Texas faith leaders divided over school prayer, Bible reading periods as deadline for SB 11 approaches

From Houston Public Media:

Texas public school boards and charter school governing bodies have until March 1 to decide whether to set aside time for students and faculty to pray or read the Bible. That’s according to a law passed last year as Senate Bill 11.

Texas faith leaders both for and against the law are lobbying school boards as the deadline approaches.

Pastor Hernan Castano said he believes strongly in the power of prayer to heal people. Speaking at Iglesia Rios De Aceite in west Houston, where he is the senior pastor, he said it’s important for parents and churches to take the lead in teaching children about prayer, but he said schools also have a role to play.

“We’ve seen how children have lost their sense of direction, how much violence has gone to the schools,” Castano said. “And I think people need to realize that this wasn’t the case when prayer was back in the schools before it got taken away. We need to get prayer back into school.”

Castano recently became director of the Houston Area Pastor Council. He and his colleagues are looking ahead toward the March 1 deadline.

“We’re sending out letters. We’re expressing our concerns if this doesn’t go through, and we’re also expressing the importance of this going through and how the entire community wants this to go through,” Castano said.

The lead sponsor of SB 11 in the Texas House was Republican state Rep. David Spiller, who represents a 12- county district west of Fort Worth. Before he was elected to the Legislature, he served 26 years as a school board member.

“I’d heard from a lot of constituents that they felt like, over the years, the opportunity for students and employees in schools to participate in voluntary prayer or reading of the Bible or other religious texts, that those things had deteriorated, their rights had deteriorated over a period of time,” Spiller said.

Spiller said the way the Texas Education Code was written before SB 11, students could only pray in school silently, not openly. He stressed the new law is written in such a way as to make participation voluntary at all levels.

“First of all, the school district has to say, ‘Are we going to participate in this, or are we not?’ If they don’t, the end of story,” Spiller said. “If they do, then they provide a place outside the instructional time period for students and staff at each campus to do this on a daily basis.”

The cornerstone of the bill, Spiller said, is that the schools must get the consent of participants, in the case of school staff, or their parents in the case of students.

“It is specifically designed to not be in contact with or earshot of anyone that chooses not to participate, and so their safeguards are in there, and this bill is carefully drafted to respect everyone’s rights,” Spiller said, “whether you choose to participate or whether you don’t.”

But for some Texans, including some faith leaders, even that is going too far and risks violating the First Amendment protections against separation of church and state.

“Even if you have an opt out or an opt in, when you’re using the blunt instrument of government, you are advocating for the role of religion in a child’s life who does not have the agency to make a free choice about whether to participate or not. There’ll be pressure from peers. There’ll be potentially even pressure from parents,” said the Rev. George Mason, a retired Baptist pastor from Dallas and the president of Faith Commons.

Many supporters of SB 11, notably Spiller, have argued the law does not privilege any one religious group over another. The Rev. Laura Mayo disagrees. She is a senior minister at Covenant Church, a progressive Baptist congregation in Houston. Mayo pointed to Attorney General Ken Paxton’s public comment on SB 11.

“When Paxton suggested that there should be a prayer, he said, right, the Lord’s Prayer offered by Jesus Christ. That was the suggested prayer,” Mayo said. “So, how is that not a privileging of Christianity?”

More than 160 faith leaders across Texas have signed an open letter, produced by the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, urging school boards not to adopt the periods of prayer and Bible reading. The letter spells out the potential hazards to non-participating children.

“Students who do not opt in might be bullied or ostracized, and students may feel pressure to opt in to gain favor and time with teachers or coaches,” the letter states. “State-sponsored prayer time will also cause division among students based on their religious beliefs.”

If that poses a theological and moral problem for Christian faith leaders like Mayo and Mason, it poses a potentially more serious problem for non-Christian faith leaders, many of whom are concerned for the psychological or even physical safety of students among their congregations.

“It’s not carving out five times a day for Muslims to pray, or three times a day for Jews to pray. We’re talking about Christian prayer here,” said Cantor Sheri Allen, co-founder of Makom Shelanu Congregation, a synagogue in Fort Worth. “It’s just one more attempt to dismantle this wall between church and state.”

Mayo, a former teacher, argued that even with the opt-in provision, SB 11 would be a bureaucratic nightmare to implement.

“Let’s just talk about the nuisance of the permission slips,” she said. “The teachers [have] got to keep up with what kid said that they would be able [to participate] or what kid’s parents or guardians said that they were allowed to stay for the prayer and which kids weren’t.”

Mayo, like Castano, is calling school board members to make her case – in her case arguing that, as a Christian minister, she feels religious education belongs in the home and in houses of worship, not in schools.

“We already have the freedom to pray in schools, read scripture in schools, create religious clubs in schools,” Mayo said. “This is not needed.”

Mayo likes to quote one of her divinity school professors, the Rev. James Dunn, as evidence of why the law is unnecessary: “As long as there are math tests, there will be prayer in school.”

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