As President Clinton and the new Republican leadership in Congress consider measures that would return organized prayer to public schools, it is worth remembering one thing.
Prayer already is there.
Despite a Supreme Court ruling 32 years ago that classroom prayer and Scripture reading are unconstitutional even if they are voluntary, prayer increasingly is a part of school activities from early-morning moments of silence to lunchtime prayer sessions to pre-football game prayers for both players and fans.
The most common forms are state-mandated moments of silence at the beginning of the day, which are permissible to the extent they are not meant to be a forum for organized prayer. But, particularly in the South, religious clubs, prayer groups and pro-prayer students and community groups are making religion and prayer part of the school day.
At Louisa County High School in Louisa, Va., for instance, lunchtime prayer meetings on the steps outside the school’s band room were organized last year by Tenille Wermteer, now a senior.
“We read a chapter of the Bible and prayed for 15 minutes every Monday and Wednesday,” she said. “We got some weird looks, but a lot of people came up and asked what we were doing. I told them, `Jesus Christ loves you so much, it would be mean for you to turn him down without giving him a chance.’ “
At Greenville High School in Greenville, S.C., the head football coach, Larry Frost, asks an assistant to say a prayer and lead the team in reciting the Lord’s Prayer before every game.
In Iowa, 50 to 100 of the state’s 358 high schools had prayers at graduation ceremonies last year.
The director of the Mississippi chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union said the group was planning to sue a school district in northern Mississippi, asserting that the school allows prayers over the school intercom and pays Bible study teachers to teach in elementary and middle schools.
The American Center for Law and Justice, founded by Pat Robertson, estimates that 12,000 Bible clubs are operating in American public schools. People for the American Way, a civil liberties group, says 60 to 70 percent of Americans respond favorably to the idea of prayer in school.
Nancy Wilson of Student Venture, a part of the Campus Crusade for Christ International, said “Student prayer is not rare at all. Students are praying whether they’re officially allowed to or not.” Student Venture is helping students organize prayer groups that have 177,000 participants.
Much of the activity is private and voluntary and within constitutional guidelines. Some of it probably goes beyond what is legally permissible, because a large segment of the public is more inclined than the courts to have prayer in the schools. Particularly in the South, there is enough support for school prayer that communities are sometimes content to let it continue.
“You know how it is in Louisiana,” said Keith Johnson, a Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education member. “We do things and just don’t discuss it. In other states people argue, but in Louisiana they just go ahead and do things until they get sued.” For example, he said a state law that allows students to observe a “brief time in silent prayer or meditation” is often used by students to pray aloud.
To proponents, the school prayer that exists, and the potential for widening such observances, is a much-needed counterbalance to the violence and lack of values that they see in society.
But critics say the push for school prayer is eroding the constitutionally mandated separation of church and state. Separation of church and state was put in the Constitution to prevent the religious persecution in Europe that many American colonists came here to escape. Many school officials say prayer increasingly is dividing boards and communities.
“We get more questions on religion and sexual harassment than anything else at this point,” said Gwendolyn Gregory, deputy general counsel for the National School Boards Association in Alexandria, Va.
