June 9, 1996
[is religion worth the price?]
People sometimes suggest to me that religion has done more damage in the world than it has good. While I don't believe that, there is a case that can be made. If one just catalogs the families that have been separated and the killing that has been done in the name of religion, the plus side has a long way to go to balance the negative side of the cost-benefit analysis. Just look at the tensions in today's world in Bosnia, and in Northern Ireland, and in the Middle East - tensions between people in which religion plays a major role. What is it about religion that makes people so deadly certain that they have a commitment to the Divine to behave in a bestial fashion?
It is, of course, not usually the founders of religions who call for the massacre of non-believers. The founders have commonly offered gospels of love and understanding and preached the oneness of humankind. But after they have left the scene, it has been common for the second or third generation of leadership, in an attempt to institutionalize the message of the great ones, to build solidarity among the followers, to cope with the wavering that tends to follow the loss of the inspired ones, to focus attention on the non-believers - the people of darkness who are enemies of the people of light. That message makes it a tad harder for the doubtful to leave the in-group because of the implication that one is joining the enemy. It works. It is a tried and true method.
The problem about holding a religious movement together is that there is an inevitable process of heresy that sets in over time. There are conflicts among leaders and new interpretations of what is true, and history tells us that it has always become necessary in the eyes of those in power to separate the sheep from the goats - the faithful from the unfaithful - in order to maintain their power.
Sometimes the process has involved simple shunning, sometimes the penalties have been stronger: torture, expulsion from the community, or death.
[moving to a new world]
Why do people leave a stable society to go out as pioneers into a new world? Sometimes the motivations are economic. Sometimes they are idealistic. Most often they are probably some of both.
Some of the Europeans who ventured to the Western Hemisphere two and three centuries ago were motivated by the desire to escape religious oppression. They were people who were on the losing side of religious struggles in the old world and they were seeking the opportunity to create a new society in which they and their understanding of God would be dominant. We used to be carelessly taught that they came here in search of religious freedom, with the implication being that they wanted everyone to be free. No, many came here in search of freedom for themselves to believe what they chose, and to do unto others what had been done unto them back home - or worse.
[religion in the colonies]
The British Colonies in the New World were not happy places for dissenters - that is, for dissenters from the dominant theologies. They were, in many cases, theocratic states of the worst kinds. The Puritans demanded strict observance of the Sabbath and the stocks were freely used to punish deviance from "the Lord's way," which was what the Puritans said it was.
Roger Williams spoke his mind and was banished in 1635. Anne Hutchinson was excommunicated in 1637 for asserting that she took her instructions directly from God and not from the Puritan leaders. Roman Catholics, Quakers and Jews were persecuted in many of the Colonies. Mary Dyer, a Quaker who did not know when to accept banishment as a blessing, was hung in Boston in 1660.
[a new religious climate]
Religious authorities were viewed as generally sympathetic to governmental authorities with whom they had worked out accommodations. The Enlightenment ideas that called traditional political structures into question also produced skepticism about traditional religious structures. Many of the founders of this nation were people who were well acquainted with religious tyranny and wanted no part of it. They were by no means anti-religious. They were in most cases very devout -- even those who were considered heretics -- but they were in touch with religious diversity and they knew how divisive religion could be.
Most of us know that the Bill of Rights to the US Constitution came about because some leaders in the not-yet-united States feared adopting a constitution without the enumeration of liberties, while the drafters had felt it safer to leave out altogether those things that should not be done by the government out of fear that any mention might later be subject to misinterpretation. High on that list of unaddressed subjects was religion.
[the first amendment]
We all know the outcome: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." Those words have, of course, been subject to interpretation and reinterpretation over the years with distinctively different meanings drawn from them. We know more about the outcome of the deliberations than we do about the process that led to it. There were people who envisioned some form of establishment of religion. Some wanted only national establishment to be prohibited, leaving that right to the individual states. One proposal was that it say "Congress shall make no law establishing any particular denomination of religion in preference to another." Those proposals were rejected. Many scholars are quite clear what the Congress had in mind: "a wall of separation" between church and state is how Thomas Jefferson described it.
