Printer-friendly versionThis piece is to accompany Religion in the Locker Room.
Even today, a simple Google search can produce recent headlines from the mainstream media that say something like “Prayer Banned at Graduation” or “School Football Resumes After Prayer Ban.”
This is ironic for two reasons. First, prayer has never been banned in public schools—only school-sponsored prayer. Second, the Supreme Court decisions, aided by changes in federal law, have opened the door for students to become more religiously active at school, not less.
According to Charles C. Haynes, by the early 1980s, many schools had become religion-free zones. That is because cautious school officials overreacted to the controversies stirred up by the 1960s-era Supreme Court decisions. Wary of causing more controversy, they tried to keep out all mention of religion. It was not discussed in textbooks, and students were wrongly told to keep their religious beliefs at home.
Such incidents do still occur. In 2011, school officials at a Los Angeles elementary school tried to prevent a fifth-grader from singing the Christian song “We Shine” at its talent show. The principal mistakenly believed that allowing students to select songs with religious themes would violate the separation of church and state. However, when school officials allow students in a talent show to select which songs they wish to perform, they may not prohibit songs with religious content. After a threat of legal action, the school backed down and allowed the song.
Although these kinds of stories make a splash in the press, Haynes says that such incidents are much less common than they used to be. Increased litigation is one reason. Another is that a 1984 law called the Equal Access Act opened the door for student-initiated religious clubs in secondary schools.
“There are kids meeting around the flagpole [to pray] every September in thousands of schools,” says Haynes. “There are kids handing out religious tracts in thousands of schools across the country. There are kids praying in the lunchrooms. There are kids bringing scriptures [to school] and reading them at recess. Before the Equal Access Act of 1984, there was no such thing as a religious club in a public school. So this has been a sea change.”
