetts transfer, via legislation from the federal bench, to neighboring Rhode Island.  Each State would be free to decide the issue for itself.

Any kind of public funding raises the potential for purse strings, which enable the political funder to pressure the funded school by threatening to withhold or reduce appropriations.  There is an oft expressed concern, from the private school standpoint, that by accepting public funding they may lose religious independence.

To safeguard the autonomy of the private school sector on religious issues, section 12:9 makes it a high crime to use public moneys as purse strings to modify a school's religious character or its hiring practices.  This explicit check will protect religious schools against postmodernists intent on forcing religious bodies, say, to hire homosexuals; also against government officials generally who may be hostile or unsympathetic to religion. 

Checks are more effective between levels of government, as opposed to self-policing from within one level.  Accordingly, the check will be imposed from the federal level against purse strings operating at the state or local levels. 

 

The primary federal role shall be to make sure that State and local government moneys are never employed as purse strings to undermine or modify a school's moral and religious character.  (constellation law 12:9)

 

This provision will also deter any tendencies in the States toward favoring or establishing one denomination over another.  In order to prefer the Catholic school, for example, a State must make funds more difficult for Lutheran, Evangelical, Mormon or Jewish schools to acquire.  Thereby the State would, in effect, be using purse strings to encourage schools to become more like Catholic schools.  Section 12:9 would explicitly forbid pressures of that kind with all the authority of the U.S. Constitution.  Any pressure to introduce pagan elements into the curriculum would likewise encounter explicit constitutional language forbidding purse strings that modify or undermine the religious character of a school.

 

The constellation law will liberate states and localities[91] from judge-made hindrances to school choice as favored by some 70 percent of the American public.[92]  States whose constitutions are compatible could set up either contract systems or voucher systems.  The latter would let students’ parents choose where to send their share of public educational funds, i.e. to the public, private or parochial schools.

In 2002 vouchers in Cleveland, Ohio successfully ran a Federal Court gauntlet.  The U.S. Supreme Court narrowly overturned rulings against the vouchers as decreed in both Federal District Court and Federal Appeals Court.[93]   A single new Supreme Court Justice could reverse it all again, or tie the question up in further complications.

In order to maintain his bare majority in the Cleveland case, Chief Justice Rhenquist uncharacteristically mounted the old merry-go-round about religious neutrality:  “We believe that the program challenged here is a program of true private choice, consistent with Mueller, Witters, and Zobrest, and thus constitutional. As was true in those cases, the Ohio program is neutral in all respects toward religion.”[94]

With all due respect, your Honor, I object on grounds that your overemphasis on neutrality is a good application of a bad principle.  That religion does and ought to have prerogatives follows logically from official religious symbols and mottos (like “in God we trust,” and “one nation under God”) and from a host of precedents ranging from paid chaplains in legislative bodies to tax-exemptions for churches, synagogues and mosques.  The constellation law will break through the national amnesia (or apostasy) and reinforce the principle that far from being neutral, the USA is committed to favor godly ways over practices that are ungodly.

 

the hottest places in hell
are reserved for those who,
in a period of moral crisis,
maintain their neutrality.
     JFK paraphrasing Dante[95]

 

The constellation amendment will simplify and stabilize government policy, clear away the confusion about neutrality, and end the costly judicial proceedings that attend most any sort of public cooperation with parochial and private education.

 

 

   Public Schools:
The Ten Commandments and Scripture Posters

In a suit brought by the ACLU of Kentucky (1980) the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a state law by which the elected legislature required the posting of the Ten Commandments in Kentucky public schools.[96]   This case set the federal standard which continues to govern all 15,000 school districts in the United States.  Today about 90 percent of the nation’s elementary and secondary students are enrolled in the public school sector. 

            A uniquely American chapter in the 3500 year old history of the Ten Commandments began during World War II in St. Cloud, Minnesota.[97]  There E.J. Ruegemer, a juvenile court judge, asked a car thief whether he realized that the Ten Commandments forbad stealing.  When the teenager indicated no knowledge of the Ten Commandments, Judge Ruegemer ordered the boy to memorize the Decalogue and apply them to life.  From that point on the youth avoided trouble with the law.  His turnabout impressed the judge, and as a member of the Fraternal Order of Eagles Judge Ruegemer proposed that the F.O.E. send copies of the Ten Commandments to courthouses throughout the country as a way of deterring young people from a life of crime.

Eagles’ monument at Everett WA, by city hall since 1959

            Initially the Eagles rejected Ruegemer’s idea, concerned about the complications that might stem from the existence of the three denominational versions of the Decalogue.  Later, however, a group of Protestant, Catholic and Jewish laymen convened and were able to produce a version acceptable to the parties concerned.[98]

            In the mid-1950’s, Cecil B. DeMille was producing a film entitled The Ten Commandments, and when the great director heard about the project he contacted the Eagles with an idea for bronze plaques instead of paper.  Finally the Eagles decided on granite as more in keeping with the original stone tablets from Mt. Sinai.  The project was carried out by local aeries; thus it remains uncertain how many engraved monuments were placed.  Estimates go as high as 2,000 around the country.

           

Roll over Roger Roger Williams thou wouldst turn in thy grave, The Lord’s law enshrined, but few moved to save; To see such travesty in thy founding city, In the commons named for thee – greater the pity.   From gentry in Providence down to bakers, A haven did ye make for Jews and Quakers, To celebrate God’s Providence in the town’s name, Memorialize gratitude in the state’s fame.   And so, in Rhode Island long ago, Seed didst thou sow and freedom bestow, To lift up the Commandments in high renown, Till Providence of all places pushed them down.

