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YFEN
Express Yourself! - Op-Ed
"Freedom of Religion, not Freedom From Religion" By Alex Weisler
I thought I’d be aghast. I thought that little, liberal me was going to seize on this supposed “violation of the separation between church and state,” and write this month’s column about my raw outrage. Well, I’m not. Still in the dark? I’m talking about the brightly colored flyers you’ve seen hanging all around school, the ones advertising South’s newest club - the School Bible Talk. The flyers quote Jeremiah 29:13 (“You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart”) and urge students to come to room 222 on Tuesdays for weekly scripture discussions. I’m glad to say that, when I thought about it, I found no reason for outrage.
I’ll freely admit that the idea of a bible talk – here, in our suburban, pleasantly non-fundamentalist high school – is a little foreign, but to say it has no right to exist would be hypocritical to the extreme. We allow and embrace many “niche” clubs. We embrace them because there’s nothing wrong with them; rather, they are beneficial, fostering tolerance and unity. But God forbid (oh, look, he used God!) a majority starts a club; then it’s discriminatory, elitist, unconstitutional. Think I’m wrong? No one in this school would give an Atheists’ Club a second thought, but a School Bible Talk? Third horseman of the apocalypse.
As high school students, we’re supposed to be mature enough to recognize that just because the school lends its facilities to a given group does not mean the school necessarily endorses its ideas. Each month in this newspaper, the opinions section is filled with acid-tongued invectives and masterful insults, yet no one sues. Why? Because the paper does not endorse the views of its writers, and opposing viewpoints are given equal space. So it goes with the school; if a group of students wanted to band together and create a “Science Explains Everything” society or “Separation of Church and State” club, they would have every right to do so. Power to them, but the school wouldn’t be endorsing their ideas either.
The Supreme Court of the United States agrees. A little thing called the First Amendment, when combined with the Equal Access Act, guarantees that no non-curricular activity (read: after-school club or gathering) may be prohibited based on the content of its speech. Since denials of the ability to have a Christian Club (as was the case with Board of Education of the Westside Community Schools v. Mergens – the Supreme Court case I just referenced) or a School Bible Talk would be because of their religious natures, such denials are inherently discriminatory. I had to look up Mergens to validate my suspicion, though. We all – and I include myself in this – need to get a better background in the history of religious freedom; too many people think Engel v. Vitale (the landmark case prohibiting school prayer) describes a feud between a math teacher and the principal.
For those who say that Christian-based clubs violate the establishment clause of the First Amendment (“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,”) I direct you to the American Civil Liberties Union, our nation’s premier defendant of constitutional rights. I can think of a recent case where the right to be religious in a non-curricular school setting has been defended by these vanguards of constitutionality. In February of 2003, a Northampton, Massachusetts school’s Bible Club was suspended for selling yuletide candy canes with religious messages printed on them. The ACLU came to the students’ defense, saying, “Students have a right to communicate ideas, religious or otherwise, to other students during their free time, before or after class, […], or elsewhere.” Before or after class? During their free time? Sounds a lot like a club to me. I am no religious fundamentalist, but I will never condescend and blindly reject religion. This club, this School Bible Talk, is neither endorsed by the school nor rejected by it. It is a little unfamiliar, but the Bible Talk should not make us angry. We have no right to judge.
President Bush often extols the benefits of exporting “American” concepts like religious freedom to countries like Iraq or Afghanistan. I have a problem when we Americans decide we only want to accept certain aspects of a right like religious freedom. The establishment clause of the Constitution was not designed to create a communistic religion-free state; it was designed to prevent the government from becoming a theocracy. The Bible Talk’s members have every right to exist, meet peacefully, and discuss their faith. Why stop them? We are Americans, and our history is unlike that of Adolf Hitler’s Germany or Mao Zedong’s China. We embrace cultural and religious differences because we find mandated conformity threatening. We have a Constitution that protects and embraces both the religious and the non-religious; we’re lucky enough to have a school that does as well.
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