Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, November 19, 1994                   TAG: 9411230034
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A11   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

PRAYER FOR A PRESIDENT

Subsequent efforts by the president and his handlers to explain and clarify his remarks have only reinforced the impression, consistent with other evidence, that Clinton's core of convictions isn't much more solid than soup.

The fact is that voluntary prayer in school has never been unconstitutional or illegal. Kids can pray anytime they want. The president presumably knows this, even if he's not sure what he believes.

The problem occurs when group prayer is organized by school officials or other representatives of the state, acting as stewards of children during the school day. As Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black wrote in 1962, such prayer - even if "voluntary" - can have an "indirect coercive effect upon religious minorities."

The reality is that this ruling was pro-religion. It protected the diversity of America's faiths as much as it upheld the constitutional separation of church and state. It also protected the depth of real faith against the empty repetition of state-sponsored mumbo jumbo concocted by bureaucrats to be mushily inoffensive and shallowly nonsectarian.

The court's wise lesson plan was to have teachers teach about religion in the classroom, but leave the inculcation to others. To overturn the 1962 decision with a constitutional amendment, as Republicans in Congress are suggesting, would be absurd.

Just as absurd would be to believe that enforcing prayer - or "moments of silence," when they are transparent means of circumventing the constitutional proscription - would turn the tide against social decay.

Sorry, but prayer in school is no substitute for coherent families, community role models or sturdy values - for which all of us share responsibility. School days could be given up entirely to devotional exercises, and the social pathologies we all lament would still remain, given adult indifference.

Newt Gingrich, the nation's new arbiter of morality, calls voluntary prayer "the core of being American." Fine. Let all good Americans pray whenever they want. They might even try it more often at home or in church.

But don't coerce others into feeling un-American or otherwise excluded if they choose, in public schools, not to mumble boilerplate entreaties to the God of the Majority.

To a president on his knees, talking up prayer might seem a convenient way to reach out to cultural conservatives who repudiated him in droves in the recent election. But a reasonably conservative position is to respect religion, and distrust the state, enough to keep the former free from the latter's entanglement.

From Clinton, on prayer in schools, let us have a moment of silence.