Constitutional Scholar Seeks Middle Ground in School Prayer Debate : Education: Charles Haynes says that if religion were treated as an academic subject, without advocating any one set of beliefs, both sides could be satisfied.

To pray or not to pray.

The debate over prayer in public schools presents what seem like two irreconcilable alternatives.

But a 1st Amendment scholar has proposed a third option that he believes can bring the bitter constitutional dilemma to a peaceable solution: teach about religion with textbooks, not piety.

“Most people neither wish to impose religion in the schools nor eliminate religion from the schools,” said Charles Haynes, visiting professional scholar at the Freedom Forum First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University.

“They want programs that give religion an appropriate place while protecting everyone’s freedom of conscience,” he said.

Religion, Haynes said, is typically excluded from school curriculum because teachers and administrators fear running afoul of church-state separation or because they are not adequately prepared.

A new guidebook for public schools on teaching about religion--published by the Freedom Forum center, a think tank on First Amendment issues--suggests that schools make religion an academic subject, rather than a devotional exercise, and teach students about all religions, without denigrating or promoting one set of beliefs.

“Omission of facts about religion can give students the false impression that the religious life of humankind is insignificant or unimportant,” the book states.

“Failure to understand even the basic symbols, practices and concepts of the various religions make much of history, literature, art and contemporary life unintelligible.”

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Haynes said some progress has been made to persuade publishers to include treatment of religion in textbooks, “but we’re still a long way from home.”

“We’re over the hump,” he said of texts.

“Now we need to go beyond the mention of religion--that Martin Luther King was a Baptist minister--to getting religion more fully treated.”

While providing specific guidelines and a list of 29 “religious influences in American history” that teachers of history, literature and social studies courses can use, the guidebook also covers such areas as religious holidays in the public schools, students’ rights to religious expression and the status of school prayer laws.

Haynes said that if schools would move toward inclusion of religion in learning, it could end some of the debate over prayer.

“The interest in a prayer amendment would evaporate if schools deal with religion where they can, rather than where they can’t,” Haynes said.