Unanswered: School Prayers

by Sara on 02/19/08 filed under religion

Are theists using school shootings to force religion down our throats?

Shortly after Seung Hui-Cho killed 33 people (himself included) in the Virginia Tech massacre on April 16, 2007, the following email began circulating the web:

Dear God:

Why didn’t you save the school children at ?.

Bath, Michigan 1927
Houston, TX 1959
Moses Lake , Washington 2/2/96
Bethel , Alaska 2/19/97
Pearl , Mississippi 10/1/97
West Paducah , Kentucky 12/1/97
Stamp, Arkansas 12/15/97
Jonesboro , Arkansas 3/24/98
Edinboro , Pennsylvania 4/24/98
Fayetteville , Tennessee 5/19/98
Springfield , Oregon 5/21/98
Richmond , Virginia 6/15/98
Littleton , Colorado 4/20/99
Taber , Alberta , Canada 5/28/99
Conyers , Georgia 5/20/99
Deming , New Mexico 11/19/99
Fort Gibson , Oklahoma 12/6/99
Santee , California 3/5/01
El Cajon , California 3/22/01? and
Blacksburg, Virginia 4/16/07

Sincerely,
Concerned Student

—————————————————–

Reply:

Dear Concerned Student:
I am not allowed in schools.

Sincerely,
God

Now, on the heels of four separate school shootings in February of 2008, it seems only a matter of time before evangelicals and concerned theists in general start springing up, again shouting to bring religion back to public schools. Already, statements like these are starting to crop up on forums all over the internet:

1. “That just goes to show you what happens when you take prayer out of the schools! And when something like this happens, the first thing people wanna do is start praying!!” (Source)
2. “They never should have taken PRAYER out of schools in the first place. I believe that is where things started to go wrong in schools.” (Source)
3. “You don’t find violence and drugs in church sponsored schools. The children in those schools are taught moral absolutes. Public schools teach moral relativity and multi-culturalism. They leave it up to the child to decide right and wrong and the results are what we see today. No moral authority leads to anarchy. The founders knew this. Why don’t you?” (Source)

So just to recap, the root of the problem is a lack of moral absolutes taught in our public schools, which leads to students deciding right and wrong for themselves—which, then, leads to bloodshed. Hmmmmmm…

To imagine school violence can be solved be solved with religion seems, at best, naïve.

First, consider these three other cases, conveniently omitted from the above email:

1. University Of Texas Tower Sniper (1966)

Last August, with little fanfare, the University of Texas marked the 40th anniversary of what then was the nation’s worst mass shooting.

Until Monday’s carnage at Virginia Tech, the Aug. 1, 1966, sniping rampage by Charles Whitman from the Austin school’s landmark 307-foot tower had remained the deadliest campus shooting in U.S. history. (Source)

Although this incident happened four years after the Supreme Court ruling that the state should be prohibited from sponsoring prayers in public schools, Whitman himself was never affected by this decision. The future gunman was a student at Scared Heart Grade and Junior High Schools, and eventually graduated from St. Ann’s High School in West Palm Beach in 1959. Why wasn’t his religious education enough to prevent this tragedy? Clearly, the “moral absolutes” didn’t follow him into adulthood.

2. Bishop Neumann Junior-Senior High School (2001)

March 7, 2001: WILLIAMSPORT, Pennsylvania — An eighth-grade girl has been arrested after a shooting at a Bishop Neumann Junior-Senior High School, a Roman Catholic school in Williamsport , Pennsylvania that left another 8th grade girl wounded. She says that the shooting was due to repeated teasing. (Source)

In this case, it is clear that exposure to prayer and religious teaching doesn’t always guarantee that children will not commit acts of violence, anymore than teaching abstinence guarantees that teenagers will save sex for marriage.

3. Georgetown Amish School (2006)

BART TOWNSHIP, Pa., Oct. 3 — Five young Amish girls are dead, and five more are seriously injured, after being lined up in their one-room school Monday and shot “execution style” by a heavily armed milk truck driver who then took his own life, police said. (Source)

Of course the gunman, Charles Carl Roberts, was not himself a student at the Amish school, but neither was he a product of a secular public school education. He was homeschooled, leaving his education in the hands of father, a policeman, and his mother, who worked for a Christian organization that staged bible plays. Surely, Roberts was exposed to the “moral absolutes” of Christianity throughout his childhood. Why then, did he grow into such a sick and disturbed individual?

While we should take the time to examine the shootings left off the email, it is equally important to note one incident that actually did make the list. In 1927, Andrew Kehoe of Bath, Michigan, blew up his town’s school. The explosion took the lives of 38 children and 7 teachers, making it the bloodiest killing spree in an American school to date. Horrific, yes – but the Supreme Court’s decision to prohibit mandatory school prayer was made in 1962—35 years after the massacre in Bath. In other words, the bloodiest act of school violence to date actually happened before school prayer was outlawed.

Conclusion

A much longer article could be written about the issue of prayer in schools, but it should be clear, in light of the above information, that the problem of school violence cannot be solved by forcing our students to spend more time in church. Theists must stop capitalizing on these tragedies by pushing their own agendas. And we must ALL put aside our personal beliefs and prejudices if we ever hope to attack the reality of this very serious issue.