Television Driving prayer from the classroom
By RAYMOND SCHROTH
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
husbands search for work. But when she heard prayer over the
public-address system in her sons 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 communitys
freedom to worship according to its own tradition or the individuals
right to be protected from the communitys 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.
Theres something equally disturbing about the militantly
prayerful teenagers and their parents who cant 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 turn 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 Nicks 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 Lords Prayer at graduation he won again; when some
prayed aloud at graduations 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.
In structure, School Prayer: A Community at War, which
documents over a year of the controversy, is a balanced examination. The camera
moves between the Herdahl family as they chop wood, do household chores, drive
to school and court, and their opponents, like the Rev. Doug Jones, pastor of
the Victory Baptist Church, Jerry Horton, the superintendent of schools, and
Lisa Gooch, who had initiated the intercom-led prayers when she was a student
in 1978.
Both sides get a more-or-less equal chance to speak for
themselves; but in the context of basic American mythology -- as well as
Constitutional law -- theres no way for organized religion to win. Lisa
Herdahl is the lone individual standing up against the forces of blind
conformity. True, the Lone Ranger and Tonto -- played by the ACLU and People
for the American Way -- ride in to help; but its her tenacity in the face
of social ostracism, the loss of her job and death threats in the mail that
enables her to triumph.
She wins when the Federal Court at Oxford, Miss., in
1996 outlaws the school prayer and Bible classes and requires the community to
pay Herdahls $144,000 legal costs. Ironically, the impoverished local
citizens must raise the money to pay her through church collections.
By then the films evidence that the religious leaders are
narrow-minded bigots may have won viewers to Herdahls cause. Church
services include exorcisms over parishioners moaning on the floor.
On the other hand, the films most ambiguous moment shows
Herdahl teaching her adolescent son Kevin how to fire a pistol. The presumption
is that the townspeople are literally planning to kill her family and that she
and her children are ready to shoot it out.
The films first weakness, it seems to me, is its failure to
examine moments like this. How serious was the evidence of death
threats? Were these investigated? If the mother is giving her son a
handgun, havent things gone too far? Kevin tells us that the local boys
say nigger and that Mississippi is a different country from
any place in the U.S. It is true that Mississippi and its neighbor
Louisiana consistently rank at the bottom of various lists, like the one that
ranks quality of education; but what does this have to do with school prayer?
Why do we see only the prayer of the fanatics?
Finally, theres something odd about us never seeing the
husband and father, described as a very private person, while Lisa
Herdahl is enough a public person to fly with Kevin to appear on a
Chicago TV talk show.
The documentarys other failure is its not considering
a non-polarized point of view. Nick Beckers math teacher suggests that
although he looks for tolerance from other people he doesnt
necessarily give it himself. ... Hes just so overwhelmed by his
convictions. Michael Novak, in a New York Times op-ed essay on
school prayer (June 18), says that if he were an atheist he would not worry
about his children being intimidated by the prayer of others; he would teach
them how empty prayer is and have them build their character by silently
enduring the words that mean nothing to them. So much for prayer in
school causing some to feel left out. Everything in school causes someone to
feel left out.
A few of my fellow Jesuit professors begin class with prayer; and
for them, I think, it works because its in the context of a Catholic
university, in the relative intimacy of the classroom, and because the gesture
obviously flows from both their priesthood and their style of teaching.
Personally, I like prayers at faculty meetings, formal dinners and private
meals and presidential inaugurations.
But my problem with prayer over the intercom, particularly in
public schools, is like my problem with classes taught with teachers or
students wearing hats or classes taught outdoors on sunny days. They trivialize
prayer and education. Both prayer and learning are serious business, hard work:
They demand absolute concentration.
Thus, I suggest, the disembodied voice once emanating from the
speaker on the wall in rural Mississippi was neither religion nor education;
and the ACLU, congratulating itself for having banished God and Jesus Christ
from the classroom, had better look again.
Jesuit Fr. Raymond A. Schroth is writing a history of Fordham
University.
National Catholic Reporter, July 16,
1999
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