Santa Fe ISD v. Doe (2000) – Part Three: A Little Leaven Leaveneth The Whole Lump

January 10, 2017June 4, 2023 ~ Blue Cereal

I suspect you would never intend this, but this is what happens. When you attempt to live by your own religious plans and projects, you are cut off from Christ, you fall out of grace.
Meanwhile we expectantly wait for a satisfying relationship with the Spirit. For in Christ, neither our most conscientious religion nor disregard of religion amounts to anything. What matters is something far more interior: faith expressed in love.
You were running superbly! Who cut in on you, deflecting you from the true course of obedience? This detour doesn’t come from the One who called you into the race in the first place. And please don’t toss this off as insignificant. It only takes a minute amount of yeast, you know, to permeate an entire loaf of bread.
Galatians 5:4-9 (The Message)
A little leaven leaveneth the whole lump.
Galatians 5:9 (KJV)

In Part One I introduced Santa Fe Independent School District v. Doe (2000), a case in which the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional for the school to open football games with prayer over the stadium loudspeakers – even if students “voted” on it. I suggested the stories behind this decision emphasized the importance of that whole “wall of separation” thing.

In Part Two I tried to highlight the impact on dissenters whenever majority beliefs control secular government policy, using the power of the state to promote favored theologies. I managed to keep it under 1800 words and didn’t mention ISIS or Al-Qaeda even once!

Finally, I’d like to look at the damage done to faith when it becomes entangled with secular authority. This isn’t really a religiously-driven blog, but it’s an important point – so I’m going to give it a shot.

It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?
If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself…
James Madison, Federalist #51 (1788)

When I stop at a red light, I’m not doing it because those damn liberals are making me late for work just so someone else can drive through the intersection on my time; I do it because traffic lights allow for safer, more productive use of the common roads. They help the other guy, sure – but they help me as well. That’s true even when I’m not benefitting obviously and directly right that second.

That alone should be enough for us to stop, even when we’re in a hurry and there’s no one coming from the other direction. But we know ourselves, and we know humanity, so we collectively devote resources to both the cost of the lights and enforcement via police and the courts.

You can get a ticket for running a red light even when no one was coming and there was no danger. The rules are enforced on principle alone because over time, as a whole, that’s what’s best for everyone – including the guy getting the ticket.

There’s no crime in getting annoyed that you’re stuck at a red light. You might even go to city leadership and ask them to reevaluate some things – how long lights stay red or green, how the equipment senses vehicles, etc.

But if I let my determination to drive through that intersection any time I damn well please become a priority – the reason I even start the car in the morning – then something else has gone seriously wrong. Something with the potential to be personally destructive as well as threatening to others. At that point, I’ve lost sight of the whole purpose of driving to begin with.

Two men went up into the temple to pray; the one a Pharisee, and the other a publican.
The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself, God, I thank thee, that I am not as other men are, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this publican. I fast twice in the week, I give tithes of all that I possess.
And the publican, standing afar off, would not lift up so much as his eyes unto heaven, but smote upon his breast, saying, God be merciful to me a sinner.
I tell you, this man went down to his house justified rather than the other: for every one that exalteth himself shall be abased; and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted.
Luke 18:10-14 (KJV)

The “separation of church and state” defined by the First Amendment isn’t about being “nice” to folks with other beliefs. It’s not cultural charity – it’s collective preservation.

Yes, it protects religious minorities – like, say, the Baptists were for many years. But just as importantly, it preserves the integrity of the dominant faith. It’s a shield against the corrupting of Christianity.

Santa Fe had been something of a Mayberry. I’m sure they had their issues – most of us do – but it wasn’t until boundaries between faith and politics began to crumble that things turned particularly ugly.

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.”

We all remember when Christ emphasized to his disciples the importance of mandatory group prayer before athletic events, yes? Otherwise, the Devil scores the real touchdown.

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… 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…

This sound at all familiar, Oklahoma?

Abstinence-only sex education classes were instituted. Juvenile literature by Judy Blume and Beverly Cleary was removed from the elementary school library… 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…
Texas Monthly (November 2000)

The transition from believer to Pharisee is not always a clear or sudden one. The decline from faithfulness to rules and rituals is ugly, but often difficult to recognize in real time.

You don’t have to be a bad person to become a leavened lump.

And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward. But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.
Matthew 6:5-6 (KJV)

What the controlling majority in Santa Fe was fighting for wasn’t a fundamental component of their faith – it was a tradition. A statement of “us” in a community determined not to give in to “them.” Jesus, as you may recall, was a bit more of the “come unto Me” type – much less excited about ceremony and separation.

