What Might The Founding Fathers Say About Chaplains In Public Schools?
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“The Prayer in the First Congress,” 1774. Stained glass and lead, from The Liberty Window, Christ Church, Philadelphia. (Photo courtesy U.S. Library of Congress)
(OPINION) Ah, springtime in America. Religion is abloom.
For example, legislators in 14 states are pushing to bring religious chaplains into public schools.
Boys and girls, this is our subject for today: chaplains in public schools.
Texas passed a law last year “allowing school districts to hire chaplains or use them as volunteers for whatever role the local school board sees fit, including replacing trained counselors,” reports the Washington Post.
Texas thus inspired conservatives elsewhere to follow its example, including our neighbor Indiana, where a chaplaincy bill was approved by one legislative chamber but failed to become law.
Mike Wynn, public information manager for the Kentucky Legislative Research Commission, said he’s not aware of any legislation related to school chaplains now pending before Kentucky lawmakers. But my guess is, it’s a matter of time.
(A state house committee amendment to Senate Bill 2 would have allowed pastoral counselors to school trauma teams, but that did not make it into the final bill.)
Those who want school chaplains argue that having religious representatives on campuses “will ease a youth mental health crisis, bolster staff retention and offer spiritual care to students who can’t afford or access religious schools,” according to Hannah Fingerhut of The Associated Press.
Chaplains also will restore public schools’ declining morals, advocates claim. Declining morality in education is the great bugaboo for some conservatives.
Naturally, those on the left are aghast. They say installing chaplains — likely they’d be Christian clergy — is a ham-fisted attempt to use public education and public funds to convert increasingly diverse students, which violates our founding American principle of separating church and state.
Following this brouhaha, I was reminded of a column I wrote in 2010. In it, I explored the Founding Fathers’ original views about whether, or how, religion and the state should be mixed. We were having a church and state dustup then, too. Really, we’ve had this fight since the birth of the Republic.
Back in 2010, the Texas Board of Education was contending (note to self: why is it always Texas?) that our founders intended the United States to be a Christian nation, and Texas public-school textbooks ought to reflect that indisputable truth.
I reviewed our religious origins using Steven Waldman’s excellent, and scrupulously fair-minded, book, “Founding Faith: Providence, Politics and the Birth of Religious Freedom in America.”
Actually, the truth of our country’s Christian origins is, if nothing else, messily complicated, guaranteed to give liberals and conservatives alike cause for rejoicing and, simultaneously, the fantods.
Europeans who journeyed to America in the 1600s indeed tended to be a religious lot. They believed it was government’s job to promote Christianity, or at least their own brands of it. Most of the 13 colonies had official state churches.
For 150 years, breakaway Christians, including Baptists, who refused to bow to state churches were imprisoned, were flogged, had burning pokers bored through their tongues, were urinated upon, were banished and even killed.
By the mid-1700s, though, a massive revival broke out, multiplying the ranks of evangelicals who claimed they owed no allegiance to official churches or earthly kings. This Great Awakening led directly to the Revolutionary War.
When Franklin, Washington, Adams, Jefferson and Madison appeared, they weren’t mythic figures with their tenets carved on stone tablets, but very human intellectuals, politicians and seekers. They were trying to figure out what they believed personally about God even as they debated religion’s role in a fledgling nation.
These guys didn’t fit into our 21st century boxes.
Franklin and Jefferson, favorites of modern liberals, weren’t true Deists as they're often portrayed. While both rejected accounts of miracles and thought Christianity was sometimes corrupted by bad clergy, they also believed in a monotheistic God who was active in human affairs. Both thought Christianity was a civilizing force beneficial to individuals and society.
Washington and Adams, darlings of today’s conservatives, weren’t orthodox Christians. Washington was active in his church but refused to take Communion. Adams was a Unitarian who didn't believe in Jesus’ divinity or in the Trinity.
During the Revolutionary War, Washington became the first to explicitly impose a division between church and state, when he banned religious discrimination in the Continental Army.
But it’s Madison who best demonstrates how tricky it is to understand the founders through the lens of today’s culture wars. Radically against any mixing of religion and government, he opposed even generic proclamations calling for a day of prayer — and explicitly opposed the appointment of military chaplains.
He did this, counterintuitively, because he supported Christianity generally and evangelicalism specifically. Educated at an evangelical college, he’d earned his legal reputation by defending persecuted Baptists in court. He won election to Congress by promising Baptists he’d see to it the government entirely avoided matters of faith.
His original version of the First Amendment prohibited any expression of religion by the federal government — and by the states. The amendment we ended up with is a watered-down compromise Madison was forced to accept. For his efforts he was beloved by evangelicals.
So, how would the founders respond to the idea of sectarian chaplains in public schools?
Madison would oppose them, as he opposed military chaplains.
The remaining founders would land all over the cultural map, as they did in the 1700s. They would surprise us. Politics, culture and human nature were messy affairs in their day, constantly in flux. As they are today.
Paul Prather has been a rural Pentecostal pastor in Kentucky for more than 40 years. Also a journalist, he was The Lexington Herald-Leader’s staff religion writer in the 1990s, before leaving to devote his full time to the ministry. He now writes a regular column about faith and religion for the Herald-Leader, where this column first appeared. Prather’s written four books. You can email him at pratpd@yahoo.com.