            In 1963, just as the postmodernist blitzkrieg was about to begin, the elected city government in the capitol city of Providence, Rhode Island, authorized the Eagles to place the Ten Commandments monument in a public park.  Four decades later, in 2004, that same state – the only state founded explicitly on the principle of religious freedom – saw the mere threat of legal action suffice to push their Eagle’s monument out of Roger Williams Park in Providence, the commons in the capitol city named for colonial Rhode Island’s founder.  Christians like Sandy Sanchez were shocked.  "‘My heart sank. It saddened me that it wasn't there,’" lamented Sanchez.  "‘The first thing I thought was that this was the work of the ACLU.’" 

            Sanchez was exactly right, for adjudication to push religion out of public life is the forte of the American Civil Liberties Union.  Who knows their plans for the future?  Might their attorneys try to compel the municipality of Providence to change the city’s name because of its religious connotations, much as the Bolsheviks renamed St. Petersburg (first as Petrograd and then as Leningrad)?  A local Rabbi in Providence, Mitchell Levine, speculated on where militant secularism was leading:  “Maybe we shouldn't even have a park named after Roger Williams because he was a religious person. Where do you draw the line? ”[99]

            As it turned out, the following year (2005) saw the U.S. Supreme Court draw the line in an unexpected way, by upholding an Eagle’s monument on the state Capitol campus in Austin, Texas, even as they ordered copies of the Ten Commandments removed from courthouses in Kentucky.  The disparate rulings turned on Justice Breyer splitting his vote – nixing recent memorials in Kentucky but okaying an old monument in Texas – because, said he, “we must 'distinguish between real threat and mere shadow.'”[100]  (For more on this ruling, see chapter five)  In other words, if I understand Breyer correctly, the mere shadow of public piety is not so dangerous as the real thing.  The more ancient the placement, the more decrepit the spirit, and therefore the safer are citizens from religion.  But the lately placed copies of the Decalogue, especially if posted with any show of reverence, are too vital an expression of religiosity to pass muster.

            So goes the line of reasoning laid down by our postmodernist overlords.

            We the people can restore the Constitution, reassert the principle of self-governance, and recommit the nation to Judeo-Christian values – not as hazardous but as helpful to the United States.  Or instead we can acquiesce and let the politburo of nine set the country’s course.  Although the ACLU would prefer the latter, the thesis of this book is that it is high time to rollback their agenda and their elitist, repressive influence.

Downplaying the Decalogue   “Many years have gone away, The olden days are done to stay.” Yea, that’s the shelf where they would lay, All the rules of yesterday.   Ten Commandments included, God’s call to obey thus precluded, Convenient indeed for fun, To which so eagerly they would run.   Not fun of the good clean healthy sort, Like field-sports of wide assort, That do comport with standards high. No – thrills such as cause a gasp and sigh.   For the saints do cringe when we miss, Our own eternity of bliss, For want of faith and Godly laws, To probe and check capital flaws.   Heaven mourns when we take away, Beacons to mark that Mosaic quay, From which people and nations stray, To be damned and doomed extempore'.

 

We turn now to the specifics of the constellation law for public schools.  One option which section ten will reopen for public schools is the posting somewhere in the classroom of the Ten Commandments.  The warnings against covetousness, falsehood, violence, adultery; and the mandates to respect parents, Sabbath and the Creator; are particularly urgent admonitions for youth to be aware of, and hopefully to retain and heed.

            As regards the classroom, a particular problem with mandatory posting is that it would put agnostic and atheistic teachers (of which there are not a few) into conflict with the very principles posted on the classroom wall.  To reintroduce the Judeo-Christian moral code into schools via teachers who are themselves estranged from religion might well be counterproductive, or at least less than propitious for student acceptance than when proposed voluntarily by teachers who honor the Commandments, i.e. who practice (or at least believe) what they preach.  Our aim is not massive quantity of witness, but quality as spoken from the teacher’s heart.  Section 12:3 of the constellation law will therefore let stand the Supreme Court decision against mandatory posting, but will reopen public schools to optional posting by the teachers so inclined.  Such a teacher will exercise a virtue defined by Christ Himself: “whoever does away with one of these least commandments and so teaches men, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever carries them out and teaches them, he shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven.”[101]

In the event of dispute as to versions, the teacher will have the option of posting simultaneously the Protestant, Catholic and Jewish versions (see Appendix).

Furthermore, section 12:3 will authorize a teacher to post up to ten verses from the Bible in addition to the Ten Commandments.  The verses might, for example, be in the form of a poster focusing on the golden rule or the Sermon on the Mount.[102]  Or students might be invited voluntarily to drop favorite scriptural verses into a suggestion box, or make their own posters.  The teacher could put them on the wall as permitted by classroom space and the ten verse limit.

 

Eagles’ monument, Shoshone County Courthouse, 1982, Wallace Idaho[103]

Quartet of Checks

Sections 12:5-7 will encourage prudence on the teacher's part.  If the posting becomes too proselytizing, or for any reason objectionable to the parents of a pupil; then a petition of complaint presented to the principal and signed by a least one parent (or guardian) will give the principal discretionary authority to put a stop to posting (other than the Decalogue) by the teacher in question.  Thus we have the quartet of parent, teacher, principal, and school board, the decentralized decision makers who would resolve dissent in the localities when and where it occurs.  First it is the teacher who may initiate the classroom exercises, and who may also decide to opt out at any time before or after controversy begins.  Second, the parents (or school district resident) may intervene by means of the petition process.  Third, the principal may cast a partial veto subject to review at the next school board meeting.  Fourth the schools board rules on the aforementioned petitions, extends principal vetoes or lets them lapse, and deals with religious controversy deriving from religious exercises not covered by section twelve.

