Protestant and Catholic organizations welcomed last Monday’s...

Protestant and Catholic organizations welcomed last Monday’s U.S. Supreme Court decision supporting provisions of a 6-year-old federal act that permits religious clubs to meet on high school grounds after classes.

But school districts can still deny permits for any clubs not related to the school’s curriculum, a policy that some Southland-based evangelical groups say has been common.

“Most public schools have tried to declare most clubs as curriculum clubs, therefore shutting out all clubs having to do with religion,” said Forrest Turpen, executive director for Christian Educators Assn., based in Pasadena.

The 8-1 ruling noted that the 1984 Equal Access Act says that if a high school permits a stamp collecting or chess club--that is, a special interest group not related to school courses--the school must open its doors to any “non-curriculum” groups without regard to religious, political or philosophical views. The case related to the denial of a religious club at an Omaha, Neb., school.

The ruling was greeted by the National Assn. of Evangelicals and the National Council of Churches as one that correctly made a distinction between school-sponsored and student-sponsored religion. “The former is unconstitutional; the latter is not,” said the two groups, which often disagree, in a statement also joined by the Christian Legal Society and the Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs.

The U.S. Catholic Conference and the Knights of Columbus also praised the court. Supreme Knight Virgil C. Dechant said the court’s ruling “coerces no one but simply empowers religiously motivated student groups to make the same use of school facilities as other student groups.”

A nationwide ministry to high-school-age students does not have a project ready to launch in light of the court ruling, according to Ken Tuttle, national administrator of Student Venture, based in Rancho Bernardo.

“We’d be happy to help students with advice,” Tuttle said. Student Venture is affiliated with Campus Crusade for Christ and operates in 20 major metropolitan areas. But Tuttle said he doubted that club meetings on school grounds would be more appealing than the group’s meetings at night in homes and community halls.

Organizations concerned with civil liberties have warned of possible abuses. A statement by John Buchanan, chairman of People for the American Way, said “impressionable children” might assume that such clubs are “part and parcel of their school-approved, daily instruction” and an American Jewish Congress spokesman said he feared that peer pressure could be exerted by evangelical Christian students in some communities.

But the board of an organization with a similar perspective, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, based in Silver Spring, Md., has been divided on the issue. “The equal access concept is quite appealing in theory,” spokesman Joseph Conn said. “It is a practice that is going to have to be monitored quite closely.”

MEETINGS

About 2,000 United Methodists in Southern California and Hawaii will begin their annual, five-day business sessions Wednesday night at the University of Redlands. Bishop Felton E. May, on special assignment to create church responses nationally to drug and alcohol abuse problems, will speak during three convention worship services at the university chapel--at 8 a.m. on Friday and Saturday and at 10:30 a.m. June 16.

A national conference on U.S. Catholic efforts to assist migrants and refugees will begin Tuesday morning at Loyola Marymount University. The meetings, which end next Saturday, include a luncheon talk Wednesday by Jewel Lafontant, the U.S. coordinator for refugee affairs.

The ethnic outreach of Jehovah’s Witnesses is evident in the growing number of non-English-language regional conventions offered by the organization this summer. Of the four gatherings at Dodger Stadium--each four days long--two are in Spanish this year instead of the usual one. The first English-language meeting started Thursday and ends Sunday. Smaller conventions next month at the Witnesses’ Woodland Hills facility will be in Japanese, Korean and Chinese.

A broad range of ethics questions will be explored in a June 17-20 conference at Biola University in La Mirada. Harold O. J. Brown, chairman of the Christian Action Council and director of the Rockford Institute Center on Religion and Society, will chair the event. Among the speakers is the Rev. Jeb Magruder, a one-time figure in the Watergate scandal during the Nixon Administration who is now a minister in Columbus, Ohio, where he also chairs the Columbus Commission on Ethics and Values. Registration is $230.

PEOPLE

Mike Love of the Beach Boys will host a gathering of 500 practitioners of Transcendental Meditation at his Santa Barbara estate next weekend. The “Meditation and Music Festival for World Peace” features a Saturday performance by sitar virtuoso Debu Chaudhuri from India, according to a publicity release. The stated purpose: “To help restore balance in nature in drought-stricken California and promote peace in the world.”