No school prayers

The spring came into New York very balmily at the usual time, if not the usual date. This tends to happen once every four years, a fact that was noticed and deplored by the godly men who founded New England.

There is a record somewhere – and please don't ask me to synchronise the dredging operations of my memory and of the Library of Congress – there's a record somewhere of a fiery old New England divine who took the arrival of spring on 20 March in leap years as sure proof that the devil was very busily at work in the person of those humans who, as I remember his putting it, had the irreverent audacity to be born on 29 February. They, apparently, were responsible for upsetting the equinoxes and he warned us that these agents of the devil were to be watched for the rest of their days, since they were destined from birth to pretend to an age that was not truly theirs and to brew mischief of one sort or another through their mortal lives how long soever.

Well, we all know people who for a time, at least, have pretended to an age that was not theirs – the new Democratic Galahad, Gary Hart, being only the latest to be found out – but that pretence has everything to do with vanity and nothing to do with the calendar.

I have to say that I know two men, both then in their late fifties, who three weeks ago celebrated their 14th and 15th birthdays, respectively. One is an Englishman and the other is a New Zealander and I have to admit that they are both wily birds, if not suspicious characters. The thought of the godly men, the divine's pious lawyers who founded New England, must have come to mind because in the past week, the people of the United States have been bemused and their representatives in Congress obsessed by God – an interesting change in a country which is so often thought of by foreign commentators as being either too puritanical or too heathenish. What I'm talking about is the tremendous to-do about the president's proposal for a constitutional amendment which would permit – it would not compel – permit spoken prayer in the public schools, that's to say the elementary and high schools maintained at public expense.

What private schools do, the schools whimsically known in Britain as public schools, what they do is their own business and, plainly, in this country, the so-called parochial schools, the privately maintained Catholic schools, always, at some time of the days, either hear or recite a spoken prayer.

Since the children who go to the public schools here are drawn from the widest possible ethnic range – that being the children of parents or grandparents from all the countries of Europe and increasingly in our time from South and Central America and now again from Asia, especially from Vietnam and Cambodia and Korea – the children in the public schools of America subscribe to literally scores of different religions. This recognition has always been the main practical obstacle to any standard religious practice in the schools, but there's a bigger obstacle put there not by accident, but by design. Put there by the 55 men who set up the American system of government, who sat in Philadelphia for two months debating and writing and voting on, clause by clause, the Constitution of the United States.

When it was finished, it took two years for the original 13 states to ratify the constitution and appoint or elect their delegates to the first Congress. It met in September 1789 and the first order of business was to submit 12 amendments to the constitution to clarify certain individual and state rights, not put into the original document. They had very little trouble with the First Amendment and many of the new congressmen were amazed they'd not anticipated it.

It had to do mainly with freedom of the press and the part that religion was to play in the new government. It is the article that has been the bone of contention between the president's supporters and his opponents in the argument over school prayer.

The First Amendment, then, says, in its first phrase, 'Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof'.

To many people outside this country that seemed, and still may seem, a very early preoccupation when you come to define the rights of individuals, but the old colonials were offering a cure for their own grievous experience. They'd had over 150 years of religious intolerance among themselves and the New Englanders reluctantly came to admit that their forefathers who had landed on these shores to practise their own religion, after being persecuted for it in England, had not come here to establish freedom of religion, they had too often come to allow your freedom to practise my religion.

In other words, the new non-conformists were just as rigid in setting up a new conformity as the Church of England had been in enforcing the old conformity. Of course, there were states that did allow people to worship as they chose, but the New England example, down a century or more, was frightening. The Quakers, to take only one sect, suffered exile and persecution.

So, by 1789 with the colonies already populated with English Christians of several sects, with German Lutherans, with French and other Catholics, with Jews and with various unaffiliated sects, by 1789 it became clear that the way to what they called domestic harmony, in the matter of religion, lay through a plain statement that people could worship or not worship as they chose and that the state, the United States of America, should have no official religion. That's what the founding fathers had in mind by 'an establishment of religion'.

As a matter of daily practice, once the new system got under way, schools had prayer or didn't have prayer according to the religious preference of most of the inhabitants of a particular town or village. Only in the late nineteenth century when millions of new immigrants, German and Irish and then a tidal wave of Jews from Central and Eastern Europe, only when they all poured in did it seem prudent not to have spoken prayers anywhere in the public schools.

By that time, in the flood tide of the turn-of-the-century immigrant, a generation of old Americans began to wonder if prayer was gone from the schools, what simple, secular ceremony could unite these various nationals and in 1892 a weekly magazine in Boston called the Youth's Companion printed a pledge of allegiance to the flag of the United States and proposed that it be recited at morning assembly in the schools. This idea, by the way, had its strongest appeal at the beginning of this century when the United States was having its first and only fling at acquiring an empire in the Caribbean and in the Pacific.

Well, it came to be and I don't know any American who went to public school who did not regularly recite in the first hour of the school day this pledge: 'I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all'. It's a pledge that's long been required, also, to be spoken by everyone on the day of acquiring American citizenship.

Now, an interesting point which I haven't heard mentioned in the congressional debate or in the editorials of the newspapers, but I have heard and seen on the telly, young people arguing in favour of the school prayer amendment by making the point, why shouldn't we pray to God in public when every morning in school we take the pledge of allegiance with the words 'under God' – that's the moment when my wife, for instance, rises in indignation and says, 'Who says 'under God'. When did that get added to the pledge?'

Well, to be precise, in 1954, an act of Congress added the words 'under God' so that the pledge now goes: 'the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all'.

So President Reagan's proposal for a constitutional amendment was rooted in no such historical survey, but in the simple belief that America needs to reaffirm old godly value. It was rooted, also, in the unproved historical conviction that school prayer is something the founding fathers would have been all for. To the president and his supporters the prohibition of an establishment of religion was a prohibition against – and only against – an 'official' American religion.

Well, the question then came up, what sort of prayer would be suitable for this rich, ethnic mixture of American school children? Who was to write it? Simple, they said. It should not appeal to the god of any religious sect and children who believed in no god could simply bow their heads and stay silent. Or, indeed, they could leave the room.

The more this simple prescription was offered, the more complicated became the possible family and individual problems – problems of ostracism, of being mocked, of feeling different, of being seen as oddities. Plenty of parents were willing, nay eager, to declare that if the thing went through, they would keep their children at home and launch appeals to the courts, ultimately to the Supreme Court. The whole proposal blew up a terrific dust storm of religious, political, social and psychiatric argument.

Now, I ought to say that to make a constitutional amendment binding is a long and arduous business. The founding fathers were careful to lay out a whole landscape of hurdles for any man who wanted to have a political whim or prejudice pass into the law of the land. First, the Senate must pass the measure by a two-thirds majority, then the House by a two-thirds majority, then it goes to the legislatures of the 50 states and three-quarters of them – 38 – must pass and ratify it. It can take years.

Well, last week, after a rehearsal of much passion and a tangle of knotty debate, the Senate came to vote on the school prayer amendment. In the result, it fell 11 votes short of the necessary two-thirds majority. Even if it had passed, the experts in the House gave it no chance there – a House controlled by a Democratic majority with Democrats, on the whole, strongly opposed.

Incidentally, the polls showed that 80 per cent of the American people are in favour of the amendment, but the founding fathers, in writing the constitution, ignored the popular wisdom of the Gallup poll. The school prayer amendment is put off for a year or two or more, perhaps for ever.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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