School Prayer Again: The Good Old Days and Other Fallacies

This morning I saw that a group called The American Family Association of Kentucky has an online petition to the governor of Kentucky, imploring him to return "God's protection to America" by "putting prayer back in the schools." At the top, it shows a pair of praying hands in front of the American flag, and says, "restore student religious liberty." It goes on to say:

Prayer was in our schools for over 200 years before the anti-God forces took it out in 1962. After prayer was removed from our schools, teen pregnancy went up 500%, STD’s went up 226%, violent crime went up 500% and SAT scores went down for 18 years in a row, opening the door for the AIDS epidemic and the drug culture.

I didn't wake up this morning thinking I would write another post about school prayer, but this survey got me thinking about some of the myths and fallacies I keep seeing that surround the issue, and I'm getting pretty tired of them.

The biggest myth (or lie, if you're more cynical) is that prayer was ever entirely taken out of schools. It wasn't. Official, school-sponsored prayer was taken out of schools (though not always successfully--I remember bowing down with all the other seventh grade football players to say the Lord's Prayer before games). Students are still free to pray as long as they aren't disrupting class or doing so as part of an official school function, like cheerleading or speaking at a graduation. School officials can pray, too, but if they want to stay within the law they need to do it silently and discreetly, so that it isn't a promotion of prayer. You can't outlaw silent prayer, and no sensible person wants to anyway.

I've noticed it's incredibly hard to get some people to acknowledge the distinction between "official school prayer" and "voluntary student prayer". It's an important one: the first is illegal, and the second is not. In fact, it's protected, as long as it's not disruptive. There's an inevitable tension in the 1st Amendment between the Establishment Clause, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion" and the Free Exercise Clause: "or prohibiting the free exercise thereof". In the case of government institutions and employees, free exercise is restricted, to keep from violating the Establishment Clause. That's why public schools and their employees can't officially support one religion over another. What they do on their own time is up to them.

Which brings us to another fallacy: that restricting official school prayer is a violation of "religious liberty", as the Kentucky petition claims. It isn't, or at least it isn't an unreasonable one. School officials and students acting in official school functions can't expect full religious liberty while they are acting on behalf of the school, because that violates the Establishment Clause. We're back to that official/voluntary distinction. In fact, official Christian school prayers would be a violation of religious liberty, because some non-Christian kids would be forced (or would feel intense pressure) to participate in the prayers of a religion they don't share. There's this strange idea on the religious right these days that religious liberty means being allowed to force others to conform to your religion. It doesn't--that's twisting the word "liberty" into something else entirely. In the immortal words of Inigo Montoya, "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

Another one you hear a lot is that "God has been kicked out of schools." There's an idea in religious right circles that many of today's woes can be traced to the removal of official prayers from school in the early sixties. Those woes aren't just the result of kids not receiving religious instruction, according to this view. They also come from the fact that God has removed his protection from America, as the petition claims. The recent school shootings aren't just happening because the students don't know God. They are also happening because God is letting them happen, because we "kicked him out of the schools."

Now, I'm a little out of my theological depth here, I admit, but these sentiments don't seem to be giving God a whole lot of respect. If God is really omnipotent and omnipresent, as most Christians believe (I think), than it's impossible for mere humans to kick him out of anywhere. Of course, you could argue that the "kicking out" part is just a rhetorical flourish, and what's really happening is that God is simply deciding to leave the schools and withdraw his protection. As Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association (the same organization sponsoring the petition in Kentucky) put it when discussing why God let the Sandy Hook school shooting happen:

In 1962 we kicked prayer out of the schools. In 1963 we kicked God's word out of ours schools. In 1980 we kicked the Ten Commandments out of our schools. We've kicked God out of our public school system. And I think God would say to us, 'Hey, I'll be glad to protect your children, but you've got to invite me back into your world first. I'm not going to go where I'm not wanted. I am a gentleman."

So...God let a madman gun down little children because...he's a gentleman? Once again, I don't think the word "gentleman" is being used correctly here. This view paints a picture of God as being petty and vindictive, the kind of God who says, "If you don't base your government on one particular religion--conservative Christianity--then I will let terrible things happen to you and your children." Granted, that does resemble the vengeful and jealous God of the Old Testament. But happily, not all Christians see God in those terms anymore (some folks on the religious right seem to have never read the New Testament...except for Revelation, of course). 

