When God or Mohammed or Buddha attend, public schools become a battleground. But with common sense and dialogue, parents, educators and students can find common ground.
That's the view of Charles Haynes and the Rev. Oliver Thomas, national experts on the First Amendment and religion in public schools. Haynes is a First Amendment Center senior scholar and Thomas is a religious liberty attorney. They wrote "Finding Common Ground," the primary resource used in the Utah 3Rs Project (Rights, Responsibility and Respect), which trains teachers on where religion belongs in public schools.Monday, they spoke to Utah school superintendents.
Litigation has "replaced baseball as the national pastime," said Thomas. So why would schools want to look at religion, almost guaranteed to spark lawsuits? "Because it's the smart thing to do. You buy the firetruck before the fire."
Some of the battles seem petty, said Haynes, like one over Halloween. California schools are fighting over tolerance. Christmas is always controversial.
"A great deal is at stake in each of these," he said, "because it isn't about Halloween or Christmas . . . It brings to the surface long-festering and deeply held convictions on all sides."
Schools "must be places where religion and religious conviction are treated with fairness and respect," said Haynes. "All our rights are at stake in how we treat one another."
Part of America's challenge is that it is the "first country not defined by bloodlines or kinship, but by shared principles."
The law does not provide most of the answers to religious liberty questions, said Thomas. Rather, it provides the "floor you cannot fall below."
He warned that the law should not be the only thing that administrators consult. For instance, he said, there's no constitutional right to hear religious music in a public school concert. But "I hope you hear it sometime. I would argue that many of the great works of music are religious. To go through public school without exposure to great music . . . would be tragic. But you should not feel you have gone to church."
The answer is balance. "Make sure religion is treated with fairness and respect."
The key point for school administrators is to remember the First Amendment applies to government, not to students. "They can establish all the religion they want as long as they don't coerce, disrupt or harass," said Thomas.
That means students can pray, have student-organized-and-run religion clubs, preach to each other, write about their week at summer Bible camp, mention God or Allah or another higher power in valedictory addresses.
Teachers can address religion in an educational way. While a teacher can't preach to students, he can bring out a creche for a class and explain its significance to Christians. Or a Star of David. Or other religious symbols. Leave it up long and it can't be justified as educational.
"The courts are looking for the way we are a kind of neutral broker among religions and between religious and non-religious," Thomas said.
Educators also need to learn the don'ts of religious liberty. First, religion shouldn't be ignored," said Thomas, or you get texts "dumbed down" to where pilgrims are people who traveled a long dis-tance.
"Don't deprive students of the richness of studying the role of religion in history, arts, science . . . "
Educators should not censor religion to try to create a "religion-free zone," said Thomas. "Don't censor viewpoints because they happen to be religious in your public schools."
And they must not prohibit values.
"This doesn't mean values neutrality," he said, adding that it's OK to tell Johnny not to cheat on a test, but it's not a good idea to tell him not to cheat because it will "send him to hell in a New York second."
"Never teach values in a way that undermines religious conviction," said Thomas. "Remember that it's not a matter of conscience for many, but a matter of revelation."
If all else fails, he said, educators should listen to their lawyers with one ear and their mothers with the other. Lawyers may know the law, but mothers have a "good idea what fairness looks like."