Faith on Their Time : Teens are flocking to on-campus religious clubs. Some advisers say the groups fulfill any spiritual needs, making a constitutional amendment allowing prayer unneccessary.

At John F. Kennedy High in Granada Hills, students study in 60 air-conditioned mobile classrooms while workers hammer, saws grind and cement mixers buzz to bring their earthquake-torn campus back to life. Every week, a few of those students also pray.

They thank God.

“We thank you for being such a giving creator, God--for your mercy,” goes a recent prayer at the school’s Christian Club. “Even in the earthquake last January, God, you caused the Earth to shake, but you were merciful.”

Even without a proposed constitutional amendment that would allow voluntary prayer in class, thousands of students across Los Angeles and the nation are already pressing their hands together in honor of capital-H Him. Some say more high school students than ever are involved in voluntary religious clubs--an overwhelming majority of which are Christian. The clubs offer a place where students can express their faith on free time.

It is estimated that more than half the 49 high schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District have religious clubs. The National Fellowship of Christian Athletes, one of the more popular national religious groups on campus, says it has an all-time high of 5,278 school affiliates--mostly high schools--up nearly 50% over 1992. And a group called Campus Crusade for Christ says it reaches 250,000 junior high and high school students nationwide.

“It doesn’t really matter whether they have school prayer,” says Hamilton Yutan, an Eagle Rock High School junior. “We still pray. It’s just that it’s on our own time.”

Some religious club advisers agree, saying the constitutionally protected clubs fulfill any spiritual needs students might have. “To make that a school rule, that everyone’s going to have a time of silence, will water prayer down and make it less real,” says Paul Webster, Bible club adviser at Jefferson High School in Los Angeles. “I think a constitutional amendment is overkill,” says another area adviser.

The clubs got a boost in 1990 when the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the 1984 Equal Access Act. The act says religious clubs must be treated like any other extracurricular clubs on secondary school campuses: Christian clubs must be allowed if chess clubs are.

In the 1990 case, the court sent a message to holdout school districts across the nation that they must allow the clubs, noting “the crucial difference between government speech endorsing religion, which the (Constitution) forbids, and private speech endorsing religion, which the (Constitution) protect(s).”

“Theoretically,” says LAUSD lawyer Howard Friedman, “students can discuss traditional religion as well as devil worship.”

Others, however, say religious clubs are not enough. Republicans vow to pursue the constitutional amendment, hoping to get it on the books by next summer. The measure, introduced by Rep. Ernest Istook Jr. (R-Okla.), would allow--but not require--school districts to conduct teacher-led prayer. Under the proposal, students who don’t want to pray can sit silently or leave the room. President Clinton has opposed the Republican plan, although he says he would endorse a moment of silence for schools.

“I like the idea of students acknowledging their faith in the school environment,” says Brian Metzger, Christian club adviser at Eagle Rock. “Faith is a lifetime and lifestyle involvement.”

The Freedom Forum First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn., argues in a recently released study that schools should teach students about religion, but not indoctrinate them.

“There’s no way to teach United States history adequately without teaching about our religious roots,” says the study’s author, religious scholar Charles C. Haynes. “The same is true in world history. A student who graduates from high school and doesn’t know anything about Islam is not prepared to live in the modern world. Many of the world’s conflicts are rooted in religious differences.

“Fighting over whether we can have a 30-second nondenominational prayer diverts attention from the real issues,” Haynes says. “Teaching about religion needs to be there.” At the same time, he says, religious clubs are a “reasonable accommodation” on the part of schools.

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Some say the clubs’ currency can be traced to an increasingly confusing teen-age landscape--one filled with crime, casual drug use, absent parents and a fragmented youth culture. “It’s important to those students that there is a deeper solution to crime and gangs and failure at our schools,” says Jefferson’s Webster, 25. “They believe, and I believe, that the solution is Jesus.”

“There’s a longing among teens for a group that influences and impacts them in a positive way,” says Kevin Harlan of the National Fellowship of Christian Athletes.

At some schools, it’s no longer as stigmatizing to belong to the clubs: “There are kids that are in gangs, and there are girls that don’t wear anything but dresses because their parents won’t let them,” Webster says. “The kids that are Christians are real bold in the halls and in their classes.”

Some Christian clubs in Southern California conduct the faith en espanol . Jefferson High is one.

Bible club leader Estuardo (“like Stuart,” he says) Ardon sports a long T-shirt that says “Choose Christ” in pink-and-blue graffiti. It covers his black baggy jeans, which cover his buckskin boots. He has a goatee, prickly hair and hands that slice the air like a rapper’s.

“Necesitas a Dios en tu corazon,” he says--You need God in your heart. “Amen, amen,” the group of 20 replies.

After the lunchtime meeting, Ardon says the club is gaining followers, but confides that he’s almost gotten into three fights because of his pro-Christ garb. “I try to stop the fights with the word of God,” he says. “A war’s not against the flesh, but it’s a spiritual fight.”

Sometimes he finds a soft spot, and more than a few gangsters have joined his gang of Bible clubbers, he says. “Instead of looking for answers in the street, they can have a relationship with Jesus Christ,” says Ardon, 17. “There’s a lot who say it’s a good idea. If they don’t go to church, we bring the church to them.”

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At Eagle Rock, Christian club president Yutan wears a surfer-style T-shirt that says “Come to the Light.” The room that club members use is a teacher’s lounge-cum-classroom that now features copies of “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” in back. The club attracts more than 30 students.

“This school is pretty liberal,” says club member Sophia Lee, 16. “They respect our thing.”

At Kennedy, a mix of about a dozen students prays under the gaze of a local church. “Whether or not we speak, we try to come just to be here,” says 29-year-old Scott Maxwell of Grace Community Church in Sun Valley. He’s in his last year of seminary school.

On a sun-drenched day, students forgo the outdoors in favor of Jesus. “I thought maybe we would talk about what’s a good way to spread the gospel,” Maxwell tells the class. “Where would be a good place to start?”

“Someone you know close?” a student says.

“Good,” Maxwell says.

“One of the things we like to see Christian students on campus do is use this club as a ministry to involve other students,” Maxwell says before the meeting. “We minister to them and try to make sense of this world.”

The classroom they use features a 10-foot-high mural of former President John F. Kennedy. He wears a navy tie over a light blue shirt. Behind him is the American flag. Kennedy’s likeness stares at the class, with a slight smirk assigned to its pale lips.

“They need to know,” Maxwell says, “there is a God.”