Praying for votes
Nicholas von Hoffman
Washington
Since some sect or other detonated a bomb in a washroom of the Capitol, the guard has been reinforced, but the tour buses, the reverential couples fromIowa,
i the senior class from a high school in San Mateo, California, still make the days around the high-domed building a happy egalitarian stew.
There are also the lobbyists, the most obnoxiously intrusive of which are the low- church fundamentalists exercising their constitutionally guaranteed right of petition by warble and caterwaul on the steps and gently inclining lawns of the national legislature. They are raising their clatter to Bet themselves a new right — the right to imprecate their deity in the public schools. Most Americans are not terribly interested in the subject, but those who are involved in attempting to pass the prayer in the schools amendment are vocal and visible to the highest degree. They command attention not only because they are perfervid in their insistence that teachers conduct prayer at the beginning of the school day, but also because Ronald Reagan has taken up their cause and has been bouncing into evange- lical conventions to tell his worshipful listeners that the kids went to hell, stopped doing their homework and began taking drugs the year they took prayer out of the schools.
That year was 1962 when the Supreme Court ruled that the constitutional prohibi- tion against the establishment of religion in the United States should be construed to mean no prayer in state-run schools. No teacher-led prayer, that is, for, as some wag observed the other day, as long as they have mathematics examinations, there will be Prayer of some kind in the schools.
Nothing riles people more than when the Supreme Court suddenly rules that some- thing which people have been doing a long, long time is unconstitutional. That is what happened when they ended capital punish- ment, although the reaction to that was so bad, so powerful and sustained, that they have back-tracked, slowly at first, but then with increasing alacrity until now it seems we are enjoying a fresh execution every week. The controversy over prayer in the schools is following a similar trajectory. From the 1840s, when the first public school systems were being put together here, there was prayer led by the teachers, and for decades tax-supported education was, for all intents and purposes, a Protes- tant parochial school system. The Roman Catholics and the Lutherans had their own non tax-supported schools and anybody who wanted something else could go whistle. But from the 1880s onward, with the gigantic immigrations from Europe, the percentage of Protestants in the population began to go down. At the same time a move was under way to secularise American education. It began at the college level where institutions, founded by church organisations, began to dilute or break their denominational affiliations. The Carnegie Foundation; which was putting huge amounts of money into higher education, made its bequests conditional on the beneficiary schools cutting loose from their denominational origins.
Since whatever is in fashion at the col- legiate and university level percolates downwards, by the 1960s many school systems had stopped asking for the Lord's blessing at the start of the day. Whether the practice would have been abandoned everywhere in the course of time is anybody's guess, but then Madeleine O'Hare McCormick, an obnoxiously ag- gressive atheist, filed the suit which ultimately led to the Supreme Court's deci- sion. Not content to leave the matter to her lawyers, the lady stomped the country, giv- ing speeches, appearing on television and radio shows, pushing a brand of atheistic anti-clericalism which was as rude as it was overbearing. But it was gorgeously suc- cessful in stirring up hard-shelled Christians . who matched her insult for insult.
The drive to amend the Constitution had begun. At first it was a fringe issue, the kind of thing that bandy-legged sectarians jump up and down about, but as the years have gone it has been stoked by suave preachers with smooth TV manners and politicians who have found the grimmer kinds of Christian will not only vote for you, they will pass out your leaflets at the polling stations. High-school kids, injected with the evangelical needle and then pumped full of God, are available for every TV news show to testify that the Lord has been banished from geometry classes and they are the poorer for it.
From every pore in the body politic you can hear voices declare that this is a Chris- tian nation, gagged in its orisons and un- naturally prevented from lifting up its voice in prayer. Meanwhile in Poland, a Christian people, or at least a people who use the cross as their symbol of revolt against tyranny, are demonstrating for the return of crucifixes to their classrooms. Here, however, the demand for prayer only makes Jewish people understandably ner- vous as it does the calmer sort of Christian who suspects that, if you give in on school prayer, this kind of evangelical zealotry will then aggrandise itself at the expense of the curriculum. The next thing on the agenda of the jumping-bean Christians is to purge the biology texts of Darwinism. The new doctrine is called 'creationism', which translates into an insistence that the na- tion's children be taught that the Book of Genesis is genetically sound and zoological- ly accurate.
The Christian denominations who do not preach in the raw and red-toothed style the methodists, the Anglicans, the Roman Catholics and the Presbyterians, for exam- ple — are either neutral or publicly hostile to the demands of the evangelicals. They are showing a good-hearted tolerance that the combatants lack. The secularists can be mean-spirited, as when they file a suit to eject the Nativity-scene pressures from City Hall, while the other side has taken to say- ing that if you don't agree with them you are a Marxist.
Before Ronald Reagan, American presi- dents had the good taste and sense to stay
out of this dispute, but he has entered it and with a vengeance. Not only has he been grabbing every chance to address Calvinist zealots in the convention hall, he has taken to lobbying senators to vote for the prayer amendment. The evangelicals love it, but others look at it as vote-catching hypocrisy. Mr Reagan himself seldom goes to church and, save on public and political occasions, has never interested himself in what goes on inside those buildings with the spikes on top of their roofs. His stand on the prayer amendment has inspired newspaper stories about the sexual practices of the friends of the First Family, such as we have not seen before. A few days ago a writer in the or- dinarily conservative Washington Post remarked that 'their interior decorator, Ted Graber, who oversaw the re-decoration of the White House, spent a night in the Reagans' private White House quarters
with his male lover, Archie Case, when they came to Washington for Nancy Reagan's 60th birthday party — a fact confirmed for the press by Mrs Reagan's press secretary'. What with the tittering in Washington that the Reagan's first child was conceived out of wedlock and the general knowledge that many of their friends have sex lives that the President's puritan allies would reckon to create an abominable stench in the Divine nostril, Mr Reagan's pleas for God-centred family life are being heard in some quarters with amused disgust.
Since the first settlement of this part of North America by English-speaking people, every 30 or 40 years there has been a religious revival here. As the revivals go, this one isn't especially virulent ... at least not so far: the Senate has just thrown out the President's proposed Constitutional Amendment.
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