Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, July 21, 1995 TAG: 9507210081
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-11 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: E.J. DIONNE JR.
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
It's thus not surprising that there has been an explosion of controversy around issues that our political vocabulary blandly refers to as ``values questions.'' The values debate is where concerns about kids, religion and sex all come together. At the heart of the debate is the country's effort to figure out what kids should be taught and where they should be taught it, how the freedoms enjoyed by adults impinge upon the environment in which children grow up, and what role religious faith plays in keeping our values straight.
This is the context in which the recent fights over the role of religion in the public schools should be understood. The polls suggest that a lot of America's parents worry that the lessons they teach kids at home will be contradicted by the world outside - especially on television and in the movies, on the Internet and in the schools.
Parents sense that they have less direct control over what their kids will learn than parents did even a generation ago. Parents probably feel this way in every age, but technological change gives today's anxieties a certain validity. These worries go well beyond the precincts of the religious right, though fears about kids have a lot to do with why the religious right has become powerful.
The debate over what the public schools should say about religion hits all the nerves because the ethical beliefs parents try to impart to their children are usually rooted directly or indirectly in a religious tradition - and that can be true even in rather secular families. Parents trying to fight for a little more religion in the public schools thus see themselves as trying to make the ethical and spiritual tone of the places where their kids spend so much time more compatible with the moral ambiance of the home. It's no shock that this battle is especially important for the millions of American parents for whom faith in God is, literally, the most important thing in the universe.
The church-state conflict is rendered all the more severe in the United States because every party to it considers itself a beleaguered minority. It ought to be easy to understand why Jewish, Muslim or Hindu kids (and their parents) would take great offense at finding Christian prayers or hymns included as part of the formal school curriculum. So would the children of unbelievers. Similarly, Catholic kids would feel excluded if the religious tone of a public school were set by a locally dominant Protestant denomination.
What supporters of religious tolerance have to understand is that the same sense of exclusion is also felt by many who belong to Christian churches that seem, to outsiders at least, to represent the ``dominant'' religion.
The most devout Christians do not see America as being dominated by Christianity at all. On the contrary, they argue that ``Christian values'' concerning sexuality and the family, faith and sin are under harsh and constant assault from a hedonistic, self-centered and anti-religious culture. Active Christian parents - again, including many who are not explicit partisans of the religious right - thus consider the battle for religious expression within the public schools to be an act of self-defense. For them, it is an effort to hold the line somewhere - anywhere - for what they regard as decency.
Pushed to its limits, this is an irresolvable conflict. What seems perfectly fair to one side (religion's place is in the home, not the public school) seems to the other an effort to marginalize faith. What seems to one set of combatants to be a matter of simple respect for minority rights looks to the other side to be yet another imposition of government power against religious people.
But pushing matters to the limit is precisely what a free society cannot do. Friends of religious liberty, including America's founders, understood that persecution and religious wars happened precisely when believers and unbelievers, or believers in different faiths, pushed their opponents too far. This is an issue on which moderation, far from being the wimpy option, is both courageous and practical.
Friends of religious expression thus have to accept that public institutions need to go out of their way to avoid imposing religious beliefs or practices on those who don't believe in them. Jewish or Muslim or Hindu children cannot be made to feel out of place in public institutions. Converting individuals to a faith, or a society to better values, is a personal, social and cultural task in which government's role is necessarily limited.
But friends of church-state separation need to respect the right of believers to express their faith in public. Last week, President Clinton expressed well the delicacy of this balancing act when he declared that ``religion has a proper place in public because the public square belongs to all Americans.'' Believers in tolerance should also be more tolerant than they often are of the sense of embattlement experienced by so many religious people.
Above all, politicians have to stop pretending that religious-freedom amendments or school-prayer statutes will magically resolve the anxieties parents feel about the values their kids are imbibing. We live in a society whose television shows, movies and entertainments cater far more to adults than to kids. If we think there's something wrong with that, we should change our habits and get the entertainment companies to change theirs. If we don't want to do that, we'll have to live with our choices and stop searching for miracle cures by way of largely symbolic political battles.
E.J. Dionne is a member of The Washington Post editorial-page staff.
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