The God-Given Loophole: How Religion Is Infiltrating America's Public Schools

the annual “See You at the Pole” prayer event...happens at schools nationwide on the same day. On the understanding that the event is student-initiated and student-led, it is deemed to be constitutional. In recent years — at least when it comes to religion — the Supreme Court has made a firm distinction between school-sponsored speech, which is constrained by the Establishment Clause, and student speech, which is protected by the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment.

Of course, within the appropriate context that a school setting demands, students should always be free to talk about religion at school. Children can and should have the right to pray in school, discuss their faith and even proselytize their classmates. Yet, as in many other schools, the loud calls for “religious liberty” and the “free speech” of students is often just a convoluted way for adults to use the authority of the school to promote their own religious views and practices among students. The prayers at “See You at the Pole” may be student-led, yet the event is organized and promoted on national and local levels by adults. At events I attended, pastors from nearby churches played a central role in urging their kids to participate and supplied them with sophisticated sound systems and other props. At New Heights [Middle School in Jefferson, South Carolina], Principal Larry Stinson led the prayers around the pole, and he was joined by a number of parents, teachers and other adults.

The idea that “it’s all right as long as the kids do it” is now so pervasive among those who view the public schools as missionary fields that it has a technical name: “peer evangelism.” A leader of the Life Book Movement — a project of The Gideons International, which provides high school students with “teenage” evangelical Christian tracts that they are expected to deliver to other kids in the school — calls it “a God-given loophole.” In the two and a half years since the inception of this peer evangelism initiative, they have distributed nearly 2 million “Life Books.”

Perhaps the largest of the peer-to-peer groups is the Fellowship for Christian Athletes, which encourages students to organize prayers before, during and after school sporting events. The Chesterfield County school district has seven chapters — and they receive the enthusiastic support of Principal Stinson...

The use of “character education” as a cover for religious proselytizing to public school children is now so common that it, too, has a nickname: “pizza evangelism.” (It seems that the first missionaries to use the tactic tended to follow their character presentations with pizza parties.) Team Impact, Commandos! USA, the Power Team, Answering the Cries, Go to Tell Ministries, the Todd Becker Foundation, the Strength Team — these are just a few of the faith-based groups that enter public schools every year with presentations on drug addiction, drunk driving, and other important topics and aim to leave with a collection of young religious converts.

The proselytizing administration of New Heights could also draw on a range of perfectly legal after-school religious programs to get its message across. The leader in this category is Good News Clubs, sponsored by an organization called the Child Evangelism Fellowship. The clubs, which are now established in more than 3,500 public elementary schools nationwide, are intended to convert young children to a fundamentalist form of the Christian faith and equip them to “witness” to their peers.