If school prayer's a football, PFAW knows the score - People for the American Way - Editorial

National Catholic Reporter, April 22, 1994

School prayer is a divisive issue at many levels. One division sometimes overlooked is the extent to which this question of prayer brings the individual into conflict with the community.

An easy illustration concerns small towns, and there are still typical small towns in America, even while they are not the population norm anymore.

In many a small town, come graduation time, the various denominations - and this usually comes down to Protestants, Catholics and Jews - take turns as to who says the nondenominational prayer at that moment of community gathering.

Prayer of some sort to God in thanks for these graduates is the community's sentiment, genuine and sincerely meant. That moment of prayer is as much an integral part of that community's sense of itself as the football team and the local paper and the state flag.

The issue in the United States is belief. In the board American cultural scheme of values, belief matters. The specifics of religion or denomination in this country frequently are less important than the actuality of believing. And so it emerges in small, denominationally cooperative communities, for example, as believers take turns listening to invocations, prayers and suplications from leaders of different religions in time of community celebration and crises. And sometimes these evidences of belief and community hold true even in the larger settings if big towns and cities.

The value judgment, of believing in the importance of belief, cannot be pried out of the American social matrix. But is belief what the battle for school prayer is about? On the topic of school prayer, two groups are currently squared off against each other like two snarling pit bulls - the religious right and the People For the American Way organization, which describes itself as "your voice against intolerance."

According to PFAW, the 1990s' religious right school prayer movement is led by Pat Robertson's American Center for Law and Justice, the Rutherford Institute, Concerned Women for America and the American Family Association, playing into "the public's anxieties about young people and about the public schools" regarding declining test scores, rising drug abuse, schoolroom violence and teenage pregnancy.

That the religious right is using school prayer as one more political tool is a given. That PFAW senses the issue as anxiety-driven is undoubtedly on target, too. That some hope school prayers might instill disappearing values and social mores is likely, if a faint hope. Parents would do more by tossing the television set out the window.

PFAW sees "the effort to put organized prayer in schools" representing "one of the most serious threats to religious liberty in America today." Well, only by extension. If by "school prayer" PFAW includes moments of silence, and it does, then a threat from respectful silence seems remote. Respectful silence does not necessarily give the religious right a foot in the door.

Prayer is a part of many Americans' day, and let those who would pray in silence do so. In the final analysis, their silent reflection is no more likely to turn them into rabid religious-righters than the Pledge of Allegiance will turn them all into latter-day Joe McCarthys.

Similarly, PFAW seems unduly concerned about prayers at graduations.

But mandating actual prayers is something else. And here the PFAW is on solid ground.

The religious right is not interested in prayer, per se. It is interested in its interpretation of certain Christian injunctions and in biblical literalism. The religious right is less concerned about belief than it is about control and domination.

That element of this school prayer revival is at one with the nativism, the anti-multiculturalism, the pro-white Christianism of a narrow band of narrow minds the religious right generally appears to promote and represent.

So PFAW is raising the correct issue, and is right to worry about the separation of church and state. But despite rallying 400 similarly concerned "religious leaders" of many denominations (including a handful of Catholics), PFAW needs to separate its worries out a little more.

Whatever people think in moments of silent reflection is up to the individual. That they have the opportunity to gather in moments of silence, even in a public school, seems here to be up to the community.

Beyond that, pit bull PFAW is correct to keep doing what it does best - maintaining a wathchful, snarling presence in the religious right's ever-shifting arenas.