They Haven't Got a Prayer
The Gulf Coast town of Santa Fe is painfully split over the issue of religion in the public schools. Supporters are outraged by a Supreme Court decision invoking the separation of church and state. Opponents have been threatened and harassed.
On the first Friday night of football season, Santa Fe High School's bleachers were packed with straw-haired girls and sunburned boys in baseball caps and parents in T-shirts that said "Fix Your Eyes on God." Beneath them, a spectacle was unfolding that seemed far grander than anything a Santa Fe Indians-Hitchcock Bulldogs game would normally merit. TV trucks and camera crews were descending from all directions on this small-town stadium, having come not for the sport, but for the symbolism: This was the first game since the U.S. Supreme Court had handed down a devastating decision against the Santa Fe school district, striking down its long-standing tradition of school-sponsored prayer at football games. The ruling had touched a wellspring of emotion in Santa Fe, and as game-time neared, it was clear that the town's indignation ran deep. Two men bearing large pine crosses across their backs stood in silent protest at the stadium gates, while a dark-eyed teenager walked among the crowd singing hymns and weeping, his Bible held aloft, as if he were seeking divine intercession. Defiance mixed with piety: On the crowd's fringes, a towheaded boy carried a sign high above his head proclaiming "We ought to obey God rather than men, Acts 5:29." Faith and football have always gone hand in hand in Texas, where the gridiron is king, and especially in Santa Fe, a devout, largely Baptist town in western Galveston County where residents keenly feel God's presence. A rural community of around ten thousand people, Santa Fe has become ground zero in the fight for school prayer, its June defeat before the Supreme Court having lent its barren stretches of salt grass and marshland an air of martyrdom. The battle that has raged here—turning friend against friend, neighbor against neighbor—has centered on the right to pray. But the prayer controversy is also part of a larger struggle over how great a role religion should play in public life, and in Santa Fe many think it should play a very large role indeed. It was a point Santa Fe made that Friday night from the bleachers, in front of the hum and whir of cameras: When the last notes of the National Anthem faded and the Fighting Indians ran onto the field, several hundred people in the stands bowed their heads and raised their hands skyward, their voices straining to be heard over cheers and air horns and scattered applause. Our father which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven. . . .
The battle over prayer began here when two mothers sued the Santa Fe school district in 1995 for what they saw as an undue presence of religion in the public schools: Gideons were distributing Bibles in the hallways, teachers were teaching religious songs to their pupils, and graduation ceremonies had taken on the air of Sunday worship services. Only one sentence in the fifteen-page petition mentioned prayer at football games, but it became the key issue in subsequent appeals and the sole complaint to be heard by the Supreme Court. The town's five-year fight culminated with the Santa Fe v. Doe ruling, in which the high court held that students could no longer deliver prayers over school loudspeakers before football games: The practice violated the separation of church and state, the court ruled, and was inherently coercive. Though students' right to pray on their own before, during, and after games is still protected by law, the decision has stirred deep emotions. This fall, it has triggered a grassroots movement for prayer in the stands across parts of Texas and the South, where pre-game prayer over the loudspeaker is tradition, as much a part of Friday nights as the opening kickoff.
In the wake of the Supreme Court ruling, Santa Fe has been championed as a symbol of a good, God-fearing Texas town that fought for what was right. But over the past several years, the town has waged a modern-day crusade that has revealed not only the best of intentions but also the worst of impulses. Those who have found themselves at odds with the town's desire for more religion in the schools have been shunned, harassed, and even threatened—so much so that the two mothers who sued the school district did so anonymously, fearing for their families' safety. Students who declined to take Bibles that were handed out at school were called devil worshipers; parents who dared to question the school's pre-game prayer policy were deemed heretics. Those of minority faiths fared no better: This summer, the parents of the only Jewish boy in the school district, Phillip Nevelow, filed a $4 million lawsuit charging that administrators turned a blind eye to classmates who drew swastikas on his notebook, gave him the "Heil Hitler" salute, and ultimately threatened to hang him.
