Divide in Schools Is More Than Spiritual

The prayers offered Tuesday mornings in the cafeteria at North Davidson Middle School are barely audible, faint under the clatter of pots from the kitchen. They are teenage supplications from the tiny student prayer club, a chorus fast becoming the voice of religion in the nation’s public schools--and a growing social presence that has energized campuses and sometimes divided them.

The morning devotions at the rural junior high are both petty and profound, simple requests for help over the long school day and pleas for deliverance from life’s unbearable moments. One girl asks to look her best on Picture Day. Another wishes good luck for friends on a church tour through Jamaica.

“I’d like to pray for my grandmother,” says 11-year-old Kevan Chandler. “She’s doing a lot better and she’s starting to walk now.”

The red-haired boy does not ask for a prayer for himself, although muscular dystrophy has put him in a wheelchair. He listens silently as a classmate quotes from Psalms, then joins the others in devotions: “Be with us the rest of the day. Amen.” Slinging a digital autoharp onto his lap, Kevan strums slowly. It is a hymn, “We Will Glorify,” and its final notes fade in time for the first class bell.

They call themselves Knights for Christ--a play on the feudal nickname of North Davidson’s sports teams. There are barely 30 of them, a number that rises and falls depending on who oversleeps and who has tests to cram for, who has strayed and who has found their way.

The Knights are one of more than 10,000 prayer clubs that have sprung up in American public schools since 1990, when the Supreme Court upheld the viability of the Equal Access Act--a 1984 law mandating that federally funded secondary schools allow student-led religious clubs that are not linked to the curriculum and do not interfere with school operations. The crusade to win equal access for prayer clubs took wing in Huntington Beach, where a 1975 battle over Bible readings popularized the concept of student religious groups through California and the nation.

The movement grew quietly until last December, when gunfire was sprayed into a prayer circle in a high school lobby in West Paducah, Ky. Three students died and five were wounded.

The slayings became a rallying point for Christian youths, accelerating the growth of prayer clubs--now found in nearly a third of all secondary schools. At Heath High School in West Paducah, principal Bill Bond was deluged with letters and calls from youths bent on starting clubs in memory of the slain prayer circle members.

“For Christian kids, it was like the day [President] Kennedy was shot,” says Dawson McAllister, a teenage-oriented radio evangelist whose weekly program is carried over 400 stations. “They all remember where they were.”

Crucifix necklaces and “meet me at the pole” T-shirts (an invitation to autumn worship rallies at school flagpoles) are such common sights that many clubs have become an accepted part of campus life, metamorphosing into a new teenage social caste. They are mostly a benign presence, noticed only in a hymn rising from a classroom or a discreet yearbook caption. But at some schools--even, surprisingly, in Bible belt communities--their emergence has set off social rifts with other cliques.

Taunts and Threats ‘Can Get Pretty Ugly’

In West Paducah, an undercurrent of taunts and threats played out between prayer circle members and skateboarders before the shooting spree and the arrest of 14-year-old Michael Carneal, a skateboard devotee and alternative rock fan charged in the slayings. For months before the shootings, as the prayer circle gathered, Carneal and other skateboarders heckled them, prompting club members to respond in kind. Months after the shooting, Bond says, “some of the tension’s still there.”

Even on quiet campuses like North Davidson, sniping between the Knights for Christ and students who idolize antireligion rocker Marilyn Manson have become a caustic rite. As they pass in halls and the lunchroom, Manson devotees sneer to the Knights that there is no heaven. Some Knights suffer in silence, but others scoff at their taunters’ black fingernail polish and call them “freaks.”

“You hear it from both sides,” says 14-year-old Brian Tomallo, who has friends in the Knights and a sister who idolizes Marilyn Manson. “It can get pretty ugly.”

The violence of West Paducah was an anomaly, a result of the gunman’s inner turmoil, not student tensions, prayer activists insist. And despite the social tremors sometimes set off by the presence of prayer clubs, many have sunk deep roots into public schools, say educators, students and civil libertarians who long distrusted them.

“In most of the country, it seems to be working,” admits Rob Boston, an official with Americans United for Separation of Church and State, a civic group opposed to enforced prayer. “The complaints we get now are mostly about adult involvement, like preachers evangelizing at assemblies or prayers broadcast over PA systems.”

Even as prayer clubs become part of the fabric of public school life, Christian activists are pressing for greater access for religion on campus. A 52-word constitutional amendment aimed at guaranteeing the right of school worship faces a House vote next month. Its prospects appear dim, but flash points surfacing this spring in courts and legislatures in several Southern states signal a new round of the legal warring that has inflamed debate ever since the Supreme Court’s 1963 decision outlawing mandatory school prayer.

