{"id":55976,"date":"2021-10-21T18:06:05","date_gmt":"2021-10-21T22:06:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/?p=55976"},"modified":"2021-10-21T18:06:05","modified_gmt":"2021-10-21T22:06:05","slug":"prayer-in-schools-is-almost-never-about-prayer-in-schools","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2021\/10\/21\/prayer-in-schools-is-almost-never-about-prayer-in-schools\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Prayer in schools’ is almost never about prayer in schools"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Overall, I enjoyed this CBS News mini-doc on \u201cThe Right\u2019s Fight to Make America a Christian Nation<\/a>,\u201d which I found thanks to Messiah U. historian John Fea (who\u2019s featured in it).<\/p>\n

<\/iframe><\/p>\nI recommend this report as, on balance, a positive contribution to our national understanding of white Christian nationalism. But I also have some quibbles and concerns. OK, then. \u2026<\/p>\nCBS\u2019s sympathetic profile of the Bremerton, Washington, high school football coach who got himself suspended for insisting on pre-game sectarian prayers at midfield did a good job at presenting the coach\u2019s perspective. That\u2019s helpful. We can clearly see his passion, his sincerity, and his utter inability to consider or even to see anyone else\u2019s<\/em> perspective. Alas, CBS also failed to look at anyone else\u2019s perspective in that opening story \u2014 and that is less than helpful.<\/p>\nTheir report thus takes at face value \u2014 and amplifies \u2014 the coach\u2019s contention that his public sectarian prayers are purely voluntary and not in any way coercive for anyone there who doesn\u2019t share his specific strain of sectarian belief or doesn\u2019t wish to participate in his particular performance of sectarian piety.<\/p>\nWhat the report doesn\u2019t acknowledge, in other words, is that the Very Nice coach is a sectarian bully \u2014 someone who follows, almost verbatim, the script of an after-school-special on the dangers of peer pressure: C\u2019mon, everybody\u2019s doing it. Don\u2019t be a loser. Play along.<\/em> His story absolutely is one of religious persecution, but he\u2019s<\/em> the inquisitor, not the victim he wants to imagine. He created an awkward and awful situation for any of his players who might be atheists, or Muslims, and also for any of his players who might be Catholic, or Reformed, or actually Baptist<\/em> Baptists.<\/p>\nThe coach\u2019s story was presented in a framework that misleadingly presents \u201creligious\u201d and \u201csecular\u201d as opposites. That framework distorts both his story and the First Amendment. The opposite of \u201csecular\u201d is not \u201creligious;\u201d the opposite of \u201csecular\u201d is \u201csectarian.\u201d And so, in practical terms and in day-to-day reality, the opposite of secular government and secular schooling is the exclusive establishment of a particular sect.<\/p>\nAnd ultimately, inevitably, of just one<\/em> sect. Establish official school prayers and those prayers will not be generically Christian prayers, or even generically Protestant or generically white evangelical prayers. They will be prayers that specifically establish <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=l3fAcxcxoZ8\" class=\" decorated-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\">Northern Conservative Fundamentalist Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912<\/a> sectarian religion in a way that is inhospitable to the equal participation even of Northern Conservative Fundamentalist Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1879 believers.<\/p>\nWhen we crawl inside the cramped perspective of this sectarian coach and embrace his idea that non-sectarian must mean anti-religious without questioning it, we participate in that establishment of sectarian religion. That framework centers, privileges, and elevates one specific sect by making that sect the sole representative and sole legitimate expression of \u201creligion.\u201d It flattens and blurs and demotes every other sect into a single, second-tier category of non-religion and anti-religion, unwilling to acknowledge or to allow any distinction among them because the only fact about any of them permitted to be recognized is that they are Not The One, True Sect.<\/p>\nStarting with that framework also colors the helpful reporting and commentary that follows. Dr. Fea and actual-Baptist Brian Kaylor (of <a href=\"https:\/\/wordandway.org\/news\/baptist\/\" class=\" decorated-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\">Word & Way<\/a>) have some helpful things to say about \u201cschool prayer,\u201d but squeezed into the template established by that \u201cpersecuted\u201d coach those insights are harder to hear. If we accept the coach\u2019s framework, then Fea and Kaylor become merely voices from the vast, undifferentiated category of the anti-religious.<\/p>\nThe other mostly unchallenged framework in CBS\u2019 reporting on this coach\u2019s story is that this is all about First-Amendment questions of church and state. The white evangelical football coach in a predominantly white suburban school is presented as being upset over \u201cprayer in schools.\u201d Then they turn to Dr. Fea, asking him about prayer in schools, and he only has time to slightly<\/em> expand that context, describing Engel v. Vitale<\/em> as just one part of the social changes of the 1960s. And thus the suggestion that this is all mainly and mostly about church\/state abstractions carries over into the following segment about the Trump-venerating \u201cPatriot Church\u201d in Tennessee and its white Christian nationalist mission.