But whether this view is true Christian doctrine or not, some of us in this country aren't Christians, and it's our country too. Personally, I think that if God exists at all, he probably doesn't have much to do with human affairs one way or the other, so the whole "God's protection" argument is a moot point. I don't think that's how the world works, and if it is, and God only protects countries with school-sponsored prayer, then he is a petty and callous deity, and certainly no gentleman. Is that a God worthy of worship? I don't think so.

Now, what about the quote from the petition that talks about the ills that have befallen America since "anti-God forces took it out in 1962"? First, that "anti-God forces" part is mostly wrong.  Engel v. Vitale, the court case in 1962 that made official school prayer illegal, was brought by a group of parents including "two Jews, an atheist, a Unitarian, and another Protestant." Only one of those people could possibly be considered "anti-God", though at most an atheist would be anti-religion, because you can't be against something you don't think exists. Maybe they're confusing that case with Murray v. Curtlett, the case that lead to Bible readings being outlawed in 1963. That's the one that involved the famous atheist Madalyn Murray O'Hair, who was pretty anti-religion, and apparently not a very pleasant person. Many of the court cases that helped remove official religious observances from schools were brought by religious people, many of whom are quite passionate about separating church and state (religious people came up with the idea in the first place, after all). So, it isn't generally "anti-God" forces; it's "anti-official-sponsorship-of-religion" forces, which is a very different thing, and often quite pro-God. 

But what about the claims about teen pregnancy, STD's, and violent crime increasing after 1962? I'm not going to spend a bunch of time tracking the statistics down for Kentucky, but I wouldn't be surprised if they were partly accurate. Those things may have increased in the 60's. Society did see some upheavals then. But that doesn't mean the removal of official prayer from school caused those problems. Jumping to that conclusion is an elementary logical fallacy: the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy (it means "after this, therefore because of this"). The fact that an event precedes another event doesn't mean it caused that event. My Dad is a veterinarian, who is always having people tell him that their pets got better because they dewormed them, even when the ailment had nothing to do with worms. He asks, "Did you ever have a flat tire the same day you went to the gas station? Did you decide that going to the gas station causes flats?" (See also "regression to the mean" and "correlation does not imply causation")

There are all kinds of things that might have caused increases in violence, teen pregnancy, etc. in the 60's, and the removal of school prayer is just one (rather remote) possibility. However, I can imagine that both the removal of school prayer and the increasing social ills could have been related to a general societal move away from traditional religious and moral values. That move did really get rolling in the sixties. It's true that belief and morality have grown more diverse in the United States in the last few decades. Some people are moving away from traditional religion, while others are embracing fundamentalism. I do believe it can be a dangerous time when people start questioning their old moral systems, because they may start abandoning rules that are there for very good reasons. That's one reason I write about ethics so much in this blog--people have to have some kind of moral framework that keeps them from doing hurtful things, and I'm trying to figure out what system might make sense, without relying on unproven supernatural claims. 

That's the thing--just because the removal of an old system of morality leads to problems, that doesn't mean the old system was right or good. And that brings me to the good old days. Lots of people, especially those on the religious right, look back wistfully at a glowing golden age when God was in charge and morals were morals. I heard someone recently longing for the time when "God was in the classroom, and there was a paddle in every teacher's desk". People look at "kids today" and shake their heads in despair. But there are some big problems with that view. For one thing, it's been around forever. Back around 700 BC, Hesiod lamented that "When I was young, we were taught to be discreet and respectful of elders, but the present youth are exceedingly disrespectful and impatient of restraint." People have said the same things for at least 2700 years, and probably much longer, yet the world has never yet completely gone to hell in a handbasket (it's come close, maybe). Every generation has the rebellious kids and the more obedient kids. Admittedly, things today are a little unusual, because we have seen traditional Christianity lose more of its dominance over western culture. Many Americans, and far more Europeans, are now non-religious (and some of the least religious countries are some of the happiest on Earth). So yes, we are living in an unusually dynamic time, in a moral sense and in pretty much every other sense. 

But that doesn't mean there's no hope for the future, or that we should return to some imagined Golden Age. Things aren't that bad now, and that golden age wasn't so golden. Yes, violent crime started climbing in the 60's, and kept on climbing through the 80's...and then it started declining in the early 90's, and has ever since. We're not down to the levels of the early '60's yet, but we may get there. Most people think violence is increasing, but that's just an illusion based on the way the media plasters the juiciest atrocities across our TV screens day and night. As for teen pregnancy, I don't know about Kentucky, but across the United States, teen pregancy was at its highest in--get this--the fifties. It started declining right around the time prayer was removed from schools (and I won't claim causation) and has mostly declined since then. Sure, we've got some problems these days, but the news isn't all bad, despite what's on the news.

