Keep Out of Our Schools

How ironic that the so-called Religious Freedom Amendment proposed by House Speaker Newt Gingrich takes away the one liberty it promises. Gingrich's House Republicans promised in their last campaign to amend the Constitution to include a moment of silence for prayer in public school by July 1995. We can be thankful that he has missed this deadline and hope that such a move will not come soon. While Gingrich claims that prayer in school would not only preserve America from ruin, but return the country to some glorious past, he misunderstands what America has always been about.

America's liberal democracy has always been about majority rule, but within a framework that guarantees the rights of the minority. Proponents of prayer in school forget about the latter. Pat Robertson claims, "Those men and women who founded this land made a solemn covenant that they would be the people of God and that this would be a Christian nation."

However, if Robertson really looked at the lessons of the past, he would recognize what every grade schooler is taught: that the earliest Americans often came to this land to escape religious persecution. Our founders, from George Washington to Thomas Jefferson, enshrined the principles of a secular state into our Constitution. Indeed, it was Jefferson who first discussed the "wall of separation" between church and state.

Religion has no place in public schools, and the problem with prayer in school of any sort, momentary silence or not, is that it will always place pressure on members of the minority. And this is even more troublesome when these minority students are merely children.

Defenders of prayer in school most often discount the views of the minority, suggesting that they should not infringe on the rights of the majority group. One New Jersey State Assemblyman argued against consideration of the views of atheist students by suggesting they "were so few in number their views could be discounted."

Nor is this view limited to local officials. Chief Justice Warren Burger once defended the Nebraska legislature's employment of a Presbyterian minister to open all assembly meetings with a prayer, by suggesting that this was "simply a tolerable acknowledgement of beliefs widely held among people of this country."

The point is that the Bill of Rights guarantees these rights to minorities, despite their numbers, in order to protect the liberty of all Americans. It is clearly wrong to argue that a group is of too little size to have their rights guaranteed.

If history tells us anything, it is that lowering the barrier between church and state will lead not to some harmonious utopia, but to open strife and the oppression of minority viewpoints. This is the history that the Founders knew, and we have seen these lessons from the Crusades to modern-day Yugoslavia.

Even in America, land of religious toleration, this mixture has at time resulted in violence. In 1843, after the Pennsylvania legislature excused Catholics from the Protestant prayers in school, angry Protestants rioted for three days, leaving 13 people dead. When conflict can result from two faiths with so much in common, as it has so many times over the centuries, we must be wary to reopen this door before the diversity of faiths that exist in American society.

Perhaps the most ridiculous part of the prayer in school issue is the claim that the "moment of silence," proposed by Gingrich, is really something other than a back door in which to return prayer to schools. Its defenders claim that this pause can be used for any voluntary activity on the part of the student, and so it has nothing to do with prayer. Of course, its defenders had never called for it before the Supreme Court decided prayer in school was in violation of the Constitution.

Really, the moment of silence is just a way to wiggle around the Supreme Court decision. It is not a compromise in any way because there is no room to compromise on this issue. Prayer simply does not belong in public schools.

The moment of silence does not reduce the pressure on minorities; indeed, Gingrich revealed his true view several years ago when he spoke before Congress and said, "It's not all that bad to have some pressure to pray."

And pressure to pray is exactly what the moment of silence in public schools brings. Testifying before the Supreme Court, an eleven-year-old boy of Jewish descent told the justices that after he read during the moment of silence, another boy asked him why. "And I told him that I didn't have to pray then and I didn't want to and then he said something to the effect that if I prayed all the time, maybe I could go to heaven with all the Christians when Jesus came down for the second time instead of, as he put it, going down with all the other Jews."

It is simply unfair to make young children feel that they are outsiders because of their faith. Any student can pray when and where they wish individually. Under the Federal Equal Access Act, high school students can even form prayer clubs and use school property. As for moments of silence that are not used for prayer, there are plenty of those already during the school day. Anyone can steal a few moments to meditate.

Enforced prayer in school only devalues personal devotion and religion in general. Children do not need their teacher to force them to pray. Religion is very personal and individual and the practice of it should be the same.

Those who assert that Christianity needs to enter the classroom should follow their own religious book. "Beware of practicing your picty before men in order to be seen by them; for then you will have no reward from your Father who is in heaven" (Matthew 6:1). After all, those who pray can use school time to pray. Under the present laws, everyone just doesn't have to watch them.

Intolerance often comes of ignorance, and education is used to encourage tolerance. By taking away precious education time and enforcing a mandatory prayer program, intolerance and ignorance win twice over, at least in the American public school system.