This essay won first prize in the Silver Arts competition of the Johnston County (NC) Senior Games of 2004.
A Letter Concerning Prayer in Public Schools
Recently a very dear niece of mine sent me a petition to be forwarded to President George Bush requesting him to work to reinstate prayer in the public schools by rescinding the decision on school prayer that was rendered by the US Supreme court some years ago. The following essay is my letter in reply to her.
Dear Amanda,
I appreciate your sending me your petition. Because I love you and respect you, I feel your request deserves my serious attention. And out of my deep love for you and my genuine respect for you I feel I have to explain why I am returning it to you without my signature.
First I want you to know how very much I appreciate your concern for the practice of religion in our country. I am concerned about these things too. It is definitely time for all of us Christians to live more Christ-like lives. It is time for all of us to be the salt of the earth and the light of the world. It is time for all of us to demonstrate the love of God in all of its attractiveness, so that others will want to experience it as you and I have been privileged to experience it. If we can all do this individually, one by one, day by day, then there will be no need for our public schools to attempt the job of making Christian disciples that Christ Himself commanded our churches and individual Christians to do.
But because you and I both desire to obey that command, I have to tell you that the petition you are asking me to sign is not the way to get the job done. There are several reasons for this, and I want to share them with you.
The first reason is simply that I don’t believe that the President has the authority to rescind a decision of the Supreme Court as your petition requests. The US Constitution just does not allow for that. In any case, the current President’s religious views are well known. No doubt, if he had thought he did have such authority, he would have exercised it during his first days in office. I suppose our Congress could pass a law restoring prayer in public schools, but I doubt if it would pass, and even if it did, I think the Supreme Court would probably declare that law unconstitutional also. So why waste the effort, unless you just want to put your opinion about the matter on the record?
Second, I have never been convinced that the Supreme Court ever actually banned the practice of prayer in the schools. So far as I know anybody can pray in his or her school anytime they want to do so as individuals. I don’t even think there is any law against bowing your head for a few moments before your meals in school. Of course, good manners would require that a person not disturb other students or school staff in the performance of their duties, so the prayer should probably be silent. Also, respect for other people who may have differing beliefs should obligate us not to expect or require them to listen to our private prayers. If you want to pray in a school, then do so silently so that you don’t disturb anyone else, and you will not be breaking any law. As somebody once said, “As long as there are algebra tests there will always be prayer in schools.”
As I understand it, the Supreme Court decision prohibited only prayers that are organized or promoted by governmental agencies, schools, school systems, or persons in authority in the schools, where you have a sort of “captive audience.” It prohibited religious exercises that required all students to participate whether they want to or not. I happen to think that was a very appropriate interpretation of the US Constitution.
Third, you and I were raised as Baptists. And our heritage, from the very beginning of the Baptist expression of Christianity, about 1609 in England and Holland, has always been to oppose any form of state sponsorship of religious beliefs or practices. In my humble opinion a requirement that students participate in prayers or other religious exercises would fall into that category. State sponsorship of religion has been the cause of many of the terrible wars in Europe since the 1500’s. It is part of the cause of the violence we have seen in Northern Ireland and in the former Yugoslavia. Do we really need that?
It has only been in the last 20 years that our beloved Southern Baptists have joined with the so-called “Religious Right” in attempting to turn back the clock on our own Baptist heritage of separation of Church and State. This to me is a dangerous form of “liberalism” that departs significantly from our historic Baptist roots. Our historic Baptist experience has always been that whenever religion and government get into bed together, they do not make love. Rather, one ends up attempting to rape the other. We do not want or need that.
Fourth, I grew up before 1963, when we actually did have required times of prayer in school. The Supreme Court decision was not made until after I had graduated from high school in 1960. I can well remember when we even had required chapel services once or twice a week in the public schools led by local clergymen. In our town we had primarily just Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians, and they all apparently believed mostly the same things, so my basic beliefs probably did not suffer by undue influence from one or the other of them.
But while it is certainly true that I experienced no ill effects from those experiences, on the other hand, I know of no person in any of my schools who ever became a Christian as a result of those practices—not one. If those services and those prayers were meant to convert me or change me in some way then they were a colossal failure! Of course that was just my local community.
But what if I had lived in a community where the predominant religious culture was not so similar to the Southern Baptist religious culture in which I was raised? Suppose that I had lived in a community where the beliefs of local Christians were radically different from my family’s Baptist beliefs. Or suppose that we had lived in Utah, where Mormonism reigns supreme. Or would we have wanted a Roman Catholic prayer leader to lead us in asking the intercession of Mary and the saints? And how many Christian parents would object if the prayer were spoken in Arabic or in Hebrew? Or chanted in an Asian dialect?
If the prayers and devotionals were really designed to influence the children toward some other religion, would my parents have wanted their Baptist child to be influenced by them? On the other hand, if the prayers and devotionals were watered down to be, in fact, neutral, or “politically correct,” so that no one would be influenced by them, then what good would they do anybody? Required prayers and devotions in school situations, in the end, would then just be a very ineffective means of evangelism, or even of just instilling “values.”
Fifth, although I and my friends, and even our parents and grandparents participated in schools where publicly led prayer was common, and required chapel services were held, still, it is certain that those prayers and religious exercises did not accomplish a great deal. I was raised in a small suburb of Atlanta, Georgia. And despite the atmosphere of White Anglo-Saxon Protestant Christianity that prevailed, most of the parents and the children continued to hold on to their (to my way of thinking) “un-Christian” and “un-Biblical” racist and segregationist views.
The 1954 Supreme Court decision determined that there could be no real racial equality in our country so long as segregation persisted in our schools. Yet as “religious” as we all were in the American South, we and our families resisted and delayed implementing the declared law of our country for as long as we could. In our schools and churches we often sang, “Jesus loves the little children, all the little children of the world; red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in His sight.” But somehow we Southern Whites were not influenced in our schools, or even in our Churches, to love our Black neighbors, and both our schools and our churches remained segregated for years thereafter.
Also, out of my generation there arose the hippie culture, and the drug culture and the so-called “sexual revolution,” and the rebellion against any and all forms of “authority” that continues even today. I’m afraid that our required prayers in the public schools and required religious exercises in the public schools did nothing stem those tides. So again, if the intent was to make our children into more religious or religiously moral adults, the effort was a colossal failure and a waste of time.
Finally, I think the places for our children to be taught religion are, and always have been the churches and the homes of our nation. And I think the most effective evangelism is one-on-one evangelism in which one person shares with another person the love of God that he or she has experienced. Schools can teach the American “values” of equality and fair play and justice for all people without ever having to teach religion, without requiring prayer, and without requiring Bible reading. So basically, I think compulsory prayer and religious observances in public schools are about as appropriate as compulsory prayer and religious observances would be in the check-out lanes at Wal-Mart! They might have some use in some rare instance, but basically, they are just totally ineffective and inappropriate in such a setting.
I don’t have to tell you how much I love our Lord Jesus Christ and how much I revere our faith as Baptist Christians. You well know that I have been a Baptist minister for over forty years now, and a college teacher of religion, including teaching in a public college, off and on for over twenty years. So you know how deeply I hold my spiritual beliefs. Yet I feel that it would be totally irresponsible for us to abandon our concepts of religious liberty and thereby to entangle our religious beliefs with government sponsorship. You also know how much I love you and want what is best for you. So I cannot in all good conscience sign your petition.
Your loving uncle,
Mike
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