            Where the sword of the Spirit is unsheathed (i.e. the word of God) the apostle Paul tells us that it penetrates to the innermost being of the person who listens, revealing the thoughts and intentions of the heart.[104]  The effect of religion in schools will depend, then, upon the spiritual condition of the students, and indirectly of their parents.  Where there is openness to the Biblical truths, the result will be spiritually uplifting; secondly where lukewarmness prevails the message may or may not even be heard; and thirdly where obdurate opposition to the word exists, sparks will fly much as when a sword strikes a slab of flint.  The latter case implies a kind of pitched battle, the waging of which is hardly appropriate to the public classroom.  Where this intense spiritual polarization becomes a problem, the quartet of checks will quite properly come into play. 

In most of this country’s 13,700 school districts, the prevalent condition is a combination of openness and lukewarmness to God, heated or militant opposition being less common.  As a rule the American teacher is more likely to encounter disinterest than angry contradiction.  The practicality and prudence of unsheathing Judeo-Christian truths in schools will vary of course from coast to coast and border to border, according to the degree of consensus that the particular school district exhibits.  Even within school districts there is likely to be significant variation.  Recent court mandates have been oblivious to the diversity factor.

Although the petition process may generate heat – the natural result of activist opposition – a little heat is a small price for introducing spiritual light into the heartland of the youth cultures.  As someone has said, where there is no heat there is no light.  It is better to let occasional sparks fly in a school district here and there, than to avoid such heat by uniformly extinguishing the light in all the multifarious school districts spread across the continent.

 

Bible Reading

Another option which teachers would have under the constellation law is Bible reading.  Section 12:2 declares each teacher in secondary schools (grades 6-12) free to spend an average of twelve minutes per school day on the reading and discussion of Holy Scripture.  If Mrs. Smith teaches five hours per day, she could allot her dozen minutes among her classes on a rotating basis, or give each class two minutes per day, or 30 seconds, or no time at all, as she sees fit.

In primary grades (K-5) it will also be possible to cite the wisdoms and virtues of the Bible in relation to the curriculums and problems of the classroom, though not by conducting formal scriptural readings on a regular basis.  Elementary teachers might, for example, use occasional quotations or stories from the Bible to make a point in lecture; and if questions about a posted verse of Scripture should arise, the reply might include a reading of the Biblical context that applies to the posted verse.

Reintroducing the Bible into schools as a teacher option, will give Sacred Scripture a substantially different place in public education than it had during the pre-postmodernist period, when the inclinations of the teacher received little consideration.  The letter of Holy Scripture was infused mechanically into the curriculum by every shade of teacher from the spiritually discerning to the impious materialist.  It was not just secularists who stood in opposition to this approach.  Maritain, a devout Roman Catholic, had written extensively about education and did affirm the importance in schools of Bible reading.  He had emphasized, however, that contact with Holy Scripture must be full of reverence and deeply personal, not compulsory.[105]  Compulsory religious exercises in Great Britain have failed to keep the British population from descending into godlessness.

Perhaps it will prove to have been a long-term blessing in disguise when the Supreme Court ended compulsory (hence spiritually lukewarm) Bible reading.  The process began in Baltimore where the son of Madelyn Murray (O'Hair) was enrolled in a public grade school.[106]  How ironic that the court created a spiritual upheaval in order to guard the ears of an atheist's son, who would later convert to Christianity and publicly repent of his role in banning the Bible from public schools.  In a 1980 press conference William Murray (then an adult) expressed a desire to help repair the damage.

... First, I would like to apologize to the people of the City of Baltimore for whatever part I played in the removal of Bible reading and praying from the public schools of that city.  I now realize the value of this great tradition and the importance it has played in the past in keeping America a moral and lawful country.  I can now see the damage this removal has caused to our nation in the form of loss of faith and moral decline....Our nation, our people, now face a trying time in this world of chaos.  It is only with a return to our traditional values and our faith in God that we will be able to survive as a people.  If it were within my personal power to help to return this nation to its rightful place by placing God back in the classroom, I would do so.... [107]

 

In 1961, two years before the Supreme Court decided the Murray case, half the school districts in the United States reported religious exercises during the homeroom period, and of these more than 80 percent included Bible reading.[108]   In 1930, a generation before the onset of the postmodernist revolution, three-fourths of the States in the Union required or permitted Bible reading in public schools.  Prior to the First World War Bible readings were common in virtually every State.[109]  During the half-century 1912-1962, laws and regulations typically required the homeroom teacher to read, without comment, several verses from the Bible.

Samuel Brown wrote in 1912 that Bible reading in schools had been the occasion of many bitter conflicts.[110]  A regrettable religious characteristic of Americans prior to the First World War was strident sectarianism, especially between Protestants and Catholics.  The mutual vituperation between denominations that occurred during the peak years of immigration is difficult for us to comprehend in our own era of religious ecumenism.  Sectarian asides by the reader in the classroom were greatly feared, which helps explain the legal provisions of the day that required any Bible reading to be verbatim without comment.  Where the policy on Scripture reading was centralized at the State level, no local flexibility in checking sectarian imprudence at the classroom level was possible; and so the centralized policymakers felt compelled to silence all commentaries whatsoever.

In our own generation the sectarian heat has greatly subsided, making public schools potentially more favorable for Bible reading than during the early 20th century.  On the other hand militant postmodern paganism now rears its ugly head.  Nonetheless, from the standpoint of interdenominational relations 21st century believers find it easier to listen ecumenically to a teacher's remarks or to a class discussion following a Bible reading. 

Another problem with religious exercises in 20th century public schools was the rigidity of statewide or district-wide control, and the lack of proximity between high-level decision makers and parents.  By contrast section 12:2,4-6 with its decentralized quartet of checks [parents-teachers-principals-school board] will allow flexibility in defusing strife in the school community, and in checking any teacher who shows more religious zeal than wisdom.