The clear message sent repeatedly by federal judges is that prayers have a proper place in school if students initiate them. That makes prayer clubs “the most important accommodation for religion in the public school system,” says Charles Haynes, point man of a growing effort to ease tensions over school worship. Spreading the gospel of compromise, Haynes and a circle of like-minded moderates say that strong student involvement--and the absence of parental meddling--is crucial to winning over nervous administrators and making voluntary prayer work.

“The kids are on the front lines,” Haynes says. “A lot hinges on how they handle the ground rules--and whether they can do it at arm’s length from their parents and teachers.”

Haynes’ philosophy faces a hard road in some Southern school districts, where teachers have openly promoted prayer for decades. In rural DeKalb County in northern Alabama, U.S. District Judge Ira DeMent sent a court monitor into high schools last year to bar educators from evangelizing among students. The judge then brought Haynes into the county last month to instruct students, teachers and religious activists on how to channel prayer on campus without adult involvement.

“You’d be amazed how many fights today erupt over issues already decided by the Constitution,” Haynes told an audience in the town of Fort Payne. Striding back and forth like a country preacher, he insisted, “We can get beyond the disagreements and lawsuits if we do the right thing.”

Isolating voluntary school prayer from adult influence is a tricky proposition. The week Haynes made his passionate case for moderation, another Alabama county settled a lawsuit filed by Jewish students who claimed that teachers had tried to convert them and that Christian students taunted them with mocking recitations of the Lord’s Prayer.

Churches Clamor to Cultivate Clubs

Even in public school systems where student-run prayer clubs prosper seemingly on their own, they often are egged on by parents, pastors and apostle organizations such as First Priority, a Tennessee group that has seeded prayer clubs in hundreds of school systems across the country.

“Legally, I can’t go inside schools. But I can stand on the sideline and encourage them,” says Mark Roberts, one of First Priority’s well-traveled road warriors.

Roberts and First Priority founder Benny Proffitt fly across the country several times a month, bankrolled by churches clamoring for the blueprints to cultivating successful prayer clubs. They tell youth pastors to act as “coaches.” Students are advised to spend their first session praying for schoolmates, then urged to invite guest religious speakers, preferably a pastor or local athlete who can attract curious students. A First Priority-seeded prayer club at Jasper High School in Texas recently swelled its ranks by inviting Dallas Cowboys star Deion Sanders.

“We’re trying,” Roberts says, “to put a bright light on campus.”

The lights already were on at some schools when First Priority started its crusade in 1995. Fellowship of Christian Athletes prayer huddles have been active for decades, and prayer circles sprouted up at some Southern high schools in the early 1970s. But it was the Supreme Court’s 1990 ruling affirming the rights of student-initiated religious clubs that opened the floodgates.

Given a green light, “this generation of Christian kids is showing they’re not wallflowers,” says Steve McFarland, a Christian Legal Society lawyer who has argued several key Supreme Court cases.

Student pressure for prayer rights has led some cautious school districts to draw up strict rules of behavior for their activities. In California, for example, Modesto officials are agonizing over whether to allow prayer clubs to raise funds on campus. Yorba Linda’s schools decided to allow only curriculum-related clubs, a move that would keep prayer groups out. Glendale’s schools are requiring all club members to provide parental permission slips before they would be allowed to meet on school grounds.

“This is all about how flexible schools are willing to be to accommodate religion,” Haynes says. “For a long time, they’ve bent over backward to try to be neutral. Neutrality’s fine, but not when you purge all traces of religious expression.”

At North Davidson Middle School, where the Knights for Christ club started up in 1993, principal James “Buddy” Kiger is comfortable with the presence of student prayer, well aware that his school lies “in a Bible Belt county.”

Still, Kiger carefully hews to guidelines on prayer developed in 1990 by the U.S. Department of Education. The Knights can advertise their Tuesday sessions on the PA system, but may not pray over the airwaves. They can invite other students to their sessions, but not proselytize. “We can educate,” Kiger says, “but not indoctrinate.”

A spit of a place, home to 7,200 and surrounded by cresting tobacco fields, Welcome is strongly Baptist. But the town has become more diverse as it has grown into a bedroom community of refugees from Winston-Salem. Many of the middle school’s 1,200 students have commuter parents.

Among them are the Chandlers, a devout Baptist family whose three children have almost single-handedly brought prayer into North Davidson’s schools. Diana Chandler, 45, runs an antiabortion family counseling center in Winston-Salem. Her older son, Andrew, 17, is a member of “Worth the Wait,” a troupe of teenage actors who tour North Carolina schools urging sexual abstinence. But it is her two younger ones, Kevan, and Connie, 15, both wheelchair-bound and afflicted with muscular dystrophy, who have become the spark plugs of North Davidson’s prayer circles.

