School Prayer

School Prayer

Public Schools are No Place for Public Prayer
      The United States was founded on the principle of religious freedom. The constitutional right to practice one’s beliefs, free of government intervention, is a protection we hold in high esteem. However, true religious freedom also requires freedom from religion. Thus, a Congressional Bill mandating daily prayer in public schools, whether voluntary or not, should not be passed. Such a prayer would be both coercive and divisive and therefore has no place in our public schools.
      In any group, and especially ones made up of children, peer pressure can have a major impact on certain individuals. A school prayer would only focus that pressure on those in the religious minority as well as non-believers. Those in favor of school prayer may make the argument that voluntary participation is a sufficient solution for students who do not wish to pray. Yet they fail to realize the predicament of a child who would choose not to participate. How could that child regard a prayer as voluntary when it is part of his or her daily routine, led by his or her teacher, and recited by the bulk of his peers? In his majority opinion for the case Lee vs. Weisman, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote “prayer exercises in public schools carry a particular risk of indirect coercion.” Peer pressure is precisely that indirect coercion. Even the Catholic Church, under Pope Paul VI, has stated that everyone should be “immune from coercion,” and not be “forced to act in a manner contrary to [their] own beliefs” in its 1965 Dignitatis Humanae The coercive pressure of school prayer would do just that and any who argue the power of peer pressure need only look back at Nazi Germany to see what individuals may do to conform with the actions of their peers.
      Along with applying coercive pressure, a daily school prayer would also create a divide amongst students of different belief systems. School is already a place where...