A stiff and regimented reading of the Bible, with any subsequent questions by students avoided for reasons of state, tended to quench the spirit of academic inquiry.  It also stigmatized the Bible in schools when an insight was seen as politically dangerous.  It defeated the purpose of Bible reading when the system forbad a clarification or forbore to draw a connection to current events. 

Classroom discussions of religion can yield much that is beneficial, according to McMahan.  “Honest interchanges concerning the most basic assumptions about life can,” he says, “engender profound insights into the consciousness and behavior of others.”[111]

Another cause of conflict in the 19th and early 20th centuries concerned the various versions of the Bible.  For instance, canon law used to prohibit Roman Catholics from consulting unapproved translations, including the King James Version so dear to Protestants.  No such policy exists anymore in the Catholic Church and nothing like the turn of the century sectarian strife over Biblical versions is likely to reoccur if Bible reading is restored to schools.  In cases where dispute over versions does occur, section 12:2 of the constellation law resolves the matter by defaulting to the Common Bible, a special 1973 edition of the Revised Standard Version, the first form of the Bible since the Reformation to have the official blessing the Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox churches – the three great branches of Christianity.  An outstanding Jewish scholar was an active member of the committee of translators who prepared the Old Testament section of the Common Bible.[112] 

In conclusion, a purpose of the constellation law, section twelve, is to salt the curriculum with Holy Scripture by applying voluntary principles.   Voluntarism favors the living Spirit as opposed to the dry letter, i.e. quality rather than sheer quantity of Bible readings.  A word in season is worth a hundred under obligation.

Another purpose is to reintroduce the Bible into public education in the most peaceful manner possible.  The initiatory option vested exclusively in teachers, the voluntary readings by students, and the decentralized system of checks should promote peace, minimize controversy, and permit reverent reading of Scripture spontaneously and quite independently of state mandates.

 

Prayer

Section 12: 2-3 would let the word of God go openly to schoolchildren, while section 12: 11-12 would let children's words go openly up to God.  Open and unconcealed prayer, that is public prayer, is no less crucial to the spiritual welfare of members of the school age subcultures than to members of adult society.  The retort that schoolchildren remain free to pray privately (but not publicly) is true anywhere, including the Gulag Archipelago of the former USSR as described by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, where

“'You can pray freely
But just so God alone can hear.'”[113]

 

As Pope John XXIII wrote, a human being has the right to practice his religion both “privately and publicly.”[114]  Confine prayer to the closet and you suppress that which Christ described as follows:

Where two or three are gathered together
 in my name, there am I in the midst of them.[115]

 

Since 1962-63, this open approach to God has been pushed to the fringes of the youth cultures, and partly in consequence the sub-cultural heartland has seen a spiritual darkening.  One thinks of entertainment that is wanton, demented and so foul that the U.S. military used American “music” to torture prisoners in Iraq and Guantanamo, and to demoralize the resistance during the storming of Falluja.[116]  This cultural poison is introduced and supported by adult authority in public schools, or at least permitted on certain occasions.  But just try to introduce school prayer and soon the ACLU and their ilk will howl and hurl court injunctions.

The efforts of late to restore school prayer have been considerable, ranging from drafting of a proposed Constitutional Amendment by the White House, to a school prayer bill passed by the U.S. Senate,[117] to resolutions in religious assemblies, including the historically vigorous defenders of church-state separation, the Southern Baptist Convention.[118]  More than three decades after the anti-school prayer mandates of the Supreme Court, the Judiciary was still suppressing reverence with scrupulosity worthy of Torquemada, but clearly the policy had failed to win public support.  Nor has the finality of edicts from on high caused the issue to wither away as supporters of maximum secularization had hoped.  On the contrary, in public opinion upwards of three-fourths of the public have continued to support the general idea of returning some religion to the public schools.[119]

So far, most pro-prayer efforts in Congress and the White House have been praiseworthy in their adherence to the principle of voluntarism by students.  For unlike the voluntary approach, a policy of mandatory prayer would defeat the very purpose of prayer, which is to lift mind and heart to God.

My words fly up, my thoughts remain below:
Words without thoughts never to heaven go.
     Shakespeare, Hamlet 3.3.97

 

Laudable for their voluntary approach, nevertheless most of the bills proposed in the nation’s capitol offend by omission.  What they omit is decentralized control all the way to the level of the classroom where prayer would take place.  The Amendments proposed by Sen. Everett Dirksen in 1966 and by President Ronald Reagan in 1982 are alike in that school boards or higher government bodies would go beyond merely serving as checks; they would be charged to compose prayers or otherwise actively direct the day to day leaders of school prayer.  This entangling government role was cited by Sen. Sam Ervin in 1966 in opposition to Dirksen.  If there is to be a school prayer Amendment, said Ervin, let it “not vest arbitrary permissive power in school boards like the proposed amendment does.”[120]

The idea in section 12:11 of the constellation law is to completely disentangle school prayer from initiation by any level of government, and confine the role of the state solely to its negative check exercised through school boards.  Failure to decentralize school prayer policy all the way to the place where it occurs, i.e. to the classroom, has the dual drawback of reducing spontaneity and increasing state entanglement.

Section 12:12 would authorize three forms of school prayer, (a) standing in silent prayer, (b) prayers recited solo, by the teacher or a student volunteer, with classmates exercising the option to join or not in the amen, and (c) for voluntary group recitation, one, some or all of the seven paragraphs at the end of section twelve.  The prayer exercises arrange themselves naturally according to the degree of consensus in the classroom and the student' level of spiritual maturity.  Advancing from least to most consensus / maturity, the progression would be as follows:

 

·         Silent prayer

·         Solo prayer followed by group “amen”

·         Two short doxologies and a short group prayer, section 12: 14-16

·         Lord’s prayer, special petition and doxology, section 12: 17-20

 

By starting with silent prayer, the teacher can acquire some feeling and feedback from a class, suggesting whether to advance to a higher level.  No one outside the classroom claims such a vantage point as the teacher in discerning the degree of spiritual consensus and maturity in a particular class.  Accordingly the constellation law decentralizes the question and lets the individual teacher decide what form of prayer meshes best with the situation of his students at any point in time.  Like all mortals, teachers are imperfect and prone to error, but in regard to school prayer the errors in judgment will be fewer when supervision is left primarily to the man or woman on the spot.

