For Heaven’s sake:
On m
y Facebook list of ‘friends’, there ‘s a picture thing going around that looks like this:
I about blew a gasket on this one, and rather than bug people about it, figured I’d whip out my Lawyer and Historian hats and explain why this particular notion is a crock.
First off, the US Constitution (1st and 14th amendments) said all along that the government is not allowed to bring any particular religious point of view in and say - this faith is better or more approved by the government than any other.
The reason for this was really simple - in most of the countries of Europe, you had an Official Religion of the Government; Catholicism, different variant Lutherans, Presbyterians (Scotland), and so on. God blessed the ruler on top, and God’s blessing said that if the ruler was a Lutheran, you’d better be one too - or face a lot of other problems. Extra taxes, can’t vote, few if any legal protections, can’t publicly worship in your chosen faith, and so on.
The reason that America got so popular is that it allowed a lot of people who didn’t care much for their ruler’s religion somewhere to go, and there were a lot of them, including pretty much any Christian church, and any non-Christians. My Rittenhouse roots are from Mennonites who left Germany and the Netherlands to follow William Penn to the safe haven of Pennsylvania. Maryland took in Catholics, New England took in all sorts of odd Protestant groups, and so forth. And Utah took in Mormons escaping persecution in the rest of the country.
When I was little, in the early 1960′s, they did have school prayer, all right - the principal or teacher would lead a prayer, and you had to say exactly the same prayer that they said, or get in trouble and be sent to the office on report. If they made a Protestant kid say a Catholic prayer, or a Jewish kid say a very Christian prayer, that was just too bad, and you had to obey anyway.
(The people who usually push this may have some sort of idea that their religion would come out on top. Don’t bet on it.)
The Supreme court decided in 1962 to stop this sort of thing, because you were having a agency of the state push a particular religious view down the throats of people. When you mix Church and State, you are letting someone in the government pick a religion they like and use the power of the government against people who don’t follow that religion. And, of course, people who disagree with any law in a church/state mix become people who are ‘against God’s will’…and can suffer horrible consequences. Just ask the Jews of 20th century Europe.
You can’t stop people from praying to God privately in school; tons of kids do it every day, asking for all sorts of help and advice. All the present laws do is forbid the people running the schools from pushing any kind of religion at the kids. To me, that’s the job of the family and their temples, churches, what have you, to support and build up a love, interest and involvement in their faith. Not the assistant principal down the hall with a paddle.