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WRITTEN STATEMENT BY C DOW. CHAMBERLAIN
Mr. Chairman and Honorable Members of United States House of Representative Judiciary Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights:
Thank you for the opportunity to address you on a matter of growing concern within diverse elements of the faith communities of our nation.
I am Dow Chamberlain, a United Methodist clergyperson for the past thirty-three years. I am presently under special appointment by Bishop Donald Otto to serve as the executive director of the Virginia Interfaith Center for Public Policy. In this capacity, I analyze proposed public policy from the faith perspective of the sponsoring judicatories which include Episcopalians, Lutherans, United Methodists, Presbyterians, and Roman Catholics and members of the Jewish community. My work is to assist people of faith to advocate public policies which reflect compassion and fairness.
Because I am a theologian, I do not speak as a constitutional lawyer. I will speak to the theologically historical concerns which inform our public policy position on religious activities in tax-supported public schools and the impact on children who are compelled under law to attend school.
I. Theological issues
The national debate concerning appropriate religious activities which may be permitted in public schools does not pit the religious against the irreligious. This debate must be placed in the context of an ongoing theological dialogue that has lasted for three millennia. It is unrealistic to imagine that any of us possess the formula to untie the Gordian knot, we do not even possess the sword to cut through this conundrum; instead, we must understand that we are engaged in an unending task of keeping equally valid understandings of religion and state in some kind of balance. We must accept the fact that if we achieve the proper balance there will be no winners or losers; we all, to some extent, will remain dissatisfied with the compromise.
A casual reading of the writings commonly called the holy Bible would seem to suggest a tilt towards unlimited government expressed through a hereditary monarchy. Indeed, during the Renaissance, these sacred texts were used to bolster the arguments offered in defense of the divine right of kings. It was argued that the king was the elect of God to whom God chose to reveal the law and it was the duty of all persons within the king's domain to be subject to him as unto God. All power belonged to the king unless he had expressly given license for any activity. The only lawful activity was that which was permitted by the king.
But a thorough study of Biblical material would suggest another tradition--the tradition of the commonwealth. We are informed in Judges 17:6 In those days there was no king in Israel; every person did what was right in one's own eyes. When the monarchy had been thoroughly discredited in 586 B.C.E., the prophet Jeremiah envisioned the restoration of Israel. But he did not see the restoration of the monarchy; instead, he said the time would come when God would write the law in every person's heart and the law of God would be so well known there would not even be the need for one person to teach another.
It is for others to judge whether the state-sponsored official cult of the monarchy is to be preferred to a commonwealth in which each person does what is right in his own eyes. Regardless of the merits of either case, it is clear that our fore-fathers appealed to the commonwealth tradition in creating a republic which expressly did not have an established church. Our founding fathers opposed an established church because they were not willing for an authoritarian, absolutist government to claim legitimacy in the name of God rather than from the consent of the people.
I would argue that the option for a commonwealth was chosen with good and sufficient reason. Not only did the several states have very different religious traditions of their own, there was the fresh memory of sectarian strife in Europe. Some of my ancestors were Huguenots who fled from religious persecution in France. Mercifully, King Philip of Spain granted them land in what eventually became part of this nation. The De La Horines became the plain Horines in America. Here they were free to worship God as they chose without any interference from the state. Both state support of religion and state opposition to religion were abhorrent to them.
One would have to add to this memory of religious persecution the fact that this fair Shenandoah Valley is home to many Anabaptists who refused to participate in state sponsored paedo-baptism. The leaders of the state church could not comprehend how just a little water on a baby's head could be such a problem. It wasn't a problem for the bishops and princes. But it did trouble the conscience of the Anabaptist minority. Ignoring religious sensitivities of minorities seldom appears to be a problem for majorities. Anabaptists were willing to suffer death before they would accept state sponsored, generic religion.
A second theological issue is the nature of religion itself. The princes of Europe were quite content with the cuius regio, cuius religio formula which emerged from the Treaty of Westphalia and ushered in modern history. The idea that one must belong to a particular religion simply because it is the choice of the prince does violence to the very definition of religion. Religion does not proceed from coercion but from the free choice of a moral agent.
A third theological issue is the vacuous belief that if some kind of official cult is observed, no matter how perfunctory, that the Almighty is somehow obliged to bless the fortunes of the state. Yes, our faith communities are deeply concerned about religion in public schools. For us, the primary religious issue is whether or not we will establish any kind of meaningful funding equity for children in all our schools. One only need read Jonathan Kozol's "Savage Inequities" to realize that the soul of our nation is at stake in terms of how we choose not to meet the educational needs of many of our children. If we do not establish funding equity for our children's education, imagining that religious activities will somehow make all the difference is to reduce religion to the status of a rabbit's foot. It is simply a public hypocrisy.
To paraphrase Governor John Engler on the same subject, "If we don't do something to give equal opportunity to all students in our schools, our schools don't have a prayer."
So why is prayer in school an issue once again? Is it an attempt to avoid the real issues in public education and blame them on the lack of prayer? Having visited grammar schools in the United Kingdom in which daily prayers, hymns, and homilies are said, has this sort of religion had any positive effect on the population? On a percentage basis, their out of wedlock births and divorce rate has been increasing about the same as ours.