Besides, those good old days weren't all they're cracked up to be. Yesterday I was looking through some microfilms of the local paper (I live in south Louisiana) from 1965. There was an obituary for a black woman who had died at the age of 89. It was tucked at the bottom of the page, in a small section entitled "Negro news". Any article that mentioned a black person would pause to point out their race, as in, "John Doe, negro, was...". In 1965, local schools were separate and distinctly unequal, and the whole region was segregated. Blacks didn't have schools that went past the 8th grade until around 1950, and those schools opened months after the white schools, so that their students could keep working in the sugarcane fields. I read an account of this period by a woman who came home from Xavier University in New Orleans in the 50's and went to the library system (where I now work) to do some research. She didn't see a "Whites Only" sign, so she decided to risk going in. But she was told to go "her people's" library, which was a shelf full of books in the underfunded black high school. 

This doesn't sound like the good old days to me, and I know it doesn't to a black person. Back in the days when "God was in the schools", women and most minorities were treated as second-class citizens, and blacks especially suffered incredible indignities and injustices. But I'm not saying that's because God was in the schools back then. That's just the kind of dodgy reasoning I'm arguing against here. 

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History on Engel v. Vitale

School-Sponsored Prayer: What's the Harm?

Last night I didn't feel like reading, especially not the geeky books I usually read. But there wasn't much else to do. So I watched a geeky video. It was an old Bill Moyers interview, from 1987, called God and the Constitution. Moyers talks to Dr. Martin Marty, a Christian and an expert on the religious views of the founders, and Leonard Levy, a Jewish constitutional scholar who edited The Encyclopedia of the American Constitution. All three men are stunningly smart, and I urge everyone to watch it (you can stream it for 3 bucks on Amazon.com, or watch it for free if you have a library card and your local library has Access Video on Demand).

The part that struck me the most was Dr. Levy talking about school-sponsored prayer. (Not voluntary student prayer, which is protected by the First Amendent. I want to make clear nobody is saying kids shouldn't be allowed to pray on their own at school.) Levy offers one of the most powerful and personal arguments I've ever heard for keeping official prayers out of schools. It's more impressive if you watch the video, but here's the transcript:

Moyers: What about school prayer?  

Levy: I think that the state should not promote or sponsor religion.  

Moyers: But there are prayers and "prayers." You grew up in De Kalb, Illinois, right?  

Levy: I did.  

Moyers: 20 Years ago in De Kalb the court said the cookie prayer was unconstitutional.  

Levy: I forgot that it came out of De Kalb!  

Moyers: "We thank you for the flowers so sweet, we thank you for the food we eat, we thank you for the birds that sing we thank you, God, for everything." The court declared it unconstitutional even though the teacher took out the word "God".  

Levy: She did, but the court didn't quite declare it unconstitutional. When the Supreme Court won't agree to review a case, they allow the lower court decision to stand. If that's how you construe it--which is reasonable--yes, the court, in effect, upheld that.  

Moyers: Now, do you think the founding fathers would have thought that little verse an establishment of religion?  

Levy: I think not, but... to begin with, that's a prayer being said in the public school. The founding fathers had no position with respect to this because public schools as we know them did not exist. Prayers do not belong in public schools even though they are sterilized, as in the cookie prayer which is non-denominational, and doesn't even refer to God. I agree with you that religious liberty would not be imperiled if children said the cookie prayer in the public schools.  

Moyers: The teacher said she was only trying to instill a sense of wonder in the children--to make them appreciative of the world around them and of the divine being that made that world. She wasn't trying to persuade or to indoctrinate them.  

Levy: These cases are very complex. That's why the court divides so closely and so frequently. When you say that that teacher wanted to inspire children with a sense of wonderment and you referred to her talking about a supreme being, that is a religious statement. You and I may believe it but there are people who don't believe it. 

Moyers: You think the First Amendment protects atheists?  

