Innocence, ignorance - and backlash

Amy was tall for a first grader. She had a joyful smile, soft fair hair, and a deep desire to learn to read. But my first impression of her was tempered by the warning I received almost immediately from the school principal: I was not to make her stand when the class said the Pledge of Allegiance because it was against her religion. The school wanted to accommodate all faiths.

Ludlow, Vermont, in the late 1960s was a small, homogenous community of less than 1,000 people, most of whom were either Roman Catholic or main stream Protestant. There was no synagogue in town; only a few Jewish families lived there. A lot of people, including my family, didn't attend religious services at all, though most of us came from a Protestant background. There was, however, a growing group of Jehovah's Witnesses in town. Amy was from one such family.

So all eyes were turned on her when she remained seated during the morning ritual. Her pale skin glowed red; she looked at the floor. In succeeding weeks, she sometimes stood silently, sometimes squirmed in her chair. Always she maintained a sad dignity that showed how well she understood that she was irretrievably set apart from her classmates.

Eventually the class accepted that there were different rules for Amy. The other students mumbled the pledge without staring at her or asking awkward questions. Amy became less shy and sad. She made friends. She chased around the playground during recess like everyone else. She gained status because she was one of the brightest and kindest children in the class.

Then came the Christmas season. Peter and Rachel, the two Jewish children in my class of 24, were not for bidden by their parents to participate in learning Christmas carols, writing letters to Santa, practicing for the all school holiday pageant and concert. (Hanukkah was mentioned only in passing, as a sort of afterthought.) I know now that the holiday preparations in school must have posed an absolutely no win dilemma for Peter, Rachel, and their parents, but I also understand now why they did not protest. The homogenous majority of townspeople saw nothing wrong with celebrating Christmas at school. It had been done for generations. It was a tradition--one that excluded and intimidated those who did not share it.

Only Amy, once again, stood out. Her mother, a warm and courteous woman, came to school to talk with me. We agreed that Amy would be excused from all rehearsals and caroling, and that she would stay home on the day of the class Christmas party as well as on the day of the holiday concert. She would not draw a name for the gift exchange; her name would not be put into the gaily decorated "Christmas Mailbox." She would not make decorations for the class Christmas tree.

The school officials and the PTA thought this was the perfect solution to a minor problem. But I watched Amy grow more silent, saw her try less hard to make friends, and ached as she began to lose her spontaneity and lose interest in her schoolwork.

I felt disturbed and uneasy. For the first time as an adult I had directly experienced the destructive effect of state sponsorship of a particular religious faith. I wish I could say that henceforth I became a strong advocate for purely secular holiday activities, refused to participate in carol singing, ceased to tell the story of the stable and the star and the wise men--but I confess I did not. I just kept the visual memory of Amy and Peter and Rachel somewhere in the back of my mind as an instance of in explicable injustice.

Now, many years, many changes, many experiences later, I am the executive director of the Vermont chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, and I realize that there was a kind of majority innocence 26 years ago (when I knew Amy) that still exists in parts of this country. That innocence remains as dangerous as ever.

I say innocence instead of ignorance, though, in fact, both are alive and well in every community that puts up a cross or a menorah on the courthouse steps, in every school that opts for a graduation prayer or moment of silence de signed to promote prayer, in every well meaning parents' group that doesn't understand why "Silent Night" cannot be included in the holiday program. The tyranny of the majority is too often strengthened by the good intentions of the innocently ignorant, even as it is promoted by the cynical, the devious, and the power hungry.

The innocent and the ignorant, it seems, are always with us. So are the manipulators, those who promote feel good proposals to well meaning Americans--like a school prayer amendment or an amendment to ban flag-burning--so that a broader and more insidious purpose can be achieved.

As we approach a new millennium, the battle lines drawn over the separation of church and state are becoming increasingly polarized. The idea of truly secular education has never been popular in America; any religion except main stream Protestantism has often been viewed with suspicion, and schools have traditionally been given the task of instilling patriotism and morality in children. Only in this century have Catholics and Jews begun to become free of religious discrimination in most areas of society. We still have a long way to go before all Americans get a fair shake in education and employment without regard to their faith or lack of it.