To the extent that poor judgment does occur in the teaching profession, students and parents can look to the quartet of checks.  This policy of decentralization is far preferable to entangling administrative officials who would tend to bureaucratize the choice of prayer forms and reduce them to a civic ritual that passes for prayer.

Just as the Bible councils us to “pray without ceasing,” as individuals,[121] so on the collective level let there be no area where public servants are barred from citing divine wisdom and taking God’s will into account.  The compartmentalization of American society went terribly wrong when it walled Judeo-Christian faith and morals out of such a crucial cultural sphere as the education of children.  Here we see the vital need for counterrevolution.  Our very future as a good country will depend not on a wall of separation that is high and impenetrable, but rather on the courage to reverse rules and regulations that separate children from God.[122]

            One possible difficulty with religious exercises in a pluralistic group is that the majority may become so ostentatious in devotion as to make the non-participant conspicuous.  One of section twelve’s aims is to render the pupil’s dissent comfortable to exercise within the peer group.  Teachers would be forbidden to encourage kneeling or any bodily posture more overtly devotional than standing respectfully.  With everyone standing up during prayer exercises the physical bearing of the class would identify no one's interior stance.  Dissent if desired would be easy to exercise simply by maintaining silence.  Though not always indistinguishable to the inquiring eye, such dissent would blend peacefully with assent and would have title and distinction by virtue of an Amendment to the Constitution (constellation law 12:4). 

In my home state this was the method, until 1990, of incorporating dissent into mandatory flag exercises in the public school.  When I began teaching high school, Washington state law provided that “students not reciting the pledge shall stand at respectful attention.”  Since 1990 the law has read, “students not reciting the pledge shall maintain a respectful silence.”  It seems that the re-codifiers didn’t want to force the little darlings in public schools to get off their derrières for the purpose of respectful dissent.  Likewise in Maryland, current state law provides simply that dissenters from the flag salute “shall be excused.”[123]

The former system of permitting silent non-participation but requiring the dissenter to “stand at respectful attention,” is prescribed in section 12:4 as by far the better approach.  Whether for patriotic or religious exercises, a decorous posture rules out ostentatious dissent (like exiting the classroom, or sitting while everyone else is standing, or anything intended to make a big splash) that might disrupt the exercises, or lead to friction, or demoralize both participants and dissenters.

Standing unobtrusively teaches students how to dissent — with respect rather than rudeness.  If a pupil insists on being rude, start the student on the first rung of the disciplinary ladder.  A salutary side-effect of this policy would be to offer combative youth an opportunity to reflect on the utility of good manners.

Intolerance of dissent is uncommon in America, and usually erupts in reaction to cases of dissent that are themselves unruly or disruptive.  As with flag ceremonies today, so with prayer tomorrow: the approved avenue for dissent would be non-disruptive non-participation.  The public schools are an ideal place to learn how to dissent in an orderly and mannerly way.  The rare school community whose minorities lack the self-command to dissent gracefully, or whose majorities are intolerant of dissent in any form, would be prime candidates for the quartet of checks — perhaps exercised at the outset if the teacher opts to avoid devotional exercises entirely, or to limit classroom prayer to moments of silence.

Another difficulty might conceivably arise from the teacher’s personal bias against the Judeo-Christian tradition.  Such is the legacy of postmodernism that it is not impossible that some teacher will propose prayer that derives from occultism or perhaps even overt Satanism.  In such a case, a single signature on a parental petition of complaint would authorize the school board to confine the teacher and his classes to a moment of silence, an exercise which is at least safe.  Also the principal can intervene similarly at his/her own discretion (section 12:6).

            With regard to the foresaid form "c" (group recitation) the specified subsections (section 12: 14-20) are as traditional as the Judeo-Christian tradition itself.  Nonetheless they presuppose the existence of a more positive spiritual atmosphere than in classrooms where polarization forbids more than posting of the Ten Commandments or a moment of silence.

When the respective teacher deems it appropriate, the class would be at liberty to recite a particular subsection aloud as a single prayer, for example, (12:16) “Your Ten Commandments, O Lord, help us to keep.”  Or subsections could be recited in concert with some (or all) of the companions, as in section 12: 16, 19-20:  “Your Ten Commandments, O Lord, help us to keep.  For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, forever. Amen.”

The more Christian the consensus in the classroom, the more appropriate it would be to include all seven subsections in prayer exercises; whereas the five subsections 12: 14-16 and 12: 19-20 would be suitable for Jewish children as well as Christians.  Muslims might feel most comfortable with subsections 12: 14, 16, 19-20.  If all seven are recited, it may be that some students will want to go silent during one or more subsections.  Where religious exercises occasion dissent let students learn both to cope with it and also to exercise dissent with propriety.  Society ought to encourage respectfulness in dissent, and what better time and place to assimilate such respect than in school?

            Taking the final seven subsections in order:  The first two (12: 14-15) consist of 13 words taken verbatim from the Old Testament, Psalm 89:18.  This verse also graces the rotunda of the State House in Boston, Massachusetts.[124]  In the classroom it would be available as an introductory prayer, and its presence in the Constitution would reaffirm America’s dependence upon God:

The Lord is our defense.  The
Holy One of Israel is our King.

