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Rev. Elenora Giddings Ivory
Director, Washington, D.C. Office
Presbyterian Church (USA)
I am Rev. Elenora Giddings Ivory, Director of the Washington Office of the Presbyterian Church (USA). The Presbyterian Church (USA) has approximately 2.8 million members in 176 regional governing bodies called presbyteries across the United States and Puerto Rico.
Prayer In Public Schools
Prayer is a personal petition between an individual and God. If the legislation entitled, "Legislation to Further Protect Religious Freedom" where to become law, it could bring about situations that would cloud a young individual's understanding of God.
A vote against this legislation is not a vote against prayer. Students already have the right to pray in student led bible study groups under the Free Access Law. A vote against this legislation would still leave young people with the right to explore their faith at home under the direction and support of family. A vote against this legislation would leave young people free to explore their faith at their Church, Synagogue, Temple or Mosques under the supervision of trained clergy and lay leadership.
If school officials are allowed to lead prayer or bible study, impressionable young students may be subjected to forms of prayer or religious behavior that is alien to the faith of their families. In a conversation with a 50 year old women who attended public schools at a time when we opened with a Bible reading and prayer, she recounted an experience she had which left her confused even to this day.
Each morning her grade school teacher would read a passage from the bible to the class. After each and every reading, the teacher tore the page out of the Bible and threw the page away. Was this simply a bazaar way of marking a page for the next day's reading-she wonders? Or was it the teachers way of showing disrespect for a religion she herself did not hold, but was mandated by law to present to her students? This women at age 50 still puzzles over this behavior.
Do we really want to put our precious religious readings and prayer in the hands of public officials who may treat it as though it is trash? A vote of yes, on this legislation, would open the door again to this kind of behavior.
We Christians do not even agree on how to pray together-let alone mix us in with Jews, Moslems and Hindus. Pentecostals stand in prayer--Episcopalians Kneel--and Presbyterians bow their heads giving the effect of holding our noses.
Church leaders are trained religious persons who can explain the difference in the way we bring our petitions to God. Should school officials explain the differences in prayer? The policies of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA) have for over 40 years stated that mandated school prayer must not be initiated in our public school systems as a way of protecting the individual religious conscience of us all. Leave the prayer business to the churches and the education business to the school system.
Social Services and Public Funds
In 1988, the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA) stated, "The Church may initiate service ministries and operate service agencies, either for its own adherents or for the public, without governmental intervention and regulation when it uses its own resources to do so. When it wishes to use public funds for serving public needs, the church should understand that it gives implied consent to necessary and proper governmental regulation and supervision, and to the civil compact concerning the organic relationship between church and state."
The legislation, before this committee, suggest that government funds be permitted to come to churches for educational or social service purposes more directly then they do at present. Public funds require public accountability and may not be used in ways that advance or support religion, whether or not in the context of charitable service. Public accountability would leave the explicitly religious activities of the church open to public scrutiny.
When I served as a pastor of a Church in the Roxbury section of Boston in the mid 1970's, we served the poor. But we kept separate our feeding program and community religious activities.
Let's allow our First Amendment freedom of religion to remain as it has for more than 200 years. It has served us well.