A Blurred Church and State Line

This past fall in DeKalb, Georgia, a suburb of Atlanta, the public high school held an assembly. Seems innocuous enough, except that this wasn't any old assembly. It was a "motivational assembly." And it was organized by the school administration with the help of the nearby New Birth Missionary Baptist Church.

The church singers led the auditorium filled with students and parishioners from New Birth Missionary in singing "I just can't stop praising his name."

Bishop Eddie L. Long, New Birth's pastor, led the congregation, or audience, in a confession of faith in Jesus, telling the participants that if this was their first time professing faith in Jesus, they had been saved that day. Not surprisingly, within days of the assembly, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, Atlanta chapter, joined together to assault the school's decision to bring direct Protestant dogma into the public school system. Editorials rang out for protection of the First Amendment on the pages of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. However, reports Doug Cumming in The New Republic, from one quarter a conspicuous silence greeted the school's action: African Americans in the predominantly black suburb of DeKalb (the fastest growing black suburb in America) did not protest the motivational assembly.

The Incidents in the Southwest DeKalb High School represent an unusual confluence of race, rights and religion. The explicit blurring of public education and religious doctrine and the support from the largely middle-class, black community brings to the fore some critical questions about the relationship between church and state.

Only two weeks before the assembly, a young DeKalb student, Ronald Gaines, had been stabbed to death in a fight with another student. Even more unnerving, the murder occurred in the sight of a crowd of students who were cheering on the two boys and who shouted, "Yeah!" as Gaines fell to the ground with a knife wound to his chest. The school decided an assembly focused on spiritual guidance would provide an environment in which students and parents alike could try to come to terms with the violence. And they thought the very popular pastor of the New Birth Church would be the ideal person to lead such an assembly in their public school.

The Supreme Court has unambiguously decided that religion has no place in the public school system. In order to protect the religious and political spheres from encroachment one upon the other, the First Amendment of the Constitution proscribes the establishment of a single state religion. Since public school students are legally required to take classes, the courts concluded that the schools have no right to host religious activities during school hours.

However, the reality of the relationship between church and state is significantly more complicated. As Tocqueville understood when he visited America more than a century and a half ago, in America, religion is "the first political institution." As Robert Putnam, Sidney Verba and others have found, even in our more modern times, those who attend religious services and are involved in church activities vote and engage in direct political activity more often than do those who are not institutionally involved in religious life.

This relationship is especially true for the African American community, that has been and continues to be mobilized through its churches for political activity. Among the most striking examples are the voting drives in the late '50s and the Civil Rights movement in the '60s and arguably through the early '70s, but the black church has been the locus for the political mobilization of African Americans since its inception.

To claim, then, that the nominal distinction between religion and politics ensures that there is no encroachment from one sphere on the other is to deny the practical and very real relationship between religious involvement and political participation.

However, to understand that religion and politics are more intimately intertwined than our Constitutional guarantees might desire is not to argue that there is no benefit to the legal differentiation between the two spheres.

One could argue that the focus on individual rights that is one of the hallmarks of our political system is deeply indebted to such a separation. Further-more, the uniquely diverse character of the United States is in large part due to the legal obligation of the separation between church and state.

The incidents that shaped the events in DeKalb highlight the complicated nature of this issue. In communities attempting to address particular problems in ways that make sense for their particular communities, the line between church and state may become blurred. When the dust settles and the motivational sermons fade into the background, our courts and our country will have to decide what role religion can play in communities' attempts to heal themselves.

Talia Milgrom-Elcott '98 is a social studies concentrator in Mather House. Her column appears on alternate Mondays.