School Prayer, Vouchers and Other Threats to Democracyby Edd Doerr
Two indispensable pillars of a free society are religiously neutral common schools and an effective separation between government and organized religion. These two pillars have been most fully evolved in the United States, though their development has necessarily been gradual; further progress is needed, and both are seriously threatened by a rising tide of militant religious and secular conservatism. Public schools grew slowly from humble beginnings in colonial Massachusetts to today's system of over 15,000 school districts enrolling over 40 million students. During much of our history public schools, reflecting the religious demography of the country's communities, had a certain generalized Protestant Christian flavor. But increasing religious pluralism and sensitivity to individual rights led to increasing secularization, capped by court rulings since World War II requiring public schools to be religiously neutral. Though massive propaganda campaigns have been directed against public school religious neutrality by various conservative sectarian special interests, the overwhelming majority of Americans have supported democratic public education. Despite the well-publicized problems of many inner city schools, where poverty and social pathologies tend to settle, overall nonpublic school enrollment has fallen from a high of 13% in 1965 to less than 11% today. So too did church-state separation evolve slowly. Although many early settlers came here for religious freedom for themselves, they all-too-frequently preferred not to share it with religious minorities. The statues of Anne Hutchinson and Mary Dyer on the Massachusetts state capitol lawn symbolize the carryover to the New World of the European heritage of religious intolerance and persecution: Hutchinson was exiled in 1638 for holding unauthorized religious discussions in her own home; Dyer was hanged on Boston Common for simply being a Quaker. By the time of our war for independence from Great Britain, popular disatisfaction with Old World church-state unions led to efforts to separate church and state. Virginia, under the leadership of Jefferson and Madison, led in the articulation and implementation of the idea of separation of church and state, an idea conceived earlier by Rhode Island founder Roger Williams. Virginia became the model copied eventually by all the other states. One year after Jefferson's and Madison's final victory in Virginia, the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia drafted our present charter of government, a purely secular document which based the authority of government not on any supernatural entity or theological idea but upon the consent and participation of the governed. The only mention of religion in the Constitution is the ban on religious tests for public office and the ban on compulsory oaths of office. The Constitution was augmented in 1791 by the Bill of Rights, the first article of which, in Jefferson's words, "erected a wall of separation between church and state." It is fair to say that under the constitutional principle of separation of church and state in our federal and state constitutions, religious liberty and freedom of conscience for all have steadily ratcheted forward, giving the U.S. a degree of religious freedom, pluralism, and interfaith harmony not found anywhere else. However, the growth and coalescence in recent years of ultraconservative religious and secular movements and forces has put the whole edifice of democratic common education and church- state separation in serious danger. One of the most visible threats is the campaign to get Congress to approve a constitutional amendment to authorize some sort of government-sponsored group prayer in public schools. The objections to any such amendment are numerous: 1. Students are free to pray individually in school now and do not need any special authorization from government; 2. There is and can be no "one size fits all" prayer acceptable to Americans of all shades of religious opinion; 3. School-sponsored prayer would usurp the religious functions and rights of families and religious institutions; 4. Government-sponsored prayer, whether in the classroom or at graduation ceremonies, would mean government preferment for one mode of religious expression, prayer, over all others, such as doing good works, working for social justice, going to church, fasting, etc., while conveying to kids the message that the state, Big Brother, knows best which religious activity to promote, when that activity should take place, that all children should engage in that activity at the same time, and that praying or doing any other religious activity at a time and in a manner not ordained by the state might not be quite right; 5. At the time of the Supreme Court's school prayer rulings in 1962-63, no more than half the schools in the country had government-sponsored prayer and there is no correlation between crime rates at that time and whether schools had government- sponsored prayer; 6. Nazi Germany required prayer in all schools and we know what a wonderfully positive influence that had on the moral values of the Wehrmacht, the SS, and the Gestapo. In short, as Benjamin Franklin observed two centuries ago, there is something wrong with any religion that has to be propped up by the power of government. Other threats to public-school religious neutrality include: 1. Attempts by some fundamentalist activists to get the fundamentalist doctrine of "creationism" taught in science classes; 2. Proselytizing in public schools by literally thousands of professional evangelists from such groups as Young Life, Campus Crusade, Fellowship of Christian Athletes, Jerry Johnston Ministries, etc.; 3. Attempts to teach about religion that fall short of being sufficiently neutral, balanced, and objective. The most serious threat to both public education and religious liberty is the drive to get tax support for nonpublic schools, 90% of whose enrollments are in pervasively sectarian institutions whose main reason for existing is sectarian indoctrination. The tax support would be delivered through either tuition vouchers or tuition reimbursement tax credits, whatever they might be called for propaganda purposes. Voucher and tax credit advocates wave the banner of "school choice" or "parental choice," which all too cleverly conceals the fact that "choice" in nonpublic education primarily involves the right of private school managers to choose which kids to admit and which to reject, which teachers to hire, and which religion or ideology to indoctrinate the kids with. Parents may try to choose a private school for their children, but it is the private school which really makes the final choice. As a result of selectivity in admissions, hiring, and curriculum design, nonpublic schools serve on average more affluent families than do public schools, serve far fewer handicapped and problem children, and tend strongly toward religious homogeneity. Public schools, unlike private schools, are run by boards elected by and responsible to local citizens, voters and parents, and are barred from the kinds of discrimination and selectivity common in nonpublic schools. Voucher and tax credit advocates, led by the Catholic bishops and a growing number of Protestant fundamentalist leaders, are stepping up their propaganda and lobbying efforts despite a long history of defeats in the federal and state courts and despite consistent defeats in statewide referenda in Massachusetts, Maryland, Michigan, the District of Columbia, Missouri, Colorado, California, Oregon, Washington State, and Alaska. In the 1990s vouchers or tax credits were defeated by better than two to one by voters in California, Oregon, and Colorado. Unfortunately, the November 1994 elections greatly increased the number of federal and state lawmakers who show little regard for church-state separation. The case against either tuition vouchers or tax credits is compelling: 1. They would violate every citizen's fundamental right not to be taxed to support religious institutions; 2. They would violate the principle of separation of church and state in the federal and state constitutions; 3. They would seriously weaken public education by drawing off abler students while leaving public schools with increasing percentages of poor, handicapped, problem, and minority children; 4. They would fragment our student and general populations along religious, ideological, social class, and other lines, thus increasing social disunity; 5. They would greatly increase school costs and especially skyrocket school transportation expenses, a particularly grave problem as governments are scaling back our already inadequate support for public education; 6. They would increasingly replace democratic, religiously neutral public education with undemocratic special interest indoctrination; 7. They would increase the political clout of ultraconservative religious and secular special interests; 8. As most nonpublic schools are run by religious groups that tend to take a dim view of women's rights and reproductive choice, vouchers and tax credits would work against women's rights while taxing women for the support of education that negatively impacts women's rights. Voucher advocates point out that Canada, Britain, Ireland, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, and other countries provide tax aid to sectarian private schools. But there is no reason why this country should copy the mistakes of others. Public education and religious liberty are among our most precious assets. It would be the height of folly to allow them to be eroded or destroyed. Friends of public education and religious liberty now need more than ever to get actively involved in defending these twin pillars of freedom and democracy. If we do not act and act now to protect these crucially important institutions and principles, who will? Edd Doerr is executive director of Americans for Religious Liberty and president of the American Humanist Association.
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