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Thanks to the ACLU and PFAW

© Frank Monaldo

If you can endure the ponderous, heavy muggy summers, the small town of Ecru, Mississippi, seems like a Norman Rockwell sort of place to raise children. It is a small town where everyone knows everyone else, the sense of a nurturing community is palpable, and the local school is a center of community attention. At least that is the impression Lisa Herdahl had when she moved there from Wisconsin in 1994 with her six children.

Ecru was an isolated little island that the flood of Supreme Court decisions in the 1960s rushed by. The North Pontotoc Attendence Center (a K-12 school) broadcast Bible readings and prayer over the school's public address system to begin the school day and had done so for years. Herdahl was a Christian Scientist and objected to exposing her children to the Bible readings. She received little relief or sympathy from the school after her complaints. Putting headphones on Herdahl's children to block out the reading was a humiliating and unacceptable solution.

Despite their long tradition, the morning readings over the public address system had degraded to a parody of prayer. Children, as children are wont, were more likely to be fidgeting, talking, or staring at the ceiling than contemplating the meaning of the words buzzing through the public address system. Boredom, not rapture, was the most likely reaction.

In any case, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and People for the American Way (PFAW), ever on the alert lest young children in public schools be in an unconstitutionally spiritual frame of mind, rode their white horses to a litigious rescue. They sued the school district on Herdahl's behalf for relief. The school squandered $170,000 in legal fees, arguing that a student group called the Alethia Club initiated the readings and hence they did not violate First Amendment strictures. Ultimately, the courts found that the setting aside of school time for this reading on an ongoing basis, even if student-initiated, involved an excessive entanglement of the state with religion. Herdahl and her children were granted relief.

The result of the intervention by the ACLU and PFAW, however, has not proceeded as one might have expected. There are no longer prayers or Bible readings broadcast over the school's public address system. However, the children meet before school (1,200 of 1,300) for student-designed and student-managed prayer meetings. The meetings have continued for two years after the court's decision to stop the prayer broadcasts. Rather than consuming the thin soup of unthinking reading of the Bible, the act of organizing and running the prayer meetings has created a feast of meaning for the students. World Magazine [1] reports that Alethia Club members are themselves surprised by the student devotions. In the words of one student, "[The prayers] now mean something to us. We have to sacrifice to do it and people take it seriously."

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