“Efforts to bring religion into our public life are intensifying, as are the efforts by some to identify the United States as a Christian country”, the National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council (NJCRAC) charged in warning about the most serious attacks in 20 years on Bill of Right’s guarantees of separation of church and state. The warning was expressed in NJCRAC’s annual “Joint Program Plan for Jewish Community Relations” issued by the group here today.
The Joint Program Plan represents the collective strategy of NJCRAC’s II national and III local Jewish community relations member agencies, located throughout the United States, and is used by them as the basis for their planning for the succeeding 12 months. The Plan covers the entire range of community relations concerns.
Countering threats to church-state separation, and the religious freedom and voluntarism that rest on that principle, was urged as a major priority for the coming year in this year’s document. NJCRAC asserts that “maintaining a firm line of separation between church and state is essential to the creative and distinctive survival of diverse religious groups such as our own”.
The Plan was issued on the eve of the first of eight regional “consultations” NJCRAC is convening in the next four weeks to mobilize the Jewish community to defend the church-state separation principle. Beginning in Hartford on September 13, consultations attended by NJCRAC member agencies will be held in Houston, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Chicago, Columbus, (Ohio) and Miami.
PRESIDENT’S ROLE OF PARTICULAR CONCERN
The attack on the separation principle and religious pluralism has been promoted by the executive and legislative branches of the federal and state government and by recent decisions of the Supreme Court, the NJCRAC planning document charges. Anticipating the current election-campaign debate on the role of religion in public life, the NJCRAC strategy Plan asserts:
“Of particular concern is the role played by the President in advocating these causes … The First Amendment should inhibit the President of the United States, in his capacity as the Chief Magistrate of the nation, in advocating his religious beliefs in a partisan televised sermon as he did to a convention of religious broadcasters and others….”
“Such public expressions, as distinguished from private expressions of religious piety, is an act of religious preference by the President of the United States. It fosters the perception of the United States. It fosters the perception of the United States as a Christian nation, a conception that runs counter to the Constitution. That perception was reinforced by a 5-4 decision of the Supreme Court that characterizes the distinctive and particularlistic religious symbol of the creche as a secular national expression.”
The NJCRAC Plan cites three areas in which the attack on church-state separation has become most critical: government sanction of religious symbols, bringing religious practices into the public schools, and government aid to religiously-related schools.
Recent court decisions that allow government involvement in the display of religious symbols are cited by the NJCRAC as representing “a significant weakening of the wall of separation between church and state, and the conception of an American society in which the state is neutral in regard to religious beliefs, and non-belief.”
The NJCRAC Plan specifically focuses on the Supreme Court’s March, 1984, Lynch v. Donnelly decision, which allowed the city of Pawtucket, Rhode Island, to use tax funds to purchase and mount a nativity scene as part of an official Christmas display.
Noting the profound divisions in the Supreme Court on the issue, which split 5-4 on the Lynch case, the NJCRAC Plan calls on the Jewish community relations field to “engage in a more extensive and systematic campaign to challenge religion on public property.”
THREAT OF RELIGION IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS
The threat of bringing religion into the public schools greatly increased during the past year, according to NJCRAC, with a “renewed emphasis and increased activity by advocates of religion in the public schools with the President taking a leadership role in again advancing school prayer, as well as a general stance of injecting government into the religious sphere”.
The NJCRAC calls attention to the vigorous drive to pass a Constitutional Amendment allowing prayer in the schools, which failed to gain the two-thirds Senate vote needed in March. But such efforts continued, and a later House vote, in July, resulted in the passage of a measure to allow “silent prayer” in public schools.
NJCRAC firmly opposes both “silent prayer” and “moment-of-silence” measures which are now allowed in some form by almost half of the states. NJCRAC’s opposition is “based on the recognition that the institutionalization of prayer, in any form, spoken or silent, fosters what in essence is a religious exercise that in a public school setting can have a coercive effect on a school child, and, at bottom, debases distinctive religious expression which is vital to maintaining particularistic religious beliefs”. The Plan adds, “Paradoxically, what silent prayer does is foster religious indifferentism”.
The NJCRAC guide to action is equally opposed to “moment-of-silence” measures, which have been adopted by many states, terming them “no more than a legal subterfuge for the introduction of prayer into the schools, barred twenty years ago by the Supreme Court.”
DANGER OF ‘EQUAL ACCESS’
The NJCRAC Program Plan also warns of the “grave potential” of so-called “equal access” legislation as another route to bring religion into the public schools. Such a measure, which would allow private religious groups to use public school facilities during non-instructional hours, was passed by Congress this past July.
The “equal access” measure, NJCRAC asserts, opens the schools to outside religious groups including proselytizers and clergy, in violation of a series of Supreme Court decisions prohibiting Bibie reading, prayers, worship, and religious instruction on school premises”. It “opens the door to cults”, the group adds, since “determining the legitimacy of religious groups by school officicals would be constitutionally prohibited.”
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