Christ on Campus : Religious Clubs Cropping Up at Public Schools in Valley and Nationwide

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 there talk and laugh as they pull out their sandwiches, potato chips, juice packs--and Bibles.

Then the chatter subsides, the rustling of sacks and wrappers is stilled and a young male voice, cracking with the changes of adolescence but sounding assured nonetheless, 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 Chi Alpha club--Greek letters that stand for Christ First--goes into full swing with a reading from the New Testament and 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 granted them 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 the district’s 49 high schools have groups that attract from five to 50 students at meetings held before class, during lunch or after school.

In the San Fernando Valley alone, about a dozen of the 17 Los Angeles district high schools have such groups.

The rise of campus Christian clubs 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.

Some civil libertarians decry the campus organizations, saying they blur the line between church and state. But advocates of such associations, not least the students themselves, 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 group and often conducts the weekly Bible study. “It’s a good resource.”

“It’s a way of witnessing to people . . . of fellowshipping with people at my school,” added Deanna Turner, 17, who founded a Christian club at Sylmar High School in December. Her group, like most in the Valley, plans to devote itself to Scripture, prayer and mutual encouragement.

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

Howard Friedman, an attorney for the Los Angeles 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 footing as other clubs. With that status comes the ability to tap materials and resources available to other sanctioned organizations, such as use of the school bulletin or campus public-address system to announce meetings.

*

Under the court ruling, the clubs must be student-initiated and led and should have a school staff member monitor proceedings. The law covers groups of any faith or ideology, but the vast majority of high school religious clubs in Los Angeles that have taken advantage of the liberalized environment are Christian, Friedman said.

Fears that the law would spawn meetings of devil-worshiping, neo-Nazi or hate groups have not materialized, either in Los Angeles or other parts of the country, 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, a visiting professional scholar at Vanderbilt University’s Freedom Forum First Amendment Center in Nashville, Tenn.

At Fairfax High School in Los Angeles, clubs have been formed by Muslims, Jews and Korean 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,” said Fairfax Principal Mike O’Sullivan.

“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.

The predominance of clubs with a Christian orientation is precisely what 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.

“It’s not surprising that you don’t see a Muslim club or a Buddhist club. We live in a majority Christian culture. And (in) the more fundamentalist organizations that are around, part of the religion is to spread the word.”

Plotkin said her own son has had to turn away invitations from Christian friends to attend school Bible studies--invitations that create a social pressure she believes 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 1st Amendment tries to keep separated” from schools, she said. “Religion is just one of those things you don’t infringe on in our society.”

Students involved in the clubs deny that their goal is to aggressively 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, 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, emphasizing the Christian message and encouraging members to bring non-Christian friends to either the campus gathering or the churches they attend.

“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.”

The clubs also 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 Los Angeles’ Eastside. “They have a sense that they don’t need to follow what society is projecting on them.”

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.” The Bible study sessions have taken on a bilingual flair, with many students praying and reading in Spanish.

“We as a group would show love to all people and show people how we live and how they’re missing something,” said Monroe High’s Ray, who brings his Bible and a book of verses to school each day. Sometimes he gets needled as “Reverend Ray” by fellow members of the basketball team.

Ray and a few other Christian Club friends congregate at one of their homes every Tuesday at 6:45 a.m. to pray for the success of their weekly lunchtime meeting.

At El Camino, a handful of devout students gather on Thursdays, aside from their usual Monday meetings, also to pray--for country, school and each other.

Occasionally, the students said, there are miraculous results, like the time Melisa, who hurt her neck in a recent car accident, was able--with her doctor’s approval--to remove in just a few days a brace he had expected her to wear for weeks. At other times the prayer is for emotional well-being, like the requests for divine comfort for a youth whose grandfather is stricken with cancer.

The Northridge earthquake prompted Christian students at several schools to gather for mutual solace, said officials of Grace Community Church of Sun Valley, whose ministers often visit campus Bible clubs.

