Driving Prayer From The Classroom - Review

National Catholic Reporter, July 16, 1999 by Raymond Schroth

Atheists and fanatics prove equally disturbing in documentary

For half a century, God and Jesus Christ were in the classrooms of Pontotoc County, Miss. Today we celebrate that they are gone."

The speaker is Nadine Strosser, president of the American Civil Liberties Union, at their annual convention in Santa Fe, N.M. The ACLU is presenting its highest award and a standing ovation to Lisa Herdahl, who -- with the help of the ACLU and People for the American Way -- drove a stake into the heart of school prayer and drove God and Jesus Christ back into those kooky fundamentalist churches where they belong.

Herdahl is the heroine of "School Prayer: A Community At War," the documentary by filmmakers Slawomir Grunberg and Ben Crane, to be aired on PBS July 20.

Herdahl, raised in a Christian home in San Diego, moved to Wisconsin, then with her husband and six children to Mississippi in her husband's search for work. But when she heard prayer over the public-address system in her son's school, she raised hell. Her protest led to a two-year legal and -- more important -- ideological battle over whether the First Amendment to the Constitution protects the community's freedom to worship according to its own tradition or the individual's right to be protected from the community's public prayers.

I must say that there is something creepy -- perhaps it would be kinder to say very sad -- about the several militant teenage hero-atheists and their parents who have made their way into print and onto the TV screens this summer, in the national flood of coverage about school shootings and wayward youth.

There's something equally disturbing about the militantly prayerful teenagers and their parents who can't wait to send these nonconformists to hell to burn forever and ever.

On the surface, the controversial issue is the sometimes mandatory, sometimes voluntary school prayer -- and variations on prayer, like Bible study groups --- that local public school systems in places as sophisticated as Calvert County, Md., and as backwater as Pontotoc County, Miss., have imposed on the young as one more attempt to instill some kind of personal morality.

Below the surface is a world-view that sees contemporary culture, particularly the materialistic secular culture dominated by the entertainment industry that has emerged over the last two generations of economic prosperity, as inimical to the values that keep the embattled family from falling apart.

In short, society is a roaring lion seeking to devour the young from the moment they walk out the front door after breakfast on the way to school till the moment they mm off the TV and fall into bed at night. And in a year when alienated teenagers at several high schools have demonstrated the depths of their nihilism by gunning down their classmates, those who hold this view may have a point.

On June 21, talk show host Brian Lehrer on WNYC in New York tried to reduce to absurdity the Congressional proposal to display the Ten Commandments in public places by pointing out that there are "several versions" of the Ten, that his Jewish Bible demands the death penalty for anyone who breaks the sabbath, and so on. Callers told tales of how much they had suffered by being forced to hear offensive words like God and Jesus Christ in public places. Last week an "atheist" high school student registered the same complaint on the op-ed page of the New York Times.

Meanwhile, in Calvert County, Md., The Washington Post (June 22) has found Nick Becker, 18, who has gained national notoriety by protesting a prayer at his high school graduation. Son of two federal workers who occasionally attend Methodist services, baptized in the Greek Orthodox church and raised a Methodist, Nick began to question religious beliefs in high school. We do not know how parents, ministers and teachers dealt with his questions -- or if they ever even knew or cared. We do know that this otherwise very bright young man, a math whiz, has filled a few cubic inches of his new void with his electronic gods -- his stereo, drums, guitars, keyboards, videos and films.

He has created video spoofs where Joe DiMaggio and Groucho Marx burn in hell for not being Christians, a horror movie about a family who get chopped up and put in a bathtub, a math puzzle about how long it takes a 20-pound bag of severed thumbs to fall from the top of the Sears Tower and smash to the pavement into "a disgusting, bloody mess." Conservative columnist Cal Thomas checked Nick's popular Web site and deemed him another Eric Harris or Dylan Klebold in the making.

When Nick refused to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance the ACLU backed him and the principal who threatened to suspend him had to apologize. When he protested the Lord's Prayer at graduation he won again; when some prayed aloud at graduation's "moment of reflection," he walked out in protest. Of course the authorities and the local community overreacted again and again and barred him from the graduation boat ride and branded him a devil-worshiper.