Yikes! Most Americans now support teacher-led prayers in public schools!
A new Pew Research Center survey finds 61% of Americans are okay with teachers leading prayers in class—a troubling sign for church-state separation advocates
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A majority of Americans now support public school teachers leading students in prayer.
According to a new Pew Research Center survey, 53% of Americans say teachers should be allowed to lead their classes in prayer as long as students aren’t required to participate. Another 8% say teachers should be allowed to lead prayers and students should be required to take part. That means 61% of Americans believe government employees should be allowed to lead religious exercises in public school classrooms.
Those troubling numbers could make it easier for Christian Nationalists to enact their theocratic agenda in states where promoting conservative Christianity is somehow an educational priority. It’s also a warning to church/state separation advocates that we have a lot more work to do in convincing people why teacher-led prayers in school are always a bad idea.
The survey asked a number of questions about school prayer in the wake of legislation intended to put Ten Commandments posters up in classrooms and implement prayer time in schools.
On the simple question of whether people favor or oppose letting teachers lead their classes in prayer, there are far too many people willing to put up with it. Even many people who oppose prayer in schools think it’s okay if it’s voluntary for students.
61% of Americans, in other words, believe there are circumstances in which it’d be okay to have teachers leading prayers in school.
Why is that a problem? Because public schools are government institutions. Teachers aren’t acting as private citizens when they’re on the clock. And students already have the right to pray on their own—silently, with friends, within religious clubs, etc.
Furthermore, those prayers are never generic. They push the idea that there’s something legitimate about religious beliefs, which isn’t what any government institution should be promoting. In any given public school, there are children of parents who are atheist, Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, etc. The pressure that would be placed on them to join in with their classmates is deeply coercive and unfair. Giving them the option to opt out isn’t as generous as it sounds when they risk being ostracized or ridiculed.
That’s why courts have long distinguished between private prayer (always okay) and school-sponsored prayers (not okay). Children should never have to say a prayer—especially one for a religion they don’t belong to—in order to fit in.
But it’s telling which Americans support school-sponsored prayers, and it’s exactly the people you’d expect: the ones who know their religion would be the one promoted in school. White evangelicals and Black Protestants love the idea of teacher-led prayers (which are optional for students). Religiously unaffiliated people generally oppose it.
It’s somewhat shocking to me that the gap isn’t larger when broken down by age. 64% of Americans 50 and older like the idea of teacher led-prayer, while 59% of Americans under 50 feel the same. You would think younger Americans, who are more likely to have more religiously diverse classmates, would understand the consequences of all this.
Meanwhile, the political divide couldn’t be more clear. Republicans overwhelmingly support teacher-led prayers (79%) while only 44% of Democrats say the same. This isn’t a religious issue so much as a partisan one.
The same survey also found that a majority of people in every demographic group support student-led prayers, which, of course, are legal. (I’m not sure who these people are who oppose that. Or why.)
What all this information tells us is that Christian Nationalists are having at least some success in convincing Americans that prayer and education can go hand-in-hand when reality and history suggest otherwise. It’s why they’ve been able to get (Christian) chaplains to replace social workers, and states to capitulate to (Christian) LifeWise so that kids can leave school during the day to receive religious indoctrination, and coaches leading (Christian) prayers while on the job.
There’s simply not enough opposition in enough places to help people realize that shoving Christianity—and it’s always a conservative form of Christianity—into schools is bad for everyone. And at a time when Donald Trump and his Republican allies are equating patriotism with Christianity, we need more pushback against it, not less.
I wonder if the results would have been any different, though, if the language in the questions was different. For example, instead of asking if people support teachers leading their classes in prayer, would people be more likely to oppose it if they said “Christian prayer” instead, since that’s what students would be hearing?
Pew’s own survey hints that they would.
While 57% of Americans support coach-led prayer (a generically religious concept), only 50% support displaying the Ten Commandments in classrooms (a specifically Christian message).
In other words, the more explicitly Christian the proposal becomes, the more support drops.
It seems that even some people who are okay with the generic concept of religion back off when they find out it’s a particular brand of religion.
That raises an obvious question: When Americans tell pollsters they support "teacher-led prayer," what exactly are they imagining? A generic moment of reflection? A non-denominational invocation? Or the kind of Christian prayer that would almost certainly dominate in practice?
The fact is we don’t need more religion anywhere, much less Christianity in public schools.
What’s alarming about these results isn’t that 8% of Americans support mandatory prayer in schools. It’s that only 37% oppose teacher-led prayer altogether.
Students have always had the right to pray. That’s not what’s at stake here. What’s at stake is whether government employees should be allowed to lead religious prayers in public schools. A majority of Americans say yes, and that’s horrifying. It’s exactly the kind of public support Christian Nationalists need if they want to keep eroding the wall separating church and state. They’re relying on everyone’s ignorance to accomplish their goals.
We're going to have to go through a few centuries of bloody, sectarian strife like Europe to learn the lesson, aren't we?
About prayer...
"If God listened to the prayers of men, all men would quickly have perished: for they are forever praying for evil against one another."
-- Epicurus