Prayer before football games is part of a much larger campaign in Santa Fe, one to "bring God back into the classroom" according to school prayer advocates. Many here argue that the secularization of schools—after decades of Supreme Court rulings removing morning prayer and the Ten Commandments from the classroom—has caused a moral crisis in both this community and the nation as a whole. They believe Santa Fe has been chosen for a purpose, and that purpose is to wage "spiritual warfare" against an increasingly secular and amoral culture. "We are warriors on the field," said Pastor Terry Gibson, "and prayer is our greatest weapon."
Danielle Mason was eleven years old when she was first accused of not being a good Christian. The youngest of four sisters who lived on a rambling four-acre lot on the south side of town, she was a reverent fifth grader, modeling herself after her sister Tiffany, who had entertained thoughts of someday becoming a nun. Most Sundays, the Mason sisters attended the biggest and oldest church in town, the First Baptist Church of Alta Loma, where they sat in its dark, wooden sanctuary and prayed in Jesus' name. Danielle wore a thin silver cross around her neck and sometimes drew pictures of the apostles, carefully copied out of her candy-pink illustrated Bible. At night she would wind up her white music box with the pink trim and listen to its cheerful tune, "Jesus Loves Me," as she drifted off to sleep. According to Danielle, the week before Easter during her fifth-grade year, she gathered her belongings from her locker at the end of the school day and headed for the door. Several neatly dressed Gideons had set up a table nearby, and one of them approached her, proffering a Bible. She thanked him but declined the offer. Undeterred, the man pressed it into her hands. "God wants you to have this," he said. "Jesus wants you to know him."
"No, thank you," she said. "I have a Bible at home."
Other students in the hallway with the new red Bibles tucked under their arms stopped and stared. Again, the man offered her one.
"I don't want it," she said.
The students gathered closer. "Do you worship Satan?" one child asked. "Are you in a cult?" asked another. Danielle stared back at them, mute. Then the words came in a torrent of shrill voices. Devil worshiper. Atheist. God hater.
That was 1993, the year the Masons began to view their town with a growing sense of unease. Dan Mason, a cement contractor, and his wife, Debbie, had moved there fifteen years earlier, buying a modest spread of land and building their own home. Dan was a volunteer with the fire department and Debbie regularly attended school board meetings; every Sunday they opened their home to neighbors and friends from church and barbecued in the back yard until it grew dark. Santa Fe had always been a place where people were strong in their faith but not in their judgments, Debbie recalled, though in the early nineties, that began to change. Fundamentalist and evangelical churches had always played an important, if low-key, role in Santa Fe. But as the town grew from 5,413 residents in 1980 to 8,628 people in 1990, church rolls swelled, and the Ministerial Alliance—a coalition of local church leaders who would figure prominently in the push for school prayer—became more powerful, and more political. Several school board positions were soon filled with self-described Christian conservatives, who called the separation of church and state doctrine a "myth" and a misinterpretation of the Constitution. By the time the lawsuit was filed, the town's mood had begun to shift. "It was all about who prayed the loudest, who went to church the most, who was the 'better Christian,'" Debbie said.
Abstinence-only sex education classes were instituted. Juvenile literature by Judy Blume and Beverly Cleary was removed from the elementary school library (an effort to restrict students' access to Harry Potter books is currently under way). And Danielle Mason was not the only student to have had a Bible forced on her or to be taunted for not taking one. "I was told by an administrator that if my girls would just take the Bibles, there wouldn't be a problem," Debbie Mason said. "My question was, Why were Bibles being handed out in the first place? That's up to me and my church, not my school district." There were also troubling rumors, never confirmed, that teachers were leading children in prayer before class and at lunchtime. After a particularly egregious incident—in which a seventh-grade teacher handed out flyers for a revival meeting to his students, then spent ten minutes of class time denigrating a Mormon girl's religion as a cult—25 concerned parents and teachers met with an attorney from the American Civil Liberties Union to discuss whether the school district was promoting religion.
