An Abuse of Public Prayer

The current flap over public prayer at high school football games in Texas is merely a new twist on the politicization of religion seen this year in demands to post the Ten Commandments in schools, most recently in Riverside County’s Val Verde Unified School District.

In the Texas dispute, the student-led public football prayers at a school near Galveston go beyond accommodating the religious rights of students. The Supreme Court has agreed to take up the case, and when it rules next year it should uphold a federal appeals court decision that school officials went too far in allowing invocations over the public address system.

Students and others who hold different beliefs, or who are not religiously inclined, can be made to feel excluded. The school policy allowed what amounted to prayerful proselytizing, well beyond what a court previously sanctioned--student-led invocations that were “nonsectarian and nonproselytizing.” A Mormon student who challenged the public prayers said she was ridiculed by a teacher.

The courts generally have struck a balance in church/state separation for the public schools: no to official prayers and Bible readings and no to school-sponsored prayer at graduation but yes to students praying individually or in groups in a way that isn’t disruptive.

A football game can pack emotional power, but it is a secular event that ought not be invested with a religious purpose. To make it so is unsettling for its imposition of beliefs upon an assembled community.

Believers too should want religion kept off the public address system; to put it there potentially commercializes sacred activity, placing it alongside the booster club’s car wash promotion.

Any claim by student promoters or the politicians trying to make hay on the issue that the free exercise of religion is being infringed upon is specious. Those who desire can make their invocations privately before the game. Or they can do what the wife of a Dallas Cowboys quarterback did on national TV on Sunday, prayerfully shut her eyes as the 300-pound giants started to close in.