“They needed comfort, so we looked at the Psalms talking about the power and the love of God and at some of Jesus’ teachings,” Spencer DeBurgh, co-director of the church’s youth ministry, said of one such gathering.

*

All meetings must be attended by each group’s faculty adviser. However, Los Angeles school 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 a school district memo.

“They’re a school staff person who should maintain a neutrality,” attorney Friedman said, “whether it’s religion, politics, or sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll.”

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.

“It’s impossible to keep the adviser 100% out of the activity in terms of being passive,” said one teacher who asked not to be named. “He has concerns, too, that he may want to pray about. The idea of student-initiated (activities) is good, but there’s no way to carry that through legally 100%.”

*

Other Christian club advisers complain that their groups, while not necessarily faced with open hostility from administrators, come under greater scrutiny than, say, the cheerleading squad or the debate club.

To Plotkin of the American Jewish Congress, such vigilance is all to the good, ensuring that no civil liberties or individual rights are trampled.

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

But supporters of the clubs 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.

The church’s youth group includes a number of teen-agers involved in Bible study groups at their schools. Johnson hopes to link such clubs in a network to enable students to share ideas as well as promote a massive youth event, part of the much-anticipated five-day Valley crusade by evangelist Luis Palau.

Coincidentally, that event, planned for June 4, falls on the fourth anniversary of the Supreme Court’s ruling that allows religious societies at school.

“The greatest thing about having Christian Bible study clubs on campus is that it allows there to be a unity of all of God’s people,” Johnson said.

“There’s Baptist kids, there’s Methodist kids, there’s nondenominational kids, there’s Catholic kids. The clubs allow them to have a meeting time where they would never otherwise get together.”

Guidelines Q&A;

Guidelines on student-led religious clubs at public secondary schools were agreed upon a few years ago by 21 religious and educational organizations to help administrators interpret the Equal Access Act. The act became law in 1984 and was upheld in 1990 by the U.S. Supreme Court in an 8-1 decision, Westside Community Schools vs. Mergens.

The coalition’s religious groups ranged from the conservative National Assn. of Evangelicals and the Christian Legal Society to the liberal American Jewish Congress and the National Council of Churches. Also taking part were the National Conference of Christians and Jews and the U.S. Catholic Conference’s education department.

Educational groups participating included the National Education Assn., the National Assn. of Secondary School Principals, the National PTA and the American Federation of Teachers.

“Congress’ primary purpose in passing the Act, according to the Supreme Court, was to end ‘perceived widespread discrimination’ against religious speech in public schools,” according to the coalition guidelines.

No change was made in the Supreme Court’s prohibitions against government-directed prayer. But, the guidelines said, if a school permits student groups to meet for student-initiated activities not directly related to the school curriculum, it is required to treat all such student groups equally, even if they are religious in nature.

Here are some of the guidelines, which they put into question-and-answer form:

*

Question: What does “student-initiated” mean?

Answer: It means that the students themselves are seeking permission to meet and that they will direct and control the meeting. Teachers and other school employees may not initiate or direct such meetings, nor may outsiders.

*

Q. May outsiders attend a student meeting?

A. Yes, if invited by the students and if the school does not have a policy barring all “non-school persons.” However, the non-school persons “may not direct, conduct, control or regularly attend activities of student groups.” A school may decide not to permit any non-school persons to attend meetings of any club of any type, or it may limit the number of times during an academic year a non-school person may be invited to attend.

*

Q. May teachers be present during student meetings?

A. Yes, but there are important limitations. . . . In order to avoid any appearance of state endorsement of religion, teachers or employees are to be present at student religious meetings only in a “non-participatory capacity.” The act also prohibits teachers or other school officials from influencing the form or content of any prayer or other religious activity.

*

Q. What about groups that wish to advocate or discuss changes in existing law?

A. Students who wish to discuss controversial social and legal issues such as abortion, drinking age, the draft and alternative lifestyles may not be barred on the basis of the content of their speech. The school is not required, however, to permit meetings in which unlawful conduct occurs.

Times education writer Stephanie Chavez contributed to this story.