 

The next subsection (12:16), expresses a dire national need.[125]

Your Ten Commandments,
O God, help us to keep

 

 Subsection 12:17 consists of the Lord's Prayer as found in the Gospel of Matthew.[126]  Composed by Christ Himself, the 55 words of this prayer have a special applicability to America in its current besieged condition.  The first 24 words call for allegiance to God and to His kingdom.  Returned to prominence in public life and applied to daily affairs, submission to God would promote domestic tranquility far more effectively than a host of multi-billion dollar social programs.  One does not need a degree in criminology to perceive that as loyalty and allegiance to God rises there will be a declining trend in what is now the world’s highest prison population (and most expensive to incarcerate).

Next is the request for our daily bread.  As befits a rich nation this petition is brief; though, to be sure, we have unemployment and homelessness in scandalous proportions relative to our national wealth. 

The final 24 words of the Lord’s Prayer address the problem of sin, which spews forth from this country in quantities that must greatly offend Him whom the Declaration of Independence calls “the Supreme Judge of the world.”

Following upon the Our Father in its standard 55 word version are two short prayers.  Subsection 12:18 transitions to the concluding doxology (12:19) in the King James version of the Lord’s Prayer:

Enlighten our age to this, O Lord, that
in your Son Jesus Christ is the secret
of true progress, [127]

For thine is the kingdom and the power
and the glory, forever.[128]

 

The last word in the constellation law (12:20) is simply the Hebrew word, 'amen,' which might audibly follow silent prayer, solo prayer, or group prayer.  In choosing voluntarily among these seven options (12:14-12:20) the sensible teacher will take cautiously into account the situation and spiritual inclination of the students.

            The aforesaid school prayer options will doubtless elicit some of the same sort of objections advanced in the regents prayer case of 1962, where prayer was state composed.[129]  Such objections might carry greater weight if Congress were to propose prayer forms under the ordinary constitutional amending procedure.  In that event, officeholders would be using their high rank in government to compose official prayers.  However, insofar as the constellation amendment will require a Constitutional Convention to propose it, rather than the Congress acting from within the hierarchy of state, the objection about officials composing prayers does not apply.  The state is one component of the body politic, its topmost part;[130] whereas the Convention would comprise in a sense the body politic entire, being a kind of plebiscite organized in practical form for deliberation on a fundamental constitutional question.  A Convention would be the whole people assembled representatively, not just public officials speaking from the hierarchy of state.  Indeed the last such Convention began its work with the words, “we the people.”

Washington Cruisers Flag,  American Revolution

To be sure, ours is  a republic not a direct democracy of the people, so anything proposed by the Convention must be ratified by three-fourths of the States.  Thus, ratification of an Amendment proposed via a Convention must be by agreement of the nation organized as a republic with the nation organized as the body politic.  The constellation amendment would have to be ratified by the States but would originate from the people of the United States in Convention assembled.  Section 12: 14-20 would not, therefore, be state composed liturgy, in the ordinary governmental sense, but as the invocation says, a petition 'from a free people to the good Lord who has long provided for our cause.'

 In another context than school prayer, it is fitting that the constellation law conclude with a benediction.  For, as suggested by the invocation at its beginning, the twelve sections are to be more than political, economic and social reforms.  They would be a constellation of twelve lights offered to God, in hopes of His forgiveness and His providential assistance against the forces which threaten to engulf us and convert the American dream into a nightmare.  What better way to conclude the constitutional amendment than with yet another “Appeal to Heaven”?[131]

 

 

CONCLUSION

`

Great Seal of the United States, 1782-present, reverse side

            In 1781 the Battle of Yorktown made our independence secure.  Within a few months, the continental congress created the Great Seal of the United States.  To this day the Great Seal is still the official national symbol, its two sides representing respectively the political and the metaphysical aspects of our national identity.[132]  Surely it is folly to think that the United States can forsake the spiritual half of its founding principles without seriously weakening the basis of the Republic.

In his Farewell Address to the nation, President George Washington discoursed at length on the crucial role that religion and morality would have to play if the American experiment was to be an enduring success.  “Virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government,” said he, and “reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.” And from the father of our country, a rebuke that ought to burn in the hearts of ACLU activists today:  “In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness – these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens…. Religion and morality are indispensable supports,” said Washington, and “a volume could not trace all their connections with private and public felicity.”[133]

One such connection was indicated by the historian Thomas Carlyle.  “Thought is stronger than Artillery,” he wrote, and “the beginning of all thought, worth the name, is Love: and the wise head never yet was without first the generous heart.”[134]  In Euro-American history, the human heart as transfigured by the Gospel, or rather by Christ, is the secret that has leavened the intellectual and social progress during two millennia.

Conversely, postmodernist scorn for the Gospel has impacted our civilization adversely.  An old friend and former professor put it this way:

 

God's laws, when followed, work to the advantage of the individual and society.  The pursuit of individual lusts is, in a sense, making every person into his / her own god (this is actually a doctrine floating around nowadays).  Unfortunately, the self-god has a tremendously limited perspective: it does not know how the pursuit of selfish lusts harm the pursuer; and it does not care about the harm done to the social fabric (which of course harms the individuals in society).  Consequently, the self-oriented society must fail in two ways.  First, society will deteriorate: things stop going smoothly, there's sand in the gears.    Second, because most people can't stand actually anarchy, they will submit to the state.  Freedom will have little value; license will be the desideratum.[135]

 

The connection between religion and public felicity extends to economic progress as well.  A case in point was the conversion of slave-labor into a wage system.   Abolition movements led by Rev. William Wilberforce in Great Britain and the likes of Harriet Beecher Stowe and William Lloyd Garrison in the United States were inspired largely by religious feelings and motives.  Not only does the light and fervor of religion help to dispel the dark side of capitalism, but in the case of the Protestant work ethic, it is often cited as a pre-requisite to the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century.