<\/p>\nI call shenanigans. \u201cPrayer in schools\u201d is almost never about prayer in schools. It is almost always a pious-seeming, and therefore more acceptable proxy for cultural hegemony in schools, which is to say for white cultural hegemony in schools, which is to say for the ongoing and intensifying whitelash against the Civil Rights Movement. If someone tells you they\u2019re upset about Engel v. Vitale,<\/em> then nine times out of 10 what they\u2019re really upset about is Brown v. Board of Ed.<\/em><\/p>\nThat pattern was firmly established before I was born and it has persisted in glaringly obvious form throughout my entire life, but it\u2019s considered rude to mention it out loud. I think it\u2019s far more rude \u2014 and far less honest \u2014 not<\/em> to acknowledge the reality of it. The perennial argument over \u201cprayer in schools\u201d is always, as Dr. Fea politely says, a part of the ongoing argument about the social changes of the \u201960s, which is to say it\u2019s always, always, always entangled with the ongoing opposition to the Second Reconstruction.<\/p>\nCBS news knows this, too. That\u2019s why their report turns, eventually, to the voices of two thoughtful Black Americans, both people of faith, who argue against the establishment of sectarian government. But the link between the establishment of white sectarian religion and the establishment of whiteness is acknowledged only elliptically, never quite directly stated.<\/p>\nSo let\u2019s state that directly here: \u201cReligious liberty\u201d is the new \u201cstates\u2019 rights.\u201d Let\u2019s not pretend we don\u2019t all know exactly what that means.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If someone tells you they’re upset about Engel v. Vitale, then nine times out of 10 what they’re really upset about is Brown v. Board of Ed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":141,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[13,99,158],"class_list":["post-55976","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-evangelicals","tag-church-state","tag-persecuted-hegemons","tag-racism"],"yoast_head":"\n<title>'Prayer in schools' is almost never about prayer in schools<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"If someone tells you they're upset about Engel v. Vitale, then nine times out of 10 what they're really upset about is Brown v. 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A former managing editor of Prism magazine, Fred worked in the parachurch nonprofit world for a decade and then for a decade in the newspaper biz. He began blogging in 2002. In 2003 he began writing a review of the best-selling Left Behind series. Eight years later he still hasn\u2019t finished reviewing the second book of that series and the experience has left him a broken shell of a man. Fred knows the difference between the possessive \u201cits\u201d and the contraction \u201cit\u2019s,\u201d and he is acutely bothered when others mistakenly confuse the two, yet he himself just kind of instinctively types the apostrophe whether or not it belongs there. Some feel this is his greatest hypocrisy, but those who know him better know better. He\u2019s guilty of much greater hypocrisies. Jesus loves Fred far more than Fred loves Jesus, but he at least has the decency to recognize the unfairness of that lopsided relationship and he has long wished that he were better at maybe kind of sort of doing something more to correct that some day. A Baptist, an amateur, a Gen-Xer, a Gemini and a Mets fan, Fred lives in Southeastern Pennsylvania with his wife and two teenage daughters. You can reach him via email at slacktivist at hotmail dot com.\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/author\/fredclark1\/\"}]}<\/script>\n","yoast_head_json":{"title":"'Prayer in schools' is almost never about prayer in schools","description":"If someone tells you they're upset about Engel v. Vitale, then nine times out of 10 what they're really upset about is Brown v. 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A former managing editor of Prism magazine, Fred worked in the parachurch nonprofit world for a decade and then for a decade in the newspaper biz. He began blogging in 2002. In 2003 he began writing a review of the best-selling Left Behind series. Eight years later he still hasn\u2019t finished reviewing the second book of that series and the experience has left him a broken shell of a man. Fred knows the difference between the possessive \u201cits\u201d and the contraction \u201cit\u2019s,\u201d and he is acutely bothered when others mistakenly confuse the two, yet he himself just kind of instinctively types the apostrophe whether or not it belongs there. Some feel this is his greatest hypocrisy, but those who know him better know better. He\u2019s guilty of much greater hypocrisies. Jesus loves Fred far more than Fred loves Jesus, but he at least has the decency to recognize the unfairness of that lopsided relationship and he has long wished that he were better at maybe kind of sort of doing something more to correct that some day. A Baptist, an amateur, a Gen-Xer, a Gemini and a Mets fan, Fred lives in Southeastern Pennsylvania with his wife and two teenage daughters. You can reach him via email at slacktivist at hotmail dot com.","url":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/author\/fredclark1\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55976","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/141"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=55976"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55976\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55976"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=55976"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=55976"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}