By Gary Bauer, President of The Family Research Council
April 1995 – One of the most remarkable things we’ve seen in Washington since election day is the speed with which some leading politicians have taken up and as quickly put down the “hot stove” of voluntary school prayer.
In the days immediately following the GOP landslide, Speaker-to-be Newt Gingrich volunteered to take up a constitutional amendment on school prayer by next July 4. President Bill Clinton told a press conference in Jakarta, Indonesia, that he had always supported school prayer, but he quickly abandoned that position when liberals frowned. And some leading Republicans were quick to pooh-pooh the importance of the issue.
Surely there are other serious problems in an educational system that encompasses nearly 50 million students and on which we expend more than $300 billion annually. School violence, gangs, drugs, out-of-wedlock pregnancy, AIDS, suicide among youth, dropouts – all of these rank as serious educational concerns. As a former Undersecretary of Education and White House domestic policy advisor, I have been involved in seeking answers to all these problems.
But I also think there are some compelling reasons why voluntary school prayer is important. First, by officially accommodating religious free expression by our young people, we recognize that the state is not God. There is no more important lesson we can teach our young people. It is a lesson our teachers and administrators should also learn.
Ours is a century in which over 100 million people have been killed by their own governments. This tragic toll makes the 20th century the bloodiest in human history. Previous ages certainly saw dynastic and religious wars. Persecution and strife claimed their thousands and their hundreds of thousands. Yet, this is the century of the totalitarian impulse. We alone have seen fascism, communism and other militant all-embracing philosophies. In an increasingly rare observation, Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart noted that when we teach nothing about God, we are not, in fact, being “neutral” about religion. We are teaching young people most powerfully that religion has nothing to say about the great questions with which they are called upon to grapple each day in their courses of study.
By banning voluntary school prayer, we are acceding to the federal courts’ ruling in the case of Lee v. Weisman that “God has been ruled out of public education as an instrument of inspiration or consolation.” Do we face a real danger that our U.S. government will be mistaken for God? We have only to look at the ease with which scientists at the National Institute of Health (NIH) are moving to conceive, experiment upon and kill embryonic humans. Few members of the cultural elite, with the merciful exception of the Washington Post, have raised any qualms about this decision. And fewer still recognize the incompatibility of these actions with the fundamental philosophy which undergirds the founding of this country. For it was no less a “separationist” than Thomas Jefferson himself who wrote in A Summary View of the Rights of British North America (1774) that “the God who gave us life gave us Liberty at the same time.”
A second reason why voluntary school prayer is important can be seen in the collapse of morality in our society. Members of our elite media are quick to scorn the possibility of any connection between a casual disregard for life and the official policy of spurning public references to God. Could voluntary prayer in schools alone check the spread of gang violence, shootings and rapes? Perhaps not. But clearly, in troubled inner-city schools like New York’s Thomas Jefferson High, students were not being murdered for their starter jackets in the days when the Regents prayer invited young people to “acknowledge [their] dependence” and “beg the blessings” of God on their “parents, teachers and country.”
Nor is Thomas Jefferson High the only place where moral authority has collapsed. In fashionable Potomac, Maryland, wealthy parents rent buses to send their high school seniors on illegal drinking binges. And at the elite Naval Academy, large groups of carefully selected midshipmen have been expelled for cheating on exams. Others there have been disciplined for chaining women mids to urinals. Only the “cultured despisers of religion” are bold enough to say with certainty that the banning of religious free expression has nothing to do with these instances of violence and corruption. George Washington thought otherwise: “Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.”
A third reason why voluntary school prayer is important is because people think it is. This is supposed to be a democratic republic. Our House of Representatives boasts the motto: “Here, sir, the people rule.” On no other issue, perhaps, has that fundamental principle been so consistently flouted for so long.
Liberals despise voluntary prayer in no small measure because it has been so long and so faithfully embraced by so many of the plain people of America. Voluntary prayer bridges terrible racial divisions, too. It was a heroic black principal, Bishop Knox, who braved dismissal to allow his Mississippi high school students a chance to pray. And it is in violence-racked, drug-ravaged schools that the humility to publicly acknowledge the Almighty is the most affecting. I cannot help but observe that just as there are no atheists in foxholes, neither are there many believers in newsrooms and broadcast studios. Those who have not had to bury their children can easily dismiss the importance of prayer as a source of consolation and strength.
Finally, school prayer is important because liberals think it is. While few of us religious conservatives have been willing to sacrifice other worthy goals to the achievement of voluntary prayer, we must concede that liberals are onto something here. They know what we have apparently forgotten: that there is a kulturkampf – a cultural war – going on in America. At stake is whether we be a nation under God and under His judgment or a community united only by a common adherence to each one “doing his own thing.”
The liberal conception of society is one where autonomy is the highest of competing values. It is because of their attachment to autonomy that liberals will tolerate any lifestyle except the life of faith. Under liberal governance, students must be forced to participate in condom-banana exercises, because they must be exposed to “reality,” but they may not even hear another’s prayer, because that would unduly burden their “impressionable” young minds.
Because of these reasons, I will not abandon the important and necessary goal of returning voluntary prayer to our nation’s public schools. If it takes a constitutional amendment to reassert the right of the American people to govern themselves on a point that is close to their hearts, so be it. We have amended the Constitution for far less worthy purposes. And let us have a useful and instructive debate on the issue. Let’s let everyone see who is and who is not in favor of accommodating this most modest of requests. The people need to know who their
friends are. 
