Students Pray Constantly

What's the Issue?

Children and teachers pray in school all of the time, every single day. It's not against the law. It's not a contradiction of Church-State separation. It's human nature, and you can't ban human nature by law. Prayer is as natural to human beings as breathing, and even atheists have forms of prayer, like gratitude for the wonders of nature (for comparison, see the first prayer after the Barechu in Jewish worship, inspired originally by the rising of the sun.)

Coercion occurs all of the time in schools, every minute. Students are coerced into curricula, daily lessons, a rigid schedule, recess activities, and even social engagements. There are expectations regarding "assemblies," informal social messages conveyed regarding extra-curricular activities, and messages regarding what constitutes social and academic success. Those occur even when the messages are untrue, like "if you don't attend this you'll suffer from social exclusion," or "This activity will get you into a good college."

Whereas schools coerce and force conformity in both academic and social activities, historically since Madeline Murray (O'Hare) courts have forbidden religious coercion in the form of organized prayer. Why? Because organized religious activities are both overtly and covertly methods of creating a formal, state religion, prohibited by the First Amendment, viz.:
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof ... "
It is the coercive realities of group initiated and performed public prayer that are prohibited, because those both appear and in fact do result in an official religion.

How? Just ask most Jewish students and they'll tell you. When the vast majority of students (or even a simple majority, or even a large minority) engage in a specific activity: there is pressure to conform. It may be the same pressure as not attending a dance or the prom: What do you mean you are not participating? EVERYONE WILL BE THERE." It may mean social exclusion, or just the feeling of social exclusion where none is intended but it's just assumed by the portion of the population that does not participate.

But then, there's the bullying. I just heard yesterday the story of a young lady who had to leave her high school and enroll, successfully, in another school because she was being threatened as a Jew. This is right now happening nationwide, often theoretically as a result of the wars in Israel and Gaza, something that has nothing to do with Jewish students in an American high school. But students are particularly vulnerable to inflicting and being coerced by bullying.

Let us be clear about the motive behind the current move toward "prayer in schools." It's not prayer in schools; it's public prayer in schools. And the desire is to legitimate a "Christian America," to delegitimate other religious expressions, to establish a particular religion as the national expression of devotion to God, to include some and exclude others through the social power of conformity. It's to take particular forms of Christianity and make their beliefs not only dominant but official, and necessary for participation in the running of the State.

Prayer is as natural to humans as breathing. But the Founders, so beloved by Americans when they can exploit their opinions to achieve acquiescence from those who object, knew that the gateway to a national religion is opened by subtly coerced religious expression. They knew it because they had experienced it in their own lives, by the Church of England, by those seeking not only conformity but superiority by dint of exclusion.

We are the most "religious" (i.e.: pietistic) of the world's advanced democracies; and the most averse to coercion and conformity. Group prayer in schools is not about prayer. It's about power, and concentrating that power in a single group. It reflects exactly the reason the Founders established the First Amendment: to achieve personal liberty in the face of the coercive State. Official prayer is anathema to democracy, and the enemy of an integrated society where all are assumed equal under the law.