fbpx
Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

Banning School Prayer Made America More Secular

Societies don’t inevitably become less religious as they get richer, or more modern, or more urban.
Texan School Class In Prayer

What is responsible for the decline of American religion? It’s not your imagination. America really is getting more secular. Older generations always think young people are getting less religious because churchgoing naturally rises and falls over the life cycle, hitting a low ebb in people’s twenties before marriage and childrearing bring them back, so it is tempting to write off “the decline of religion” as a perennial gripe, something people are always saying.

But since the Sixties, every generation has started from a lower ebb than the generation before, with fewer young people attending religious services. More than a fifth of Americans under 30 say they were raised in no religion; only 5 percent of Boomers say the same. The share of white Democrats claiming no religion has almost doubled in the last ten years, from 24 to 42 percent.

Societies don’t just inevitably become less religious as they get richer, or more modern, or more urban, as once was thought. A new report from the American Enterprise Institute has a different explanation. “The most likely causes of declining religiosity are the increasingly intense role that more and more secularized educational institutions play in children’s lives,” author Lyman Stone writes, plus “the continuing delay and decline of marriage.” It is not education that makes people less religious, he argues, but specifically secular education.

Stone points to test cases in France and Turkey where secularization followed not just from expanded access to education but from shifts from religious to secular schools. “If educational attainment drives secularization, then spending two more years in school should reduce religiosity, even if that school is a religious school,” he theorizes. In fact, longitudinal studies have found that attending a religious school is associated with greater religiosity later in life.

That education would have something to do with secularization fits with what we know about when secularization happens. Contrary to the New Atheists’ heroic pose, the rise of the “nones” is not driven by the mature decisions of adults but by habits being formed (or not) in childhood.The story of secularization in America is not mostly a story of lots of people who were raised religious leaving their religious faith as adults,” Stone explains. “It is a story of fewer people having a religious upbringing at all.”

Why has the trend picked up since the Sixties? Stone notes that children today spend more of their time in school than their grandparents did, but otherwise the report doesn’t link schools to the post-Boomer decline specifically. Is it that more children are attending secular schools? Parochial schools educating 5 percent of children instead of 12 percent at their peak doesn’t sound like a social revolution. What if the answer instead is that public schools themselves have become more secularizing?

Before the Supreme Court’s school prayer decisions in the Sixties, most public schools in America had some kind of devotional practice, usually a non-denominational prayer or Bible reading in the mornings along with the Pledge of Allegiance. It was only after Abington School District v. Schempp in 1963 that they stopped.

The school prayer decisions were accepted by the public because the changes required seemed like such small things. Most people would have preferred to keep reciting the Lord’s Prayer or reading scripture in homeroom. Even today, more than five decades later, most Americans (including, oddly, about half of those claiming no religion) support school prayer. But the secularizers had a knockdown argument: If sixty seconds in homeroom is really all that stands between your children and godlessness, then that’s a pretty flimsy sort of faith, isn’t it?

John F. Kennedy took that line, though he phrased it more gently. Every past president from Hoover to Eisenhower condemned the Engel v. Vitale decision when it came down in 1962, but Kennedy defended the Supreme Court. “We have in this case a very easy remedy, and that is to pray ourselves,” he noted. “We can pray a good deal more at home, we can attend our churches with a good deal more fidelity, and we can make the true meaning of prayer much more important in the lives of all of our children. That power is very much open to us.”

The Second Circuit court of appeals said something similar in the follow-up case Stein v. Oshinsky in 1965, when parents in Queens sued to stop the principal of P.S. 184 from running around kindergarten classrooms forcing the children to stop saying “God is great, God is good, and we thank Him for our food” before their morning milk and cookies. The New York district court sided with the parents on free exercise grounds, but the appeals court reversed. “Plaintiffs must content themselves with having their children say these prayers before nine or after three,” the judgment sneered.

But if the AEI report is right, there is something irreplaceable about those hours between nine and three. The atheist’s knockdown argument against school prayer — that there are plenty of other hours in a day to pray in — was based on a fallacy. Society either teaches its children that religion is something normal or something taboo. Banning prayer from schools teaches them that religion is not normal. In England in the Sixties, a comprehensive survey of immigrant attitudes found that Muslim and Sikh parents had no objection to Christian devotional practices in British schools. Their attitude was: Of course you must teach religion to your children. It was obvious to them, as it has been to every civilization in history until ours.

Social science tells us that people become more religious as they get older (and, perhaps, wiser). But people who are never exposed to the rudiments of religious practice as children will always stand in relation to religion as the Wolf Boy of Aveyron did to language. When they develop spiritual yearnings, either in the natural course of maturity or due to some life crisis, they will discover that they have no instincts to draw upon. It may be too late to reintroduce devotional practices into public schools, but at the very least we should acknowledge that when everyone said getting rid of school prayer was a little thing that wouldn’t matter much in the long run, everyone was wrong.

I asked Stone about school prayer, which his report mentions only in passing. He was skeptical. “Forcing an atheist kid to pray is not going to make him religious,” he said. “You can’t force people to be religious. It makes them hate you.”

Stone obviously had in mind an image of a teenage freethinker being prodded into rebellion. But when I think of school prayer, I think of two different people. One is a friend who converted to Catholicism in college, whose upbringing was so unchurched that she had essentially reached the age of eighteen without ever seeing anyone pray. She was so unfamiliar with the basic mechanics of prayer that she used to have to get a Christian friend to sit with her and start her prayers for her, to get God on the line and hand over the phone, as she put it.

The other person I think of is from an older generation. His upbringing was, if anything, more unchurched than my friend’s, shuttling around foster homes in the urban Midwest. He told me how he’d never set foot inside a church until his twenties, when a spiritual crisis sent him flinging out of the house and into the first set of pews he could find. He got on his knees and just started praying. How did you know what to do, I asked. What prayers did you say? “Just the ones we learned in school.”

Advertisement

Comments

Become a Member today for a growing stake in the conservative movement.
Join here!
Join here