A Role for Religion

The House vote last week to allow the posting of the Ten Commandments in public schools shouldn’t become law, and in fact a similar issue failed a 1980 test of its constitutionality. The measure is pure political showboating. It detracts from more rational considerations about religion and the classroom and workplace that are already well underway, part of a broad search by the federal government to make room for religion in public in a way that doesn’t violate the separation of church and state.

The commandments amendment was tacked onto the juvenile crime bill by Rep. Robert B. Aderholt (R-Ala.). Congress has been casting about for symbolic responses in the aftermath of the Columbine High School shootings in Colorado, and this simplistic proposal was still around from last year. Fortunately, there are saner ways of allowing a place for religion in the schools and workplace without actually promoting it, developed in a more deliberate setting than the heat of politics before the C-SPAN cameras.

In 1997 the Clinton administration issued guidelines for religious exercise and expression for federal workers, on such things as keeping and reading a Bible or Koran. And twice since 1995 the Department of Education, in collaboration with the Justice Department, has issued guidelines seeking to clarify permissible religious expression in schools. The key issue is how schools can teach about religion without promoting it, and what religious expressions are allowed under current law and court decisions.

Many school district officials were no doubt surprised by how much is allowed: voluntary prayer by students alone or in groups, distribution of religious literature on the same terms as other nonschool material and, yes, teaching about moral codes like the Ten Commandments as part of learning about religion.

So the question is not what symbol citizens should tack up in response to problems but what to make of all the resources already at our disposal. Charles Haynes of the Freedom Forum First Amendment Center offers this useful prescription to schools: “Work hard to have character education as part of your mission and do it in a way that’s comprehensive and that addresses the entire school culture. And do it in a way that religious people of all kinds and nonreligious people can agree on.”

Finding a constitutionally acceptable place for religion in the schools and workplace is a bigger challenge than posting religious dos and don’ts on a wall.