Saturday, November 15, 1997

Saying prayers in school won't make kids saints

By GENE OWENS

Religion News Service

(Gene Owens is political editor of the Mobile (Ala.) Register).

UNDATED - When school days opened with the Lord's Prayer, "Jesus Loves Me" and a reading from "The Upper Room," kids nevertheless cheated on exams, smoked in the bathrooms, cussed on school grounds and made out at drive-ins. Girls even got pregnant - not as often as they do today, but it happened.

Knowing the kids of my generation, I'd say prayer in the schools had little to do with any of that. We had just as much native meanness as today's kids; we just lacked the know-how, the wherewithal and the opportunity.

Those limitations stemmed from the home and community more than from school. We didn't learn our religion at school and take it home with us; we learned it at home and took it to school with us.

A lot of things have affected our morals since the placid 1950s, and they had nothing to do with prayer - or its absence - in the school.

The big change has been the destruction of the community and the family as we knew them. The community was our extended family, our mentor, our disciplinarian and our chaperone. When we stepped into our communities, we were among people who knew us and our parents. If we misbehaved, somebody was watching. The community insulated us from the evil ways of the Philistines.

When the community died, the insulation was peeled away, the watchful eye went blind, and we did what kids are wont to do when nobody is watching.

Death came not from prayer deprivation but from fierce forces from within and without.

A few of the villains:

- The interstate highway. This benign invention of the Eisenhower administration decentralized the city, moving people from neighborhood streets to subdivisions and commerce from downtowns to shopping malls. It dispersed workers and job centers. In the old community, your next-door neighbor was likely to be the person you parked next to at work and sat next to at worship. Now neighbors scatter in all directions at 8 a.m. and come home at 5:30 or 6 p.m., ready to relax in front of the tube in isolated enclaves. We may know people on the Internet better than we know the people next door.

- The multi-car family. No longer tied to Daddy's keychain, teen-agers could take their own wheels wherever they pleased, following those interstates to fun and mischief.

- Rising affluence. Young people with money and credit cards no longer had to stay home and play spin-the-bottle. Beer? Drugs? They could afford them.

- Multi-breadwinner families. To sustain these lifestyles, both parents had to work, which meant less supervision for these affluent, mobile young people.

- Birth control. Reliable birth control removed the practical reasons for abstinence or fidelity, at least in hedonistic eyes. The media portrayed casual sex as normal and routine. As sex outside marriage became commonplace, parenthood outside marriage became more acceptable.

- White flight. Fleeing desegregation, affluent whites flocked to the suburbs while impoverished blacks gravitated to the inner cities. There they created a ready market for drugs and a fertile recruiting area for crime. Court-ordered cross-busing destroyed the school as an anchor for the community.

You can add to the list from your own experience.

I wonder what would happen if parents across the land banded together and decided that:

- Kids can't have that car of their own until they're out of high school. When they take the family car out, they must stay in touch by pager or cell phone. Socializing will be in chaperoned groups, and not in solitary pairs.

- Television viewing will be limited to two hours a night, and one of those hours must be spent watching programming the whole family can enjoy. The other hour must be spent watching programs the parents have screened for violence or immorality. Access to the Internet will be similarly limited.

- Family meals will be taken together and preceded by a prayer of thanks according to the religious beliefs of the parents.

- On days of worship, spiritual activities will take precedence over sports or other entertainment events.

If parents would take charge in these areas, they wouldn't have to rely on some schoolteacher of uncertain biblical literacy to lead kids in some perfunctory generic prayer that may or may not conform to their own concepts of the way to approach the Creator.

Of course, it would be easier to persuade the Supreme Court to overturn its school-prayer decisions or, failing that, to thumb noses at the Court. It wouldn't return the nation to morality, but a lot of folks would have to find something else to rail about.