Public Schools

by Jeremy Leaming

We’ve heard it for decades from the Christian Right that the nation’s public schools are hostile to religion, prohibiting students from praying or engaging in other religious activities. It is rhetoric that has helped fuel the so-called culture wars. The rhetoric is also blatantly misleading.

There were a couple of U.S. Supreme court cases in the 1960s that prohibited organized religious activities in the public schools. But neither case, regardless of the shrill cries of Christian Right leaders, prohibited truly voluntary student prayer. The concept was fairly straight forward. Public school officials are government employees and the First Amendment’s establishment clause bars the government from demanding that people, including students, pray or engages in religious activity. The free exercise clause of the First Amendment provides that government must be neutral toward religion and cannot take undue action to interfere with religious practices.

So those two high court cases – Engel v. Vitale and Abington v. Schempp – did not ban religion from the schools. Students can pray in school on their own time, such as moments before a test, or with other students, as long as such activity is not disruptive of the school’s mission to teach reading, writing, math, history, and science.  

Nonetheless, those high court cases have been twisted by Christian Right lobbying groups, such as Focus on the Family, the Family Research Council, American Family Association, and TV preachers such as Pat Robertson, to help their campaign to portray America’s public places, even limited ones like public schools, as hostile to Christianity. Government officials they often argue are bent on banishing religion and Christianity in particular, from the public square.

The misinformation has caused great confusion in the public schools about religion’s proper place. But the First Amendment Center’s Charles Haynes, director of the Religious Freedom Education Project at the Newseum, has spent decades trying to straighten things up.

In a piece for the First Amendment Center’s website, Haynes says progress is being made.

The tea party-fueled effort to provide public schools with so-called constitutional history lessons continues to attract concern, with Constitutional Accountability Center’s Doug Kendall calling it a disgraceful propaganda movement.

In a recent piece for The Huffington Post, Kendall challenged the Tea party to “find one credible historian,” to support the Tea Party’s constitutional lessons, which are based on materials created by W. Cleon Skousen, a far-right conspiracy theorist with links to the John Birch society ….”

ACS has also called out the Tea Party for its take on the constitution's underpinnings, which echo Christian nation enthusiasts' talking points. Also is an article for The Huffington Post, ACS Executive Director Caroline Fredrickson knocked the Tea Party “Patriots” for “pushing a constitutional curriculum designed by the National Center for Constitutional Studies, which disseminates reading materials suggesting that God intended for America to be a Christian nation, that the Jamestown settlers starved to death because they were communists who failed to embrace capitalism, and that the national parks were unconstitutional.”

Public school officials should not open their doors to these types of lessons, which are clearly intended to push a political agenda, besides offering wildly distorted interpretations of history, Fredrickson continued. (Moreover the lessons are laced with religiosity, which could prove constitutionally problematic for the public schools. The Supreme Court has ruled that organized prayer and other religious activities in the public school violate the First Amendment, though truly voluntary student prayer and religious activities are permissible.)

Instead of allowing Tea Party elements to invade the nation’s public schools with their take on the Constitution, Fredrickson said school officials should look to ACS’s long-running Constitution in the Classroom Project.

That project involves bringing local attorneys into the classrooms to introduce students to a decidedly nonpartisan examination of important constitutional principles that affect their lives, such as freedom of speech and religion and privacy rights.  The ACS project does not claim the Constitution was created by Christians for Christians. Instead, the nation’s Constitution is a progressive document with the promise of inherent rights for all humans, protection of those fundamental rights from unconstitutional government action, and equality under our laws for all humans.

See here for more information about ACS’s Constitution in the Classroom project.