There is one historical revisionist, David Barton, who travels around the country proclaiming the gospel that there is not and never has been a "wall of separation." Barton is, understandably, a favorite of Pat Robertson, Phyllis Schlafly, Dr. James Dobson, and D. James Kennedy. It is Barton's contention that since the Court removed prayers from schools, God has punished us by increasing the rate of teen pregnancies, of crime, and of teen alcoholism. Barton quotes Thomas Jefferson as having said that the wall was "one directional," protecting the church from the state, and that it was intended to keep "Christian principles in government." Clearly, no reputable scholar has ever found those ideas in anything Jefferson wrote. Barton claims that James Madison said that the future of our government was "staked upon . . . the Ten Commandments." No Madison scholar has ever found those words in his writings. He frequently quotes ideas that were soundly defeated in the legislative or judicial process, as if they were, in fact representative. But there is a market for Barton's ideas and books because there are people in America who really want to believe what he is saying.
The consensus for religious liberty at the founding of our nation was clear, although far from unanimous.
[religious toleration]
When Alexis deTocqueville visited America, he was puzzled by the seeming contrast between the lack of state involvement in support of religion, and the vitality he saw in churches. He questioned the clergy he met and reported that "they differed upon matters of detail alone...they all attributed the peaceful dominion of religion in their country mainly to the separation of church and state." It was his analysis that "The alliance which religion contracts with political powers must needs be onerous to itself, since it does not require their assistance to live, and by giving them its assistance, it may be exposed to decay."
This is certainly not to say that we have had a nation in which religious discrimination and tensions have been unknown. We have had virulent anti-Catholicism and anti-Semitism and anti-Mormonism. We have had, and do to this day have, some communities in which one might conclude on the basis of observation that Protestantism (or in some cases Catholicism or Mormonism) is a state endorsed religion. In the last fifty years, however, in series of cases, the Supreme Court of the United States has affirmed the principle of church state separation, which it has seen as the clear intention of our founders.
Religion being what it is, there have continued to be those people, like David Barton, who read the history very differently - who insist that this is, in fact, a Christian nation in which they believe it is perfectly appropriate to use the resources of the state to further their beliefs. As they see it, to oppose them is to oppose God. They accuse the courts of trying to kick God out of school because of decisions that have held that schools may not be used for proselytizing. As we were told last year by a local Christian leader, they are generously willing to admit non-believers to their communities and to their schools, but there is the foregone conclusion that these are their communities and their schools, and it was implicit that it is their generosity and not their obligation or our rights that makes those who believe differently welcome.
[a proposal to 'use' the schools]
Here we sit in Rockford, Illinois in 1996, in a community with, in addition to the usual varieties of Christians and Jews, we have a Unitarian Universalist congregation which has been here almost as long as there have been European settlers, a Buddhist Temple with resident monks, a Muslim Community Center, an organized Hindu community, and Ba'hai's.
And yet, seemingly oblivious to our nation's history and to the diversity which characterizes our community today, this week it was reported that a group of Evangelical Christians has decided that it would be appropriate to utilize Rockford's public schools as a way of spreading its gospel. "Everybody needs to hear about the Lord and know there is hope," said one of the proponents of a plan to disrupt the functioning of a high school to give Christian leaders an opportunity to convert the unchurched.
The plan is so seriously flawed that I find it hard to believe that even reasonable people with an Evangelical perspective would support it, but the reality is that there are people who are so committed to war for America's soul, who are so determined that this must be recognized as a Christian nation, that we dare not ignore this threat to the integrity of our public schools.
It is the hope of the proponents that there are teenagers who are not a part of their churches who will, in order to escape classroom learning situations, utilize a class hour each week to go to a nearby church where they can be evangelized. There is a church with a philosophy that meets their needs that is located near Jefferson High School, so it has been proposed as the site for the pilot project.