Prayer proponents were willing to alter the words, even eliminate references to God or the Bible just to win the legal battle at hand – begging the question of whether anything so faith-free is still even “prayer.” Students snuck in speakers and played pre-recorded invocations. Parents chanted prayers over the announcer. One way or the other, they were going to win this for God, dammit.

{History makes it clear that} religion and Government will both exist in greater purity the less they are mixed together…
James Madison, Letter to Edward Livingston (July 10, 1822)

Like the “War on Christmas” or the Salem Witch Trials, football prayers became a proxy for bigger economic and cultural changes they couldn’t fight – maybe not even consciously identify. Genuine belief mutated into a “must-win” battle over rituals and symbols. What many residents longed for was something their football prayers couldn’t give them – a return to an idealized past. One racially, economically, and culturally homogenous. They wanted Mayberry back.

Sitting in the bleachers of the local Little League baseball complex and cheering on the budding sluggers, Santa Fe school board member Couch calls it a “compliment” that the town resembles a community from the 1950s. “There are a lot of good values from the ’50s,” he says. “There are lot of people here who wouldn’t mind taking a step back.” …
He points to the 1962 Supreme Court ruling that first banned prayer in public classrooms.
“Since that time, there has been an increase in sexually transmitted diseases, pregnancies and school violence,” he says… “At the same time, test scores have dropped. It can all be traced back to that point. It is no mistake.”
That is why Couch says he is willing to go to jail to keep God in public schools. “This isn’t a matter of win or lose,” says Couch. “It’s a matter of right or wrong.”

This sentiment was not uncommon in Santa Fe. If we’re honest, it’s not that uncommon among conservatives in America today.

You wash your car, and it rains – therefore washing your car opened up the skies. You take state-sanctioned, teacher-led prayer out of public schools, and the 1960s unfold – therefore…

They could just as easily blame the Equal Pay Act, the introduction of Froot Loops cereal, or JFK saying that thing about being a jelly donut at the Berlin Wall. But the issue was never really just prayer or lack thereof, and it’s certainly not God’s inability to “get inside” public schools where desperate believers presumably lie verbally muzzled and thus spiritually forsaken.

Society changes – sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse – and it’s usually messy along the way. What faith offers isn’t an unchanging world, but an unwavering source of guidance and comfort as you walk through those changes.

That “wall of separation” isn’t there to stifle your faith. It’s there to protect it. And to protect others from you, if that first part doesn’t work.

“I have the right to do anything,” you say—but not everything is beneficial. “I have the right to do anything”—but not everything is constructive. No one should seek their own good, but the good of others.
I Corinthians 10:23-24

Santa Fe ISD v. Doe (2000) – Part Two: If She Weighs The Same As A Duck…

January 6, 2017August 10, 2023 ~ Blue Cereal

{History makes it clear that} religion and Government will both exist in greater purity the less they are mixed together…
James Madison, Letter to Edward Livingston (July 10, 1822)

In Part One I introduced the basics of Santa Fe Independent School District v. Doe (2000), in which the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional for schools to open football games with prayer over the stadium loudspeakers – even if students “voted” on it.

I suggested that the stories behind this decision were worth exploring in support of that whole “wall of separation” thing. Part Three will be about the damage done to faith when it becomes entangled with secular authority; this post is about how monolithic belief treats dissent.

As anyone who keeps up with world events already recognizes, this phenomenon is hardly limited to Christianity. It’s always dangerous when the powers of the state at any level allow themselves to become entangled in spiritual matters – particularly on the side of the majority. Religious beliefs often involve revealed truths (i.e., supernatural definitions of reality) and divine judgment based on those truths – with their own standards for right and wrong. Secular law utilizes human definitions of the collective good, and seeks to protect individual rights.

These two realms often overlap – which is fine. Sometimes they become mixed – which is not.

So it’s not a problem with Christians so much as a problem with humans and power. And since most Christians are also humans…

You get the idea.

“If somebody gets offended by somebody praying, they just shouldn’t listen,” says Santa Fe barber Tommie Weaver, holding buzzing electric clippers and standing atop tufts of straw-like hair shorn from a sunburned boy. “The government is trying to take the Lord out of our hearts and minds, and it’s going to be the downfall of this country,” says Weaver. “The devil is getting too much say here.”
The Salt Lