Like Yoder in the Free Exercise context, the Supreme Court in Greece relied on the fact that legislative prayer was a long-standing practice at all levels of American government. Because it was traditional, the Court reasoned, it could not be unconstitutional. Five of the Court’s six Catholics joined the majority opinion; only Sonia Sotomayor joined the Court’s three Jewish justices in dissent. Here again is the deep power of Christian normativity: under the Greece precedent, Christian prayer to convene a public meeting is literally subsumed within the definition of the American way of life. Even government chaplains, ordained by religious authorities and paid for by taxpayers, do not constitute an “establishment of religion” because—like Legislative opening prayers—the Supreme Court has ruled that such publicly employed chaplains were part of tradition in state and federal legislatures throughout American history. But what kinds of clergy were selected to these roles over the years? Not rabbis, imams, or pandits. If a government meeting opened with prayers from a Hindu priest, an imam, or a rabbi, would it be similarly received? The answer is no. And all this still fails to address the millions of Americans who do not believe in prayer at all, but who nonetheless, when attending public meetings, as is their right, promptly hear the words, “Let us pray.”
Even if Galloway and her co-plaintiff had gotten the “generic,” “nonsectarian” prayers they asked for, those prayers would still promote Christian norms. A chaplain who carefully omits references to Jesus will still be speaking a prayer in English, likely using words like “thee” and “thy” and a vernacular and cadence familiar to Christians, and concluding with an “Amen.” Any veneer of religious neutrality accomplished by omitting references to “Your Son our Savior,” or the words “in Jesus’ name,” is just that: a veneer. The chaplain’s words will still sound like a Christian prayer to everyone in the room—especially the religious minorities.
This is not to say that the Establishment Clause’s protections from coercive state-sponsored religious activities are never applied to Christianity. For example, the Establishment Clause was held in two major Supreme Court decisions, Engel v. Vitale (1962) and Abington Township School District v. Schempp (1963), to prohibit schools from requiring students to participate in devotional prayer and mandatory Bible reading. Sadly, the tragedy here is not that Engel or Schempp did not go far enough, but that the Christian majority saw this as an attack on Christians and schools and was successful in perpetuating the idea that government is “taking religion out of schools.” The goal was never to remove religion, but to remove compelled prayer and forced religious practice: school rules and traditions that obligated children to pray Christian prayers under the supervision of their teachers and coaches. School administrators and policy makers have often taken these rulings much too far—treating them as a virtual ban on the discussion of religion in schools, as if schools must exist as “religion-free zones.”35
Treating religion as a barred topic in school discourages students from expressing important elements of their identity. Like “color-blind racism,” it perpetuates the “optical illusion” of freedom of religion because it allows educators to deny the reality that religion is in schools every day—specifically one religion, Christianity. Christianity is there, from the calendar to the culture to the history books. Pretending otherwise results in curricula that ignore religion’s role in history and society, and allows educators to ignore religion-based conflicts and bullying when the right thing to do is to talk openly about the issue. I think of a seventh-grader I encountered years ago. An Indian American Hindu immigrant, he was held down in the lunchroom and force-fed a hot dog by several classmates who thought it would be funny to make the religiously vegetarian boy eat beef. How does pretending religion doesn’t exist help that child articulate what happened to him? How does it help educators properly punish the perpetrators, or provide restorative justice to the victim?
In fact, the Supreme Court in Schempp wrote that the study of religions in the nation’s public schools is both legal and desirable:
It might well be said that one’s education is not complete without a study of comparative religions or the history of religion and its relationship to the advancement of civilization. It certainly may be said that the Bible is worthy of study for its literary and historical qualities. Nothing we have said here indicates that such study of the Bible or of religion, where presented objectively as part of a secular program of education, may not be effected consistent with the First Amendment.36
In other words, the Establishment Clause does not prohibit the study of religion, or even the reading of sacred Scriptures in school as part of a course of study. Schools and teachers are forbidden only from crossing the line between academic presentation and religious advocacy—between “teaching” and “preaching.”37 Schools should promote awareness of religion and expose students to the diversity of religious worldviews; they are prohibited only from encouraging students to accept religion, and from endorsing or denigrating any particular religion or belief. Schools need to acknowledge the role of various religions in shaping world and US history and religions’ influence in society today, and nothing in Engel or Schempp prevents that.
Understanding the roles Christianity plays in the development of American law and society—and even of how laws and public perceptions define who is or may become “American”—allows us to see through the optical illusion of “religious freedom,” and to understand how Whiteness and Christianity have coexisted and mutually supported each other. That edifice of privilege for certain Americans, and the corresponding struggles and disadvantages faced particularly by non-White non-Christians, are fundamental to the ways the US has fallen short of the “more perfect union” it could be and should be.
Judging Devotion
In New Jersey, students pursuing a teaching career must complete an internship in the schools. Each student intern is paired with a mentor teacher who has been identified as a role model. One fall semester, around the time of the Jewish “High Holy Days” of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, two interns who had taken my Multicultural Education class described a conversation between their mentor teachers. The topic was several students’ absence for the Jewish holidays. One teacher remarked, and the other agreed: “I don’t know why they keep the kids home on these days; they’re not really that Jewish.”
This statement illustrates the judgments and attitudes of people who have spent a lifetime internalizing their dominant status as Christians in America, to the point that they feel at ease to pass judgment on their Jewish students based on their Christian interpretation of what makes a person “that Jewish.” My interns were troubled by the exchange because they could see how their mentor teachers were deciding how others should behave religiously. It is not appropriate—particularly for religious outsiders, as these teachers were vis-à-vis their Jewish students—to critique how others express their faith or celebrate religious holidays. As my students correctly recognized, their teachers’ remarks exemplified several facets of Christian privilege.
Let us unpack the situation a bit more. First of all, are the Jewish students really free to observe the Jewish holidays? Many school districts across the country have policies that treat religious holidays as “excused absences.” While appearing progressive, these policies still create a structural bias against students who are not Christian. The notion of an excused absence for Christmas or Easter is moot, as the school year is designed around the Christian calendar. Christian students never have to be absent (excused or otherwise) to observe their major holidays, while religious minority students and their families face the conundrum of observing their religion or going to school.
Second, the