More than a week ago, the North Pike School Board faced a difficult decision.
The Freedom From Religion Foundation, a Wisconsin-based group, had just delivered a memorandum citing a litany of case laws and Supreme Court cases banning prayer in schools, and warned the district it was breaking federal law by conducting prayers over the public address system before football games.
At the time, Superintendent Dr. Ben Cox said a suspension on school-directed prayer would be handled administratively, pending an opinion from Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood’s office.
To date, the district has not received an answer, and the board will not vote on the issue either way until it receives Hood’s response. Regardless, a board vote will only impact the school’s involvement with prayer.
“We’re not going to ban prayer to where someone can’t pray,” Cox said. “If a student, parent or group of parents wants to pray, we’re not going to stop them. As long as it does not cause a disturbance, it is not against the law.”
In past cases, the foundation typically limited its responses to individual complaints from specific districts. Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor said the memo was distributed to every school district in Mississippi because the state reached a “critical mass” due to a consistent stream of complaints from the state.
“We weren’t trying to accuse all school districts of breaking the law, but we had suspicions that there were several school districts,” Gaylor said. “We’re taking a proactive approach because we received so many complaints from around the state.
“We’re educating, heading off more violations. We’re not assuming wrongdoing. We’re just monitoring, making sure.”
Amite County Superintendent Debbie Hopf and McComb School District Superintendent Therese Palmertree confirmed last week that they did not receive copies of the memo, and neither district conducts public prayers.
Gaylor said the foundation did not receive a complaint from North Pike.
The majority of North Pike’s board has voiced disapproval of the foundation’s request and tactics since the change. But, pending the attorney general’s opinion, the district can no longer direct prayers due to potential lawsuits that could be filed against the district, board, school officials and individual board members, officials said.
“We want to make sure whatever we choose to do as a school district is the best thing down the road,” board member Brad Fitzgerald said. “Some want people to just ignore the law and do it. They’re asking administrators to take on personal financial responsibility. Insurance won’t pay for things like that.
“That would be the school district’s personal responsibility. We’d be opening ourselves to lawsuits. This fight has been fought and lost in other parts of the county.”
That didn’t stop North Pike parents, students and fans from saying The Lord’s Prayer in unison before the Oct. 7 game with Purvis and at Friday night’s game against Columbia.
“I think we sent a message loud and clear to the Freedom From Religion people,” board member Kevin Matthew said. “They can stop us as a school district from leading prayers, but they can’t stop prayer in schools.”
Fellow board member Scott Campbell echoed Matthew.
“I want to let everybody know how proud I am of our students, fans and parents,” he said. “Even though we couldn’t pray over the loudspeaker, they still have the individual right to pray anytime they want to, and they exercised that right.
“I hope they continue doing it. It’s their individual right to do that. The school’s not going to try to stop them.”
Matthew said he is OK with not allowing prayer in closed settings like classrooms and auditoriums, as they force believers and non-believers alike to hear any message. However, he said football games are a different story.
“In any football or sporting event situation, those people choose to be there,” he said. “If they don’t want to hear it, they shouldn’t be there or come after kick off. Pregame football prayer has really been blown out of proportion by this organization.”
Gaylor disagrees, labeling the practice as “blasphemous” and likening it to voodoo witchcraft.
“They’ve been miseducating children for generations,” she said. “They’re implanting in them this primitive idea that if they don’t pray God is going to be hurt. The schools’ only mission is to educate.”
Campbell does not see the harm in conducting a school prayer. However, he does not want to open himself or the district up to a lawsuit.
He disagrees with the foundation’s premise, saying it and the case law referenced in the memo misinterpret the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which states that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
“I think it’s ridiculous. I don’t think our founding fathers intended this,” Campbell said. “It meant Congress shall not create a religion. Congress and the Supreme Court start with prayer. They have basically taken something written in the Constitution and turned it entirely around.”
Campbell added that liberal judges deciding prior school prayer cases opened the door for groups like Freedom From Religion to protest, and he called on conservative Christians to vote for and lobby for the appointment of like-minded judges.
“If we don’t stand up and voice our opinion and vote for people who think like us, we’re going to lose a lot of these freedoms we’ve had for more than 200 years,” Campbell said, calling Freedom From Religion Foundation members atheists. “They have a right to be atheist. What they’re trying to do is take away all religion and they want everyone to be atheist.”
Fitzgerald said the issue at hand is much bigger than school prayer, and it could open the door for additional intervention down the road.
“What happens if one of our teachers tells a child ‘God bless you’ after they sneeze?” he said. “Where does all this end? This is more than just a matter of our prayer. It’s taking one small little foothold at a time.”
His worries are not entirely unfounded. The foundation responds to religion-related complaints in schools and prisons, including government prayer, religious activities at government-funded senior centers, religious displays on government property, holiday displays and related matters.
Board members — with the exception of Freddie Deer, a minister, and Etta Taplin, who both deferred to Matthew when contacted for comment — agree that if Hood’s opinion is not favorable, it would be difficult to win the case in court, and it may not be worth the time and money needed to take up the fight to keep school-directed prayers.
“It’s a very thorough and complex issue,” said board attorney John Gordon Roach, who worked with the board to find a temporary solution to the foundation’s letter. “It’s not simplistic. The general rule is you cannot use school facilities.
“We hope it’ll never come to the day where we have to stop somebody from spontaneously practicing their religion. (The suspension) was all we could do on such short notice. All we could do was contact the attorney general. Hopefully we’ll get something.”
Should Hood’s opinion find in the district’s favor, other school districts recently under fire, including Pontotoc and Desoto County, will likely follow whatever course of action the North Pike board chooses.
“Without having enough information from the attorney general right now ... we don’t know what’s going to be the best thing for North Pike to do,” Fitzgerald said. “I know there’s a lot of other school districts waiting and watching to see how we handle this.”