As in the economy and the culture, so too in the political sphere.  The link between religion and well-being  is vital.  “Those people who are not governed by God will be ruled by Tyrants,” said William Penn.[136]  Alexis De Tocqueville put it thus,

It is not liberty but tyranny that can survive without faith....  How is it possible for a society to avoid destruction unless moral restraint binds more tightly in proportion as political bonds are more relaxed? [137]

 

Tocqueville pointed out that religion gives enormous returns to society – especially a democratic society – by promoting virtue, austerity of manners, and moderation in the voting patterns of the electorate.  The Frenchman endorsed the opinion he found widespread in America during the 1830's that religion is “indispensable to the maintenance of republican institutions.”[138]  The British historian, Lord Acton, concurred:

No country can be free without religion.  It creates and strengthens the sense of duty.  If men are not kept straight by duty, they must be by fear.  The more they are kept by fear, the less they are free. [139]

 

Combine Acton’s point with this insight by Benedict XVI of Bavaria, in his first papal visit to the United States:

 

Democracy can only flourish, as your Founding Fathers realized, when political leaders and those whom they represent are guided by truth and bring the wisdom born of firm moral principle to decisions affecting the life and future of the nation. 
     Remarks of Pope Benedict XVI at the White House, April 16, 2008

 

In his History of the French Revolution Carlyle writes that “without good morals liberty is impossible.”[140]  Or as a twentieth century scholar, John Courtney Murray, S.J. put it, democracy is more than political, it is “a spiritual and moral enterprise,” depending for its success upon the virtue of the people who undertake it.  Democracy begins crumbling at its foundations when moral-religious convictions cease to generate self-discipline and no longer lash the selfish inertia in human nature.[141]  Indeed, in the era of weapons of mass destruction the survival of civilization depends on self-discipline.  Sheer survival – not just as a political republic but as a continuing human species – requires self-control lest man’s belligerent passions run wild and eventuate in a thermonuclear holocaust or some such manifestation of savagery and disorder in man.[142]  To inspire and inculcate habits of interior restraint and self-discipline, no force compares with God’s quickening Spirit.

The political, economic and cultural benefits of religion are manifest, but how does education fit into the national picture?  The increasingly adverse impact that public education exerts on American culture follows logically from the old maxim, as the twig is bent the tree is inclined.  If we continue making students spend six or seven hours per day in a spiritual desert, then each generation will be less spiritual and more materialistic in the way it shapes America.  Judeo-Christian values and morals will decline in influence upon national mores, replaced by survival of the fittest.  American politics, the economy and the culture will be dominated by strife and rancor as wealth, cunning, and position regularly overcome principle, conscience, and duty.

Thus it is imperative that public education be reopened to the dualistic approach to learning which seeks not only the mundane and scientific thought patterns espoused by Professor John Dewey, but also the ultimate realities discernible by what Jacques Maritain calls the philosophical-religious ways of thinking.[143]  In short, we need to emphasize wisdom as well as knowledge.

As preoccupied with knowledge as was Aristotle, still the great Greek thinker admitted that “'to know does little or even nothing for virtue.'”[144]  Of a highly intelligent people the Old Testament asked, “how is it, Israel, that you are in the land of your foes...?  You have forsaken the fountain of wisdom.”[145]  And as Blaise Pascal put it, wisdom is on a plane higher than mere intelligence, just as the intellectual plane is superior to the physical.[146]  Indeed, …

there is a great difference between the wisdom
of an enlightened and devout man, and the
knowledge of a learned and studious man.
     [Thomas a Kempis][147]

 

Ultimate objectives are badly chosen without the aid of wisdom.  A real danger is that educational neglect of the philosophical-religious ways to wisdom will lead to a neglect of ends for the sake of means – another formula for catastrophe in the Thermonuclear Age.  Albert Einstein, who first propounded the basis of nuclear power (e=mc²), spoke of the times in which he lived as being a period of perfected means and confused ends.[148]   He died in 1955, prior to the postmodernist era; what would Einstein say today?

In Education at the Crossroads, Maritain argues that the subordination of ends to means will eventuate in the “collapse of all sure purpose and real efficiency” in the educational process.  “Education cannot escape the entanglements of philosophy,” says Maritain, “for it [education] supposes by its very nature a philosophy of man.”  Education must not ignore the question “what is man?”  Otherwise, says Maritain, the educational process tends to “take the edge off the sense of truth,” in the minds of students.[149]  Excluding ways to wisdom from the curriculum leaves the internal world of the child's soul “either dormant or bewildered and rebellious,”[150] an apt characterization of many pupils in America today.

Here is where the public schoolteacher ought to play a constructive role.  While a pluralistic classroom is clearly not the place fully to form pupils spiritually, it is a good place to plant the seed.   From a wisdom-loving teacher the child may catch the desire, and at least get a rough conception of how to pursue wisdom, and where to look for it on his or her own.

Sculpture in New York City

 Over the course of several generations since the Industrial Revolution, urbanization and technology have put a kind of veil between people and the natural environment.  It used to be that children as well as adults spent their lives close to the “great temple of nature.”  Proximity to the Creator's handiwork caused people to contemplate the Creator Himself.[151]  Today only about three percent of Americans live on farms.  With brilliant lights turning the starry night into quazi-day, with air pollution masking the stars, and with the thrill of life in the fast lane, the urban environment confines the rapture associated with nature to occasional outings or summer camp for kids.  Postmodernist children grow up without the quiet witness formerly found in the rural solitude of their own back yard.

Today's child is bombarded with countless man-made diversions and stimuli, and few natural ones.  The souls of our school children cry out for some evidence and an occasional example beckoning them to life’s highest focus and purpose in God.  Such direction in schools is even more important in urban society than when our ancestors lived closer to nature and could read her book of wisdom on a daily basis.

