In the first few posts, I’ve been abstract in defining the full life approach to politics in order to lay some groundwork, but I've wanted to use the space to discuss specific issues and policies and how this approach would handle them. I wouldn't have guessed that the first such issue would be prayer in public schools, but I had such a strong reaction to this story, about renewed efforts at introducing prayer into schools in the wake of the Supreme Court's decision in Kennedy v. Bremerton School Dist. that it seemed a good place to start.
To quickly summarize the case, a high school football coach in a public school, Kennedy, prayed on the field after each game and was joined by his players as well as coaches and players from opposing teams. The school feared this behavior violated the Establishment Clause and instructed him to stop. He didn't, he lost his job, and he sued for violation of his First Amendment rights.
I'm not going to dissect this specific case or the Supreme Court's strange and dishonest opinion; Justice Sotomayor's dissent and articles like this one have that covered and are worth reading. I don’t really want to talk about the broader law and policy either. Public school staff, like all public officials, are individuals with First Amendment rights even as they are representatives of the state, so there will always need to be a balance that allows personal practice and expression until the point that it becomes state endorsement. That balance will be struck with an appropriate legal test (which Sotomayor points out the Supreme Court already had in place but threw out in this case) and reflected in school policies. These are deep questions, but the problem was closer to being solved before this opinion.
Instead, the questions that interest me here are the limits of law and the importance of individual character in protecting freedom of religion, or any important right. In the Kennedy case and the stories in the article, as in my personal experience, the adults don't appear to understand why they shouldn’t engage in overt religious displays. They know that there are legal restrictions and have a sense of “separation of church and state,” but the underlying idea does not seem alive to them; many of them seem to treat it as an imposition instead of as an expression of a great principle of democracy and liberty. We’ve had the First Amendment for more than two hundred years, and every high school American history course covers it, but here we are.
What do we do when our core principles have no force in the hearts of those who need to defend them? They must be enforced in law, but law can’t substitute for citizens, particularly those in positions of authority, feeling the weight of the principle themselves; a right will never be fully protected if it has to be enforced case by case, and as the Supreme Court just demonstrated, those upholding the law can lose sight of the principle as well. Instead, it has to come back to persuasion.
I don’t expect that everyone can be persuaded: there are Americans who expressly want to use the power of government to coerce others into practicing their religion, including children in mandatory public schools, and they won't be persuaded unless their core beliefs change. But, I believe there are many Americans who support prayer in schools for benign reasons because they don't appreciate the harm it can do, and this is the group I want to reach. To do that, we can’t turn to the distant authority of the Constitution (particularly because it is open to self-serving interpretation) or abstract principle. Instead, we need to make clear what’s at stake, in human terms, to give life to those principles.
My personal story of school prayer will be familiar to many, and involves the daily, pre-lunch prayer one of my (private) elementary school teachers used to lead. It was a non-denominational prayer, but even then I remember feeling that it didn't fit me or my Hindu family, because that's not when or how we prayed. But, I had to go along with it because I didn’t want to be difficult or left out. This was an alienating experience for me, but what stands out more sharply is the treatment of the one student who came from a non-religious family and who remained silent during the prayer. He was allowed to do this, but I know he was teased about it by the other kids, including me. I can only imagine how he felt every day just before lunchtime, knowing he would once again be the odd one out and that a facet of his family life would once again be exposed and ridiculed. I wonder whether he ever considered joining in the prayer or if he worried he’d be betraying his parents or himself. It may sound minor; what's the harm in a small, generic prayer? All I can say is that in those moments I felt that we did not belong. That's still with me thirty years later, as it is for countless others who had similar experiences as children. I don't know if that feeling is with any of Coach Kennedy's students, but I am certain it is with other teenagers in similar situations around the country.
To make a child feel strange and unwelcome, to make her choose between her teachers and her family, to make her decide daily whether to be set apart or compromise who she is to fit in, to leave that mark for a lifetime - these are not the only costs of school prayer, and certainly not the only costs of putting the force of the state behind religion, but they are real and understandable.
What should we say about the character of the adults who put children through this? I'm sure many of them believe that bringing their faith into school is an act of service, a chance to share their values and something positive in their lives with their students. Good intentions should count for something, but not if they are hollow. In the story linked above, one school official defended school prayer:
If done well, DeFrance added, coach-led prayer could yield advantages for his district’s 2,000 students, serving as a way to learn about other cultures.
“I could see some real interesting things like, ‘Okay, Bill, you’re Hindu. You lead the prayer this week,’ and give some background about why Hindus pray,” he said. Plus, “I do think sometimes having a little bit of a spirit helps you to play.”
This is superficially inclusive, but there's no investment in understanding if this makes any sense for Bill's religion or whether he would want to be drafted as a cultural tour guide for his classmates. It certainly shows no thought for the students who don't belong to a faith. In these stories, I see adults who are deeply concerned with their own rights, or even their mere preferences, but who have little interest in those of the children in their charge.
Looking back, the reason I reacted so strongly to these cases was not that the individuals involved were violating a Constitutional principle, but that they were wielding their authority so selfishly and so thoughtlessly. The third tenet of the full life view is:
To accomplish that, government should do whatever works best.
This is meant to embody pragmatism, but also humility: often government will be only a part of the solution, if that. It's easy to see politics as the precursor to policy, but we also need a politics that speaks to our responsibilities as communities and individuals - in other words, that calls on us to show character.