GOD IS NOT DEAD, NEITHER IS HE DEAF

Hoo-boy, here we go again.

The U.S. Supreme Court has struck down a Texas school board’s policy of mandatory prayers broadcast to the crowd before football games. It seems that two families—one Catholic and one Mormon--objected to the school district’s policy of letting the students elect "chaplains" to lead prayers over the stadium P.A. system before football games.

Of course, proponents of school prayer treated the Court’s decision as if it had legalized the hunting of Christians for sport. ``The government's 'benign neutrality' toward religion in this country is now nothing short of malevolent hostility,'' said Jan LaRue of the conservative Family Research Council. "We feel like students' free-speech rights are being stepped on," the president of the local school board said. And one local bidnessman (that’s how they pronounce it in Texas) was quoted as saying: ``You walk down the school hallway any day and you'll hear the Lord's name taken in vain, but you can't pray. When you take God out of anything, you put the devil in his place.''

In reality, nothing could be further from the truth. According to Justice John Paul Stevens’ opinion for the court: ``Nothing in the Constitution ... prohibits any public school student from voluntarily praying at any time before, during or after the schoolday. But the religious liberty protected by the Constitution is abridged when the state affirmatively sponsors the particular religious practice of prayer...worship is a responsibility and a choice committed to the private sphere." The questions and comments by the Justices during the argument of the case overwhelmingly refute the assertion that the Court is ‘hostile to religion." Justice Stephen Breyer noted that "the purpose of the Establishment Clause is to allow parents to raise their children in the religion of their choice." And let’s not forget that, back in 1990, the Court gave high school students the right to meet on their own in Bible and prayer clubs on public school campuses.

The point is not that YOU can’t pray. The point is that you can’t make ME pray along WITH you or make me listen to your prayer. Why is this so hard a concept to grasp? Is your prayer somehow devalued by the fact that I’m not doing it, too? Is your relationship with the Creator so deeply affected by mine that if I’m not plugged into the Celestial Switchboard, you’re not getting through either? Does God only hear us if we’re all yelling the same thing at him at the same time? If God is not dead, neither is he deaf.

It’s also important to note that that it wasn’t atheists bringing the lawsuit, but rather people whose religion differed from the majority in the predominantly Baptist school district, people who were forced to bring the lawsuit anonymously so as to avoid reprisals form their gentle neighbors in Santa Fe County, Texas. I find it highly significant that we’ve gone from atheists like Madalyn Murray O’Hair bringing suits like this to people who have realized that if there’s going to be a school prayer, it’s not going to be one of theirs. A mandatory school prayer runs the risk of aggravating conflicts, not just between believers and non-believers, but between believers of different flavors. Those are conflicts that can get real ugly, real fast.

When you consider the issues currently dividing religious communities, it’s a particularly good time for the high court to affirm the overriding principle that the schools, as an agency of the guvmint, need to stay out of the issue of religion entirely. Example: Southern Baptists have now adopted as an article of their faith that "the office of pastor is limited to men as qualified by Scripture," apparently following the pronouncement of St. Paul that "I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence." (Oh, yeah, Paul, like THAT’s ever going to happen.) So what if a female cheerleader gets elected to deliver the invocation? How will the Baptists feel about having to sit through that? And do YOU want to sit through the brouhaha when that hits the fan?

Remember, friends: Religious Freedom--it isn’t just for heathens anymore.

COPYRIGHT 2000 BY JERRY D. RHOADES, JR