The proposal is to give kids a class hour each week to leave the school and to go to the church. One week it would come from their first hour class, the next week the second, the following the third, and so forth. Acknowledging that time has to be subtracted for getting from the school and to the church and back, that means that they would have about 35 minutes for religious education. Subtract, of course the time required for taking attendance to assure that the kids who left the school arrived at the church - and who is it who really believes that a number of kids can be moved from one building to another and then back in 15 minutes? It takes longer than that for them to move from one classroom to another and back in the same building. What is it that the Christian leaders could successfully teach even in 30 minutes a week sandwiched in the middle of a school day? If their gospel is that potent, one would think they would already have managed to get the message across. How much English can a teacher get across in one hour a day, five days a week? Is religion that much easier to teach?
Usually when a program like this is proposed, the organizers make a real effort to involve a lot of religious groups to make it look ecumenical. Not with this plan. They acknowledged to Judy Emerson that they have no interest in "promoting the competition."
Which kids not affiliated with a church are most likely to take advantage of getting out of class for an hour? The ones who most need to be in class, of course. What would the impact be on the regular classes if any significant number of kids chose to participate in the church program? Who would be responsible for processing the attendance data and dealing with the kids who use this as an opportunity to skip classes? The school administrators, of course.
[it is legal]
In one of its less consistent rulings, after having found in the McCullom case, brought by an Champaign Unitarian, that it was not acceptable to have religious leaders go into the schools for religious education classes, the court did hold in the Zorach decision that releasing kids from school to participate in religious education off school property was acceptable as long as the educational process was not disrupted. Justice Douglas, of all people, held that given the history of excusing students for observance of religious holidays, with which teachers co-operated, "Whether she does it occasionally for a few students, regularly for one, or pursuant to a systematized program designed to further the religious needs of all the students does not alter the character of the act." Justices Black, Frankfurter and Jackson dissented. Justice Black insisted:
It was precisely because 18th Century Americans were a religious people divided into many fighting sects that we were given the constitutional mandate to keep Church and State completely separate. ...Now as then, it is only by wholly isolating the state from the religious sphere and compelling it to be completely neutral, that the freedom of each and every denomination and of all nonbelievers can be maintained. It is this neutrality the Court abandons today when it treats New York's coercive system as a program which merely encourages religious instruction or co-operates with religious authorities. .
"State help to religion injects political and party prejudices into a holy field. It too often substitutes force for prayer, hate for love, and persecution for persuasion. Government should not be allowed, under the cover of the soft euphemism of "co-operation," to steal into the sacred area of religious choice."
The Zorach decision stood, nonetheless. There was a rush of released time programs most of which have gone by the boards over the years because the benefits the churches found coming from the efforts was not equal to the energy required to run them.
In the context of this new proposal, it is hard to envision a floating period of absence during the school day as being anything other than disruptive to the educational process. That is why most schools that have a released time program do it strictly at the end of the school day.
Is the problem that we are spending too much time in school teaching English and mathematics and history? Are our kids learning too much and we need to rescue them? This is hardly a common complaint.
[spiritual war]
I noticed a couple of weeks ago that the Pastor of one of our large evangelical churches, of which some of the members of the committee proposing this program are members, announced that he was speaking on "Spiritual Warfare." I wondered about getting a tape of that sermon, but did not.
The issue that is coming before our school board is not fundamentally an issue of practicality nor of constitutional legality, although it can be found wanting in those areas. It goes beyond those to the fundamental question of what it means to live in a religiously diverse society. Jefferson told us that the liberties for which we struggled were never going to be secure - there would always be the danger of new tyrannies against which we would have to be prepared to struggle.
The people who are proposing this experiment are not evil people. I am willing to grant them well intentioned motivation. The reality of what they are trying to do is, however, a threat to our community. The churches they represent have paid staffs for youth ministry, they have abundant physical plants in which to provide programs, they have all the means necessary to reach out to needy youth in our community, and there are countless hours in the week when the kids are not engaged in classroom instruction. To take the gathering of kids in a public school as an opportunity to entice some of them into a religious program is an abuse of the schools. It is particularly ironic that it would be proposed for a school named after Mr. Jefferson.
I have prepared some petitions to the school board which I hope you will join me in signing, which call for the rejection of this program as conflicting with the primary purpose of our schools.
The people who have proposed this program have every right under law to propose it, but we equally have every right to oppose it . The Democratic Process is based on all sides being heard. The maintenance of our religious liberty demands that we be heard on this.