Or is it simply that some people, as is their right, never give up. There were persons who were opposed to the disestablishment. of the church in the various states. They lost that battle but they have renewed it in the public schools. In some communities, the public school was little more than a publicly financed Protestant school. It was that situation which led to the riots in Philadelphia. The only way to quell that civil unrest was to remand religion to the church, synagogue and home, and leave secular education to the public school.
This struggle has been played out in community after community. It is ironic that at a time when this nation welcomes an increasing population of Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, and others that the response to this increasing diversity is the attempt to return to Norman Rockwelltown. I know it is claimed that everything was fine until a few atheist trouble-makers arrived on the scene and forced the removal of prayer from public schools. To put it simply, that view is historically inaccurate. A similar claim was made that all the share-croppers were happy until outside agitators arrived to create the civil rights movement in the sixties. No, oppressed minorities, whether ethnic or religious, are never happy with discrimination. It is simply very hard to speak up when more than being ignored, you will be harassed and bullied for daring to be the Oliver Twist who asks for more.
I would not impugn the motives of all persons who insist we must install prayer in the schools again. I remember back in the sixties I had two young boys in my parish who were the lone Protestants in a public school. Every day religion classes were conducted and the boys were excused to sit in the furnace room. I finally confronted the non-Protestant pastor and asked him if he had any idea how these boys felt. No, he didn't. He just saw the whole world from his majoritarian, privileged position.
II. Public Policy Perspective
From the perspective of an ordinary citizen, our US Constitution has three basic functions. First, it defines the basic structure and relationships among the three branches of our government. Second, it limits the powers of government. Third, it protects the interests of minorities against the majority; because more than being a democracy, our nation is a republic.
When our Constitution was written there was no tax-supported public school system; further, there were no compulsory school attendance laws. The Constitution is silent on the role of religion in public school education; hence, we are left to apply the principles for the separation of church and state to public education. It has been increasingly recognized that any state sponsored religious activity violates the establishment clause of the Constitution, and this is especially problematical when impressionable young children are involved as a captive audience.
We do recognize that in our past many public schools operated all sorts of religious activities. We also recognize there was a time when it was illegal for slaves to be taught to read. Later, it was considered lawful to segregate children on the basis of race. Our nation has since come to reject these practices as being offensive to the very nature of the American spirit and our Republican form of government. The religious observances in public school to which I was subjected as a child belong to a day that is no longer with US.
Because existing Constitutional principles do not allow state sponsored or supported religious activities in public schools, there is now a move to amend the Constitution. It is our belief that this is an inappropriate because this would appear to conflict with the nature of the Constitution itself. We perceive no benefit to be derived from any such amendment.
First, the religious communities are conservative and thus reject granting additional powers to the state. As a person of faith, the very last place I want the state active is in regulating or defining religion. Whom do you trust in government to create a universally applicable definition of prayer? What speech, actions, emotions, postures, adornment constitute prayer and which do not? Apart from the competence to establish meaningful definitions, are we willing to grant that power to the state? Let us not be interventionist fools who gladly rush in where angels fear to tread. From Emperor Constantine to the present, I can think of no government intrusion into religion that has ever produced any salutary effect.
It might be suggested that silent meditation represents an acceptable solution to sponsored or approved prayer. Silent prayer may be fine for Quakers, but for Korean Pentecostal Presbyterians silent prayer is reminiscent of their previous Buddhist practices and as such is an abomination.
Second, as noted above, most constitutional amendments have been crafted to protect an otherwise inadequately protected group of citizens. A school prayer amendment would tend to have the opposite effect. Rather than protecting religious minorities, minorities would have to yield to the religious will of the majority. The closest parallel would be the Volstead Act. We are still able to recall some of the unintended consequences of using a Constitutional amendment to enforce the personal moral choice of teetotalism on an entire population. Roman Catholic priests in Oklahoma were arrested for persisting in use of wine in the Holy Eucharist.
Third, the moral issue facing our nation is not to re-affirm the prerogatives and perquisites of a majority. This is little other than mob rule. The challenge we face in the current debate is how we learn to live together in increased diversity. Two centuries ago, the Europeans scoffed at the notion that any nation could long survive as a democracy without a divinely elected sovereign. Some not only scoffed, they berated us. But we have persisted.
Perhaps those who want a constitutional amendment believe that their interest will be well-served. But suppose having yielded once to the principle of governmental interference with religion, another amendment is passed that meets the political agenda of a yet-to-be-identified majority and is contrary to the interest of persons now seeking an amendment? Will they be pleased with the demons they have released from Pandora's Box? Will they not likely rue the day they did not leave well enough alone?
The United States of America is far more diverse than the battling peoples of the former Yugoslavia. If we are not content with our solutions, we need only look at some of the alternatives to make us want to beat a retreat to the solid principles that have served us so well. The Bosnian war is ample evidence of what happens when state sponsored religion is required and coerced. We cannot afford to accept anything that even represents a smattering of religious privilege that too easily deteriorates into religious oppression.