When Connie, a spirited high school freshman who carries calling cards that read “resident angel,” entered the middle school three years ago, she was dismayed to find the Knights without a sponsor and shrunken to a few members. She asked a teacher she knew from church to become the new sponsor, then buttonholed church friends to join. At school, she handed out computer-drawn flyers and tacked up posters urging students to “follow me to KFC,” hoping the initials--the same as the famous fried chicken franchise’s--would spark interest.

Within weeks, the group swelled to 60, forcing a move from a classroom to the cafeteria. “Connie fired them up,” her mother says.

Morning devotions became long recitations of pleas to God. There were prayers for students’ cats and dogs and heartfelt requests for help for ailing relatives. “You’d see kids praying to themselves before math tests,” Connie says.

But maintaining a prayer club’s energy takes more than a single firebrand. By Connie’s graduation last year, the Knights’ ranks had withered again. Her cheery younger brother, Kevan, tries to follow her lead, but he admits “it’s hard for a freshman to get older kids to listen.”

Momentum Is Often Difficult to Sustain

Connie tried again last fall at the high school, founding its first club open to all students for prayer. She and her friends call themselves “Those Christian People,” a gentle dig at the way they expect outsiders to perceive them. After an initial flurry of interest, she and co-founder John Goodman, 17, have attracted only a core of about 15 regular members.

“The Bible says wherever two or more people gather in the Lord’s name, the Lord is with them,” Goodman says. “Even if it’s just the two of us, we can still witness. But, sure, it’d be nice to have more.”

First Priority’s solution is to urge pastors to whip up enthusiasm for prayer clubs during Sunday services. “If the church makes it a real priority, the clubs will find strength,” Roberts says.

Despite the latest nationwide surge of prayer clubs, it can be difficult to keep up momentum. The pressures of student life chip away at a prayer club’s rolls. Nishelle Caudill, 14, a devout Baptist middle school student, attended most Knights prayer sessions last year, but has slacked off, preoccupied with her schoolwork and growing interest in the debate team.

“Kids feel comfortable praying in church, but it’s hard for some people to do it in front of their friends in school,” says Connie Chandler. “It’s like they feel they’d get pointed at or something.”

Social pressures rear up even in a Bible Belt high school. Fellow students stare at them and whisper, asking about their W.W.J.D. (“What Would Jesus Do?”) wristbands. “Like it’s just not cool to show your support for Jesus,” sighed high school junior Tera Holt, 17, a prayer club member.

And many have had run-ins with Marilyn Manson devotees. One in a long line of rock musicians who have been decried as unwholesome presences by Christian groups, Manson’s sensationalist influence--his acolytes wear black fingernail polish and pasty make-up and profess Satanic impulses--has exasperated school officials.

But it is the band’s singular anti-Christian message that raises the hackles of prayer club members and has become a source of tension between evangelical youths and the band’s followers.

On Dawson McAlister’s weekly call-in show, his producers have to be on guard for Manson fans who disguise their voices so they can heckle him and his teenage Christian audience. He says he tries “to reason with them,” but cuts them off when they get too aggressive. “I can’t let them take over the show,” he says sternly.

At North Davidson High, Holt was outraged when one Manson follower showed up in an “Anti-Christ by birth” T-shirt. “I just don’t care to see that in my face,” Holt says. Even when school administrators clamp down, warning students not to flaunt Manson’s anti-Christian slogans, the two groups still exchange bitter words--a near-daily trickle of taunts that Kiger insists has not generated many complaints.

Critics Say Members ‘Think They’re Better’

Manson devotees like Ashley Towne, a middle school student, complain that prayer club members are accommodated while they are treated as outcasts. “It’s like they [prayer club members] think they’re better than everyone else,” she says.

“They have disgusting ideas,” Nishelle Caudill counters. She tells of one classmate who told her that Manson was going “to bring Jesus down.” When the West Paducah prayer circle members were gunned down weeks later, her outraged mother, Jessica, 45, a local church women’s group leader, telephoned the Larry King show and vented to evangelist Jerry Falwell.

“All it takes is one nut case to take these crazy ideas seriously,” Caudill said afterward. “West Paducah made me afraid for my daughter.”

As she scoots across the high school campus in her motorized wheelchair, Connie Chandler says she has yet to “run into that kind of thing.” Some prayer club friends say she is spared teasing because of her disability. But prayer has become such a part of her daily ritual, Connie says, that even other students’ taunts would not faze her.

She already knows what she would do if that happens. She would try to “do the Christian thing, you know, turn the other cheek.” And then she would take up what she practices two mornings a week, along with the rest of Those Christian People.

“Pray,” she says.