For most of our history, the establishment clause has been largely ignored by the American Protestant majority. Church and state have been entangled in our schools like grapevines climbing an arbor, so inextricably wound around each other that it's hard to tell where one ends and the other begins.

Still, in the last 40 years or so, Americans have begun to separate those strands. It is yet possible that the promise of the First Amendment may some day become a reality for those it was designed to protect: the "different." And it is precisely because of this more widespread demand for the First Amendment to apply to everyone that the principles of the Bill of Rights are seriously in jeopardy.

Since the upheavals of the late 1960s, more Americans have become aware of what the First Amendment means to them, and to others, in personal terms. As a result, people are becoming more fixed in their positions. As Americans have become less ignorant about what a free society might actually look like, many of them have become a good deal less complacent and less tolerant of differences.

Battles have been fought in the streets and in the courts over civil rights and the rights of women, Native Americans, people of color, the elderly, and the disabled. The Supreme Court, in several landmark decisions, has set parameters for the discussion about religion in the schools. There have been winners and losers, and backlash grows as those who are losing power feel more threatened.

Lost sight of in this struggle for the hearts and minds of the majority has been the second of the basic principles upon which the United States was founded. The first is democracy: majority rules. The second, and the most pro found and precious of the ideas of our founders, is liberty: the majority may not force its ideas and opinions on those who do not share them. You cannot make me pray if I am an atheist. You can not force me to believe as you do.

Most Americans will at least give lip service to this concept, but taking it a step further is more difficult. The good people of Ludlow, Vermont, could understand in 1969 that Amy ought not to be compelled to participate in religious holiday celebrations that violated her own faith, but they believed that lack of compulsion was sufficient to meet the test of the First Amendment; there was no need to do away with the long tradition of Christian celebration in the schools. America still abounds in such well intentioned people.

More and more Americans, however, have come to realize that true liberty must mean that the state cannot make Amy and Peter and Rachel de facto outcasts, second class citizens, by first compelling them to go to the Ludlow Elementary School and then promoting a religious belief their families do not share. If the state does not remain neutral, then religious liberty is not possible and there can be no such thing as secular education.

If innocence were the only fault of the American public, however, it would not be difficult to open people's eyes to this elementary notion. People who experience, either personally or through empathy, the pain of the dispossessed are able (if sometimes reluctantly) to ad just their views.

But we are not talking here only about what constitutes freedom and individual rights in the matter of religious faith. People like Newt Gingrich, Jesse Helms, Pat Robertson, and Pat Buchanan are not merely trying to force their version of truth on the rest of the nation through prayer in school and the teaching of creationism. The Christian Coalition represents more than just fundamentalist Christians who wish to bring the "light of faith" to innocent children in public schools and thereby save their souls. The upsurge in power of the radical right is, in fact, a backlash against all the changes of the last 40 years--a reactionary stand by those who often clearly understand the concept of liberty and don't like it one bit.

The twentieth century has seen a profound change, not in the principles of the Bill of Rights but in the ability of society to put those principles into actual practice. Because we never seriously attempted to adhere to what we said we believed in, those in the traditional power structure did not hereto fore feel so seriously threatened by it. Now many people do, and their response is to circle the wagons.

They understand that, when we talk about secular education, we are not just talking about keeping the government neutral in matters of religion. We are talking about recognizing in education the rights and struggles of women and minorities, gays and lesbians, the poor, the homeless, and the incarcerated. We are talking about opposing censorship and defending librarians, booksellers, and readers. The struggle is not just to keep organized prayer out of schools but to resist all those who would take this country back to the eighteenth century instead of forward into the twenty first.

Humanists who understand and cherish the Bill of Rights and the concept of liberty must therefore work for the right of the Amys of this world to be free and equal--not merely in the classroom but in all aspects of their lives. For in one respect or another, we are all Amy. Let us not, as I did in 1969, merely sympathize and do nothing when Amy's First Amendment rights are violated--whether through innocence, ignorance, or the lust for power. If violation can be done to one child in school, one woman who lives in poverty, one person of color, it can be done to us all.

Leslie Williams is executive director of the Vermont chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union and adjunct professor of literature and writing at Vermont College of Norwich University. She has been a pre-school and first grade teacher, has served as education coordinator and director of Central Vermont Head Start, and has taught English as a second language as a Peace Corps volunteer in Thailand.

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