Christian Club : School Religious Groups Rising in Popularity

It’s Monday lunchtime again in Room 206 at El Camino Real High School in Woodland Hills, and the two dozen students who have gathered talk and laugh as they pull out their sandwiches, potato chips, juice packs--and Bibles.

When the chatter subsides and the rustling of sacks and wrappers is stilled, a young male voice, cracking with the changes of adolescence, begins:

“Let us come before you with a righteous heart, Father God,” the teen-ager says solemnly, his head bowed. “I pray that you will strengthen us. . . . Help us do well in school, God, and help us be a light to other people.”

“Amens” from the others seal the prayer. The weekly meeting of the school’s Chi Alpha club--Greek letters used to symbolize “Christ First”--goes into full swing with a reading from the New Testament and some teaching by the group’s president.

Such scenes are becoming increasingly common at public high schools throughout Los Angeles and the nation as religious students exercise rights recently clarified by the U.S. Supreme Court. In a near-unanimous decision in June, 1990, the justices ruled that secondary schools must allow religious clubs on campus if other non-academic student organizations are permitted.

Since then, Christian clubs have begun cropping up at high schools throughout the sprawling Los Angeles Unified School District. More than half of the district’s 49 high schools have groups that attract five to 50 students at meetings held before class, during lunch or after school.

The rise of campus Christian clubs over the last few years coincides with an increase in churchgoing by teen-agers. According to a recently released Gallup youth poll, half of the nation’s youths attended church weekly in 1993, up from 45% the year before.

Civil libertarians decry the growing presence of the clubs on campuses, saying they further blur the line between church and state. But advocates of such associations, including the students, defend them as a legitimate gathering of youths with a mutual interest, akin to a chess or ski club.

“It’s a place for people who have a common belief in Christianity to come together and anybody who’s curious about Christianity to come,” said Daniel Chapman, a 17-year-old junior who leads El Camino’s Chi Alpha and often conducts each week’s Bible study. “It’s a good resource.”

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District officials say the establishment of Christian clubs at high schools has sparked surprisingly little controversy. But because of the constitutional eggshells underfoot when it comes to religion on a public school campus, the Los Angeles school district’s legal office has issued strict guidelines on application of the Supreme Court decision and the 1984 Equal Access Act, which first unlocked classroom doors to religiously themed meetings.

Howard Friedman, an attorney for the school district, said the high court ruling, known as the Mergens decision, broadened the Equal Access Act to put religious student groups on virtually the same official footing as other clubs. With that status comes the ability to tap materials and resources that are available to other sanctioned organizations, such as use of school bulletin boards or the campus public address system to announce meetings.

The court ruled that the clubs must be initiated and led by students and should have a school staff member monitoring proceedings. The law covers groups of any faith or ideology, but the vast majority of new high school religious clubs in Los Angeles are Christian, Friedman said.

Fears that the law would spawn meetings of devil-worshiping, neo-Nazi or hate groups have not materialized, said Charles Haynes, co-chairman of a broad-based religious and educational coalition that developed equal-access guidelines for schools.

“I have not in all my travels found the parade of ‘horribles’ that people predicted--that there would be all these Satan clubs or proselytizing all over the place,” said Haynes, who is a visiting professional scholar at Vanderbilt University’s Freedom Forum First Amendment Center in Nashville.

At Fairfax High School in Los Angeles, clubs have been formed by Muslims, Jews and Koreans who are Christians. “The kids are all very, very serious about their religion and I put out the red carpet for the positive things they are thinking about,” Fairfax Principal Mike O’Sullivan said. “Who could be against them leading their lives in a socially acceptable way?”

Still, advocates contend that students across the nation are running into opposition in setting up such groups. In February, the conservative American Center for Law and Justice filed suit against school districts in New York and Virginia--where the center is based--on behalf of youths who alleged that they had been prevented from starting Bible clubs.

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The predominance of clubs with a Christian orientation worries Carol Plotkin of the Pacific Southwest Region of the American Jewish Congress. The congress, along with other civil liberties groups, opposed the Equal Access Act and the Mergens decision.

“One of the reasons we are philosophically against the creation of the clubs in the first place is that it puts minorities at a disadvantage, whatever the minority happens to be. We happen to be Jewish, and in a pluralist society, it’s hard to compete with the majority religion,” she said.

Plotkin said her son has had to turn away invitations from Christian friends to attend school Bible studies--invitations that create a social pressure she says teen-agers should not be subjected to.

“Young, impressionable people, we don’t believe, should be approached on high school campuses. . . . This has to do with a belief system, with basic religious and moral standards, and that’s what the First Amendment tries to keep separated (from schools),” she said.

Students involved in the clubs deny that their goal is to proselytize in campus hallways and classrooms. Rather, they said, the groups offer an outlet for committed young people to integrate their faith with everyday life, so much of which is spent at school.

“It’s kind of nice to get involved with Christians at your school so you don’t live a church life and a school life,” said Melisa Powell, 15, of El Camino. “You can be a Christian at school.”

But the students acknowledge that their meetings often have an evangelical bent.

“Jesus told us to go into all the world and preach the Gospel to those who don’t know the Gospel,” said 17-year-old Ray Causly, a senior at Monroe High School in North Hills and leader of its Christian Club. “And the people in our school are the ones we’re most accessible to.”

Faculty advisers for several groups said the clubs offer support for students striving to live a Christian lifestyle in the midst of the temptations facing teen-agers today, such as drugs, sex and alcohol.

“I see that students need and want this kind of encouragement and alternatives,” said Elva Quintero, faculty adviser for the 20-member group at Roosevelt High School on the Eastside.

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Howard E. Miller, who advises the Christian club at Fremont High School in South-Central Los Angeles, said the 20 or so students who meet twice a week during lunch in his wood-shop class “really love Jesus, don’t like gangbanging and want to get away from that type of life.”

District guidelines--and those put out by Haynes’ coalition of religious and educational groups--mandate that supervising teachers be impartial observers. Staff advisers should refrain from commenting or participating in any way “that would convey either support or disapproval of meeting subject matter,” according to the memo issued by the school district.

But practice may not always match the theory.

Some club sponsors say they often participate, whether by singing songs with the students, praying aloud with them or even putting together the agenda for the week’s Bible study.

Other Christian club advisers complain that their groups are subject to greater scrutiny than the cheerleading squad or the debate club.

To Plotkin, such vigilance is necessary to ensure that no civil liberties or individual rights get trampled.

“We keep a close watch,” she said. “We try very hard to maintain the separation. And we do enter . . . in lawsuits when we think there’s a chance to make better laws than there are today.”

But advocates of the groups see no contradiction between preserving religious freedom and allowing students to voluntarily assemble on campus to share their faith and spiritual experiences.

“If I could run a common denominator through every Christian club I’ve been at, it would be students encouraging other students to be strong in their Christian values,” said Jamie Johnson, youth pastor at Osborne Neighborhood Church in Arleta.

Times education writer Stephanie Chavez contributed to this story.