Let Us Pray

By Alain L. Sanders

To Bridget Mergens Mayhew, the idea of forming an extracurricular Christian club at Omaha's Westside High School five years ago seemed simple enough. "There are a lot of pressures on kids," she recalls, "and we just wanted to get together and pray." But school authorities turned down her plea, fearing it would violate the separation of church and state. The refusal touched off a fractious legal battle that last week culminated in a spectacular win for Mayhew and her friends: a major decision from the U.S. Supreme Court barring discrimination against voluntary religious clubs in public high schools. The court action was an obvious victory for conservative groups who have been trying for more than 25 years to reintroduce some sort of prayers into the schools.

By an 8-to-1 vote, the high bench upheld the constitutionality of Congress's 1984 Equal Access Act. The measure says that no public secondary school receiving federal funds may bar student clubs on the basis of their "religious, political ((or)) philosophical" views, if the school permits one or more "noncurriculum" groups to meet after school hours.

Decisively coming down on the side of free expression last week, the court gave that statute a broad interpretation. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor declared that the law's equal-access requirement can be triggered by the presence of any group, even a chess club, that does not "directly relate to the curriculum." She maintained that, just like college students to whom the court has previously applied equal-access principles, "secondary school students are mature enough and are likely to understand that a school does not endorse or support student speech that it merely permits on a non- discriminatory basis."

Justice John Paul Stevens lambasted the decision in his lone dissent. "Can Congress really have intended," he wrote, "to issue an order to every public high school in the nation stating, in substance, that if you sponsor a chess club, a scuba diving club, or a French club -- without having formal classes in those subjects -- you must also open your doors to every religious, political, or social organization, no matter how controversial or distasteful its views may be? I think not." Even Justices Thurgood Marshall and William Brennan, who concurred with the majority ruling, expressed serious reservations. In order to preserve the separation of church and state and counteract peer pressures, the pair insisted, schools must "make clear that their recognition of a religious club does not reflect their endorsement of the views of the club's participants."

Not surprisingly, Mayhew was elated by the court decision. "This is a clear statement that school administrators across the U.S. must respect the religious beliefs of students and allow them to form clubs for prayer and support," she said. Much of the country's religious establishment also welcomed the ruling. "The court recognized the critical distinction between school-sponsored and student-sponsored religion: the former is unconstitutional; the latter is not," declared the Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs, the Christian Legal Society, the National Association of Evangelicals and the National Council of Churches in a joint statement. But some groups, including civil liberties organizations, were much less sanguine. Warned Robert Lifton, president of the American Jewish Congress: "The decision will open up the nation's public high schools to proselytizing by organized student religious clubs and will ultimately result in religious divisiveness."

Educators are concerned that last week's decision will cut into their authority to control what takes place inside the schoolhouse. The ruling, they fear, could place many schools in a difficult bind: it could pressure them to open their doors to all kinds of advocacy groups -- contentious pro-life and pro-choice clubs, for example -- or force them to prune down the range of extracurricular activities and eliminate popular groups like drama clubs and community-service clubs. Either way, education may not necessarily come out the winner.

With reporting by Jerome Cramer/Washington