            To treat the good Lord whose Providence has greatly favored this country as a taboo subject in the places where children learn, is to shun wisdom for our future and to invite Divine disfavor.  In the Presidential and vice-Presidential debates of 2004, Biblical wisdom as it bears on the moral questions of the day was too politically incorrect for the major party candidates, all of whom confined their remarks (even on issues like same-sex marriage and abortion) solely to secular language. 

            Americans who pride themselves on being fashionably postmodern are quick to hiss at a line of reasoning that was compelling for many of the Founding Fathers.  In the 1787 Constitutional Convention one the foremost members, George Mason of Virginia, said, “as nations cannot be rewarded or punished in the next world they must be in this.  By an inevitable chain of causes and effects providence punishes national sins, by national calamities.”[152]  Said Thomas Jefferson in the context of slavery, “Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep forever.”[153] 

It makes sense, does it not, that God will be more inclined to favor us when we favor Him?  Excluding God from public life insults “the Supreme Judge of the world” (Declaration of Independence, final paragraph).  It constitutes the scandal of ingratitude on a massive scale.  The great risk is that He will exclude the nation from that divine favor which has seen us through many a crisis.  The ride down to national destruction would be extremely unpleasant for us all, for we have much further to fall than lesser nations.

 

… How can we face our God, from whom we cannot hide?
What is left for us to do, but stem this evil tide! …
Then God will hear from Heaven and forgive us of our sins,
He'll heal our sickly land and those who live within.
But America the Beautiful, if you don't then you will see,
A sad but Holy God withdraw His hand from Thee.

“America the Beautiful,” by former Chief Justice Roy Moore of Alabama

 

In order to bring a nation to judgment the Great Legislator of the universe has gradual means that, in our case, he may prefer to sudden interventions.  Cataclysmic interpositions of God’s wrath are rare — like the Tsunami which smashed the Minoan civilization of Crete; the fire and brimstone that devastated Sodom and Gomorra; the volcanic eruption that destroyed Pompeii, the hedonistic playground of the Romans; or perhaps some future nuclear holocaust or terrorist attack on America with WMD’s.  It may be, instead, that God will simply withdraw his favorable providence and leave the USA to her own designs.  Deprived of His quickening Spirit the American people would grow cold, gross and cruel; piety and charity would decline.  The inevitable political, economic and social consequences would follow.

Tyre of the farther West!  Be thou too warn’d
Whose eagle wings thine own green world o’erspread,
Touching two Oceans: wherefore has thou scorn’d
Thy fathers’ God, O proud and full of bread?
… Tyre mock’d when Salem fell; where now is Tyre?
Heaven was against her.  Nations thick as waves,
Burst o’er her walls, to Ocean doom’d and fire:
And now the tideless water idly laves
Her towers, and lone sands heap her crowned merchants’ graves.
            John Keble, “United States.”[154]

 

Education has a larger purpose than merely to train the cerebral powers.  For if united to a bad heart a good mind is a social curse.  Better for us if the ferocious beast is stupid rather than clever or cunning.  In Leigh Hunt’s words, “cunning is not wisdom, though it may ape it for a time.”[155]  Teddy Roosevelt put the problem pointedly:  “To educate a person in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society.”  After his second meeting with the tyrant of Nazi Germany [July 1943], rocket scientist Wernher von Braun noted:

I began to see the shape of the man – his brilliance, the tremendous force of personality.  It gripped you somehow.  But also you could see his flaw — he was wholly without scruples, a godless man who thought himself the only god, the only authority he needed.[156]

 

The historian Macaulay deemed 90 percent of the calamities which have befallen the human race to have originated in the union of high intelligence with low desires.[157]  Education must therefore deal with wisdom and virtue, as well as intelligence.[158]  To the extent that we reinstate proven ethical traditions in public education, and rescind the gag rule against teachers who would be glad to pass on to students Judeo-Christian principles and morals – to that extent American public schools will again plant the seeds of virtue rather than vice.  The process will help to demote, defang and defeat the cultural commissars whose bad leadership has corrupted the nation and scandalized the world.[159]

And so, under a revived and reinforced written Constitution, let us anticipate a salutary restoration – a rebirth of religious freedom in public life that facilitates the people’s spiritual revival.

  Appendix One

Archival footage of author

 

								Video clip (1½ minutes) Struble student teaching at EWU, 1980.
			Click here for excerpts (2¼ minutes) from Struble’s testimony (2004) in defense of the Ten Commandments[160]

 

 

 

Appendix Two Ten Commandments (Decalogue), in three versions[161]
Protestant / Orthodox[162]		Roman Catholic[163]		Jewish[164]
I Thou shalt have no other gods before me.		I.     I am the Lord your God: you shall not have strange gods before me.		First Word.  I am the LORD your God who brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.
II Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image.		II You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain.		Second Word You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself a graven image.
III Thou shalt not take the name of the LORD thy God in vain		III Remember to keep holy the LORD’S Day.		Third Word You shall not take the  name of the LORD your God in vain.
IV Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.		IV Honor your Father and your Mother.		Fourth Word Remember the Sabbath  day, to keep it holy
V Honour thy father and thy mother.		V You shall not kill.		Fifth Word Honor your father and your mother
VI Thou shalt not murder		VI  You shall not commit adultery.		Sixth Word You shall not kill.
VII  Thou shalt not commit adultery.		VII You shall not steal.		Seventh Word You shall not commit adultery.
VIII Thou shalt not steal.		VIII    You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.		Eighth Word You shall not steal.
IX  Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.		XI  You shall not covet your neighbor's wife.		Ninth Word You shall not bear false witness against  your neighbor
X Thou shalt not covet. .		X You shall not covet your neighbor's goods.		Tenth Word You shall not covet your neighbor's wife; and you shall not desire anything that is your neighbor's

 

 

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ENDNOTES