Levy: Of course it does! The First Amendment protects religion and non-religion. There are people who are not theists who are in our public schools by the thousands. There are people who are not Christians or Jews or Muslims and they ought not be exposed to that cookie prayer which alludes to a divine being who allegedly created the world. You think so and I think so, but there are people who don't think so and they shouldn't be made to feel like outsiders, as if they don't belong, as if this is not their country. It's their country as much as it is ours. 

Moyers: If I remember correctly you refused to take part in prayers in De Kalb, Illinois, when you were a boy there--1935, 1936. What happened when you said "I can't participate in that prayer."  

Levy: What happened? Well, I was ostracized. No, more than that--I was persecuted. They beat me up regularly as I went home from school. Gangs of kids would jump out and beat the hell out of me and call me a "Jew bastard" and "Christ killer." I loved to play softball, and I was kept off the team. "No kikes on our team," was the motto which had, by the way, some sponsorship from the faculty. When religion is introduced directly into the public schools there is a price that may very well be paid by people who are different. There have often been times when persecution was visited upon children who wouldn't participate in the public school rituals of religion.

Powerful stuff. Of course, the thirties were a very different time, and I don't think that kind of thing would happen to Jewish kids these days. At least not as commonly and openly. But kids can be very cruel when they decide to single out another kid, mobbing them like a bunch of crows. And I can certainly imagine them abusing a Hindu or Sikh kid, or especially a Muslim or atheist kid, for declining to participate in Christian prayers. Even if they didn't (and most often they wouldn't), that kid would be put in a very, very uncomfortable situation. Now, some people will say that this doesn't apply in overwhelmingly Christian areas. But it does. I'm from a small, white, Protestant town smack in the middle of the Bible Belt, but there were a handful of Hindu and Muslim kids even there, and probably more than a handful of non-religious kids. The Hindu and Muslim kids were younger than me, and I don't know if they were ever harassed because of their religion. If so, I would think it was probably minor. But I might be wrong, and I'm pretty sure they would have had a tougher time if they had been put in the position of deciding whether or not to say prayers along with the Christian kids. That could have opened up a can of worms. So why open it? Leaving official prayer and other religious observances out of school keeps the problem from ever arising, or at least from arising because of school policy. And besides, Dr. Levy is right. It's their country, too.

The Dog and the Hitchhiker: A Ghost Story

Last night I went to see a horror movie called the Conjuring. It wasn't the best I've ever seen, but it gave me a couple of literal shivers, so I guess it got the job done. It's one of those "Based on True Events" horror movies, in the tradition of The Amityville Horror. In fact, two of the main characters are Ed and Lorraine Warren, the real-life "demonologists" who also worked the case that The Amityville Horror was based on (rather loosely, it seems). In The Conjuring, the Warrens are nice, normal-seeming people, whose work just happens to require them to battle unclean spirits. Ed is a strapping, God-fearing, all-American kind of guy with a bit of a swagger, while Lorraine is unassuming and fearless. They're the heroes of the movie, which makes it clear they've fought their good fight in spite of all those skeptics who scoffed at them

Now, as anyone who reads the blog knows, I'm one of those skeptics. I figure there's no such thing as the supernatural, in either the religious or the New Age sense. Angels, demons, fairies, auras, and psychic phenomena all seem equally unreal to me. But I'm an open-minded skeptic, and I honestly don't think that's an oxymoron. If someone can give me hard evidence that I'm wrong, then I'll change my mind. Besides, I hate seeming like the wet blanket skeptic from some horror movie (especially since those guys usually get killed off rather horribly). Besides, I like a good ghost story as much as anyone else, and I've had a few odd experiences in my life too.

Have you ever felt like you had a premonition, or thought a coincidence was too unlikely to have happened by chance? I have. In my 41 years, I've had exactly three such experiences. The first was just silly. I was about 16, and my dad had me clearing brush on a lot he owned. I decided to walk to the motel in the next lot and get a Coke out of the machine, so I pulled the change out of my pocket--three quarters. I glanced at them there in my palm, and something possessed me to throw them all on the ground. They all came up heads, and they were all from 1967...pretty old quarters, even then. That's a pretty weird coincidence, for all kinds of reasons. What are the chances they would all be from the same year and come up heads? And what made me want to throw them on the ground? I never do that. Anyway, I looked at them, thought, "Wow, that's freaky", and went and spent them on my Coke. If they were lucky magic quarters, somebody else has them now. Maybe I should have waited for the beanstalk to sprout.

The second freaky coincidence happened on April 11, 2007. I was at my parents' house in Arkansas, and I woke up thinking about Kurt Vonnegut. That was odd, because I hadn't thought about him in years. He had been my absolute favorite author when I was in my late teens, but I was 35 in 2007. I was lying there thinking, "He's getting really old now. He surely won't live much longer." Then I got up and went downstairs, and my mom said, "Well I just heard on the radio that Kurt Vonnegut died." Later that day my sister, who was also visiting, looked at me and said, "So, Mom told me how you killed Kurt Vonnegut this morning."

That's two freaky, pseudo-psychic experiences in 40 years. They were pretty strange coincidences, but I honestly think they were just that--coincidences. Forty years is long enough for a few coincidences to happen just by chance. People do draw royal flushes every now and then, and that's explainable by statistics. Magic isn't necessary.

But let me tell you my ghost story. Or maybe it was just another dream, even though I was half-awake at the time. Whatever it was, for years afterward, my scalp would prickle every time I told the story. It was March 25, 1989, and I had turned 17 a few days before. That was the heyday of hair metal bands, and Cinderella was coming to Little Rock, which is 90 minutes south of my hometown. I wasn't a Cinderella fan myself, but my friend Dave was, and he made me a deal--if I drove, he would buy the tickets for both of us. That sounded good to me. Going to the big city without grownups was a big deal then, and David and I had a grand time.

We must have gone to eat after the concert, because it was around 2:00 AM when we finally headed home. By the time we got back to the foothills of the Ozarks, where the road gets curvy, Dave was asleep, and I was fighting to keep my eyes open. That's when saw a big, beautiful collie walking down the side of the road. We were nowhere near a town, or even a visible house. I wondered vaguely what it was doing out there, but I was too sleepy to think straight. So I kept on driving.

Then, after a couple more miles, I saw another, identical collie on the side of the road...just trotting along like the last one. That struck me as very odd, but once again, I was too sleepy to think about it much. So I kept on driving, curving down into a steep little valley toward the old Cadron Creek bridge.

Just as I started descending, I saw that collie again. There it was, on the side of the road, dead and decomposing.

That's when a little jolt of fear finally broke through the sleepiness. But I kept driving. Then, just as I hit that layer of cold air you find in those little valleys at night, I saw a hitchhiker. He was a couple hundred yards in front of me, and he just stepped out into the road like he didn't see my headlights. But he didn't seem to be getting closer to me, even though I was going pretty fast. As soon as I realized how strange that was--just before I crossed the bridge--the laws of physics kicked in again, and he was right in front of me. Looking across the hood of my car, right at me. And then he was gone.

I hit the gas and roared out of the valley, pulled over, and shook Dave until he woke up. "You've got to help me stay awake, man, I'm seeing things!" We drove a few more miles and stopped at an all-night convenience store. I got out and did jumping jacks to try to wake up, and then we headed on home.

The strange thing is, the whole thing startled me, but it didn't seem truly scary until the first time I told the story, and felt the hair on the back of my head stand up. But that stopped happening after a few years, and it just became a good spooky tale to tell. I still think I was just falling asleep at the wheel, and dreaming while I was half-awake. That's a much simpler explanation than ghostly hitchhikers, to say nothing of ghostly collie dogs.

But it's not like I know everything, and it's a weird old world, whether there's a supernatural or not. I hadn't thought much about that story for years, until today, when I was thinking about that movie last night. I was trying to find the real story it was supposedly based on, and ended up finding some creepy, sad articles about "exorcisms" performed by real clergymen. I was thinking about how different my naturalistic view is from someone who truly believes in demon possession. So much less scary. So I started thinking about my "paranormal" experiences, and decided it was finally time to write about them.

But then, as soon as I got home from work, I got a message on Facebook from my old friend Dave. He had attached a picture of his ticket from that concert, 24 years ago. "Remember this?" he said, "I kept the ticket stubs to every concert I ever went to....man, what a crazy night!"

So, my third freaky "psychic" experience in 41 years was earlier today, just as I was getting ready to write this story for the first time. I don't know if it makes me or Dave seem like the psychic one, but it's pretty strange either way. In the three years or so that we've been friends on Facebook, how did he happen to send me a picture of that ticket today? If it's been roughly 1,000 days, that means the odds are 1/1,000. I know a few long shots like that are almost certain to happen in 41 years, statistically speaking. But who knows? It's still a weird old world.