They Haven't Got a Prayer
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Others admonished her to pray. Across the street, a man holding a sign that read "Get the Devil Out of Santa Fe" shouted at protesters, warning them they were going to burn in hell. Amanda had expected that the protest would invite some hostility, but even she was taken aback. "The Bible is full of passages about how you shouldn't judge others and how you should love your neighbor," she said, "but the mood that night was hateful."
There was perhaps no more obvious an outsider in Santa Fe than Phillip Nevelow, the only Jewish student in the school district. The son of Galveston County sheriff's major Eric Nevelow, who oversees the county jail, and Donna Nevelow, a sculptor, Phillip found his religion under attack—and his life threatened—during the fight for school prayer. The Nevelows had moved from Galveston to Santa Fe fifteen years earlier in search of more land for Donna's quarter horses; they settled on a remote, ten-acre spread south of town and largely kept to themselves. Never venturing to a school board meeting, much less jumping into the fray over school prayer, they have now found themselves inadvertently at its center. "We would have to be deaf, dumb, and blind not to realize that what was happening to our son was a direct result of what was going on with the school district," said Donna Nevelow. "A debate was raging over religion, and our son became the punching bag."An exuberant, if unremarkable, student who liked to sketch album covers in his notebook during class, Phillip seemed an unlikely source of controversy. But one afternoon in 1998 when Phillip, then twelve, was on lunch break in the school yard at Santa Fe Junior High, three students surrounded him and began chanting in a singsong voice, "Hitler missed one! No more Jews! Hitler missed one! He should have gotten you." It proved to be only one in a series of cruelties he would have to endure. Last October a classmate scrawled a swastika in his notebook. In November another student cornered him in English class and saluted him while yelling, "Heil Hitler!" Later that month two boys drew swastikas on their hands and shoved them in Phillip's face. Boys began roughing him up in the hallways and on the school bus, leaving dark bruises on his arms. His classmates were never reprimanded, the Nevelows said, and Phillip's complaints to teachers and administrators were greeted with indifference. "By the eighth grade he'd developed what I call a defensive posture," Donna recalled. "If he was attacked, he'd swing back."
Donna herself did not fully realize the depth of hatred her son faced at school until one afternoon this past May, when she happened to be standing outside her house as the school bus pulled up. As Phillip stepped off the bus, Donna heard a student call after him—in a voice that carried over the dull roar of a backhoe a work crew was using—"Dirty Jew!" She stopped dead in her tracks. "I said, 'Phillip, did they just say what I think they said?' He said, 'Come on to the house, Mom. Please don't make a big deal out of this. Just come on to the house and ignore them.'" Renewed complaints to school administrators again resulted in no disciplinary action, said the Nevelows, and Phillip resumed his newly familiar stance—his shoulders hunched, his eyes fixed to the ground. Two weeks later he came home trembling with fear: Three high school students who often taunted him on the bus had been particularly unrelenting that day, proclaiming their hatred for Jews until the children sitting next to Phillip had to put their hands over their ears. Before he got off the bus, they had issued a chilling threat: "We're going to hang you, you dirty Jew."
Santa Fe police officers later arrested the three boys and charged them with making terroristic threats, but Phillip's classmates continued to torment him. In June, while he waited for his mother to pick him up from summer school, a fellow eighth grader approached him. "So you're the Jew," the boy sneered. "I know someone who wants to kill you." The boy shoved Phillip several times, then began to wrestle with him, eventually putting Phillip in a chokehold. A witness broke up the fight, and the police later charged the boy with assault. "We tried for a long time to work with the school, to get them to acknowledge that there was a problem and to rectify the problem," Eric Nevelow said. "But the response was always a 'boys will be boys' attitude. [School board member] Robin Clayton even called what happened to my son 'trite.'" In August the Nevelows transferred Phillip to a public school in Galveston and filed suit against the district, asking for payment for the out-of-district tuition and up to $4 million in damages. Given current litigation, superintendent Richard Ownby cannot comment on the case except to say, "We've only heard one side of the story."
Was the hatred directed at Phillip simply adolescent cruelty or was it also the by-product of the fight for school prayer? "I'm flabbergasted that anyone would make that connection," said John Couch of the latter. "I can't understand how a policy supporting an invocation before a game that advocates safety and sportsmanship could cause fights. I think it's absurd." It is striking that many prominent figures in the fight for school prayer scoff at the Nevelows' claims, offering their opinion, not for attribution, that the family has blown these incidents out of proportion, or that Phillip—whom they have never met—is a troublemaker who must have provoked the fights himself. ("We heard he told kids that if they bothered him, he would use his Jewishness as a weapon," one minister explained.) Rather than expound upon the importance of tolerance, town leaders seemed, at best, indifferent. When pressed about his opinion of the anti-Semitic remarks directed at Phillip, Couch said, "Obviously we don't condone that, but the local media wants to make it look like Christians were behind this, and that is not Christian behavior. Christians seem to be fair game these days."
The Nevelows readily admit that their son has had "battles and scrapes with other kids," but they greeted assertions that he instigated anti-Semitic attacks with incredulity. Instead, they lay blame squarely on the shoulders of the school district, whose fight for school prayer, they believe, has fostered an atmosphere that puts religious minorities on the defensive. "Its insistence on Christian prayer in the schools has created an environment of hatred for anyone who is not a part of their agenda," Donna said. "My son is living proof."
Nearly five years after the does filed suit, the battle that rocked this small Texas town to its core made its way to the Supreme Court, where nine justices sat in judgment this past March. At issue was a very narrow portion of the original case: Whether the school district's pre-game policy endorsed prayer and violated the First Amendment or merely allowed a neutral forum for free expression in which a student could choose to say, or not say, a prayer before a football game. Aided by Texas attorney general John Cornyn, Jay Sekulow, the chief counsel of the American Center for Law and Justice, which was founded by televangelist Pat Robertson, represented the school district, arguing that its policy neither favored nor disfavored religious expression. Anthony Griffin, representing the Does for the ACLU, contended that the policy was adopted solely for the purpose of perpetuating public prayer at football games, and that, in practice, it coerced students at school-sponsored events to participate in religious exercises. "It endorses religion and its whole purpose is religion," Griffin said, adding, "They weave a web and seek to have this court ignore its history."Reaffirming its earlier rulings against school-sponsored prayer, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in favor of the Does this past June. In the majority decision, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote that the district "asks us to pretend that we do not recognize what every Santa Fe High School student understands clearly—that this policy is about prayer. The District further asks us to accept what is obviously untrue: that these messages are necessary to 'solemnize' a football game and that this single-student, year-long position is essential to the protection of student speech. We refuse to turn a blind eye to the context in which this policy arose, and that context quells any doubt that this policy was implemented with the purpose of endorsing school prayer." The policy, cautioned Stevens, "encourages divisiveness along religious lines" and "has the improper effect of coercing those present to participate in an act of religious worship." He judged the policy to be lacking in secular purpose and therefore an unconstitutional government practice. "We recognize the important role that public worship plays in many communities," Stevens wrote. "But such religious activity in public schools, as elsewhere, must comport with the First Amendment."
Echoing the sentiments of many in Santa Fe, Chief Justice William Rehnquist wrote in his dissenting opinion that the ruling "bristles with hostility to all things religious in public life." The court's reasoning was flawed and contradictory, he wrote, observing that "sporting events often begin with a solemn rendition of our national anthem, with its concluding verse 'And this be our motto: In God is our trust.' Under the Court's logic, a public school that sponsors the singing of the national anthem before football games violates the [First Amendment]." It is these subtle legal distinctions that rile school prayer supporters, who see the courts as irrational arbiters of that which is sacrosanct and who will not rest easy until the wall separating church and state has been breached. But it is such distinctions that protect religious freedom. As Justice Stevens concluded, "nothing in the Constitution as interpreted by the Court prohibits any public school student from voluntarily praying at any time before, during, or after the schoolday. But the religious liberty protected by the Constitution is abridged when the State affirmatively sponsors the particular religious practice of prayer."
In the end, it was not school prayer in Santa Fe that proved so troubling as what the fight for school prayer wrought—branding those who disagreed as infidels. Perhaps the greatest irony of this town's five-year crusade is that by fighting relentlessly for school prayer, Santa Fe revealed the true dangers of its argument, laying bare the need to keep religion out of government and, just as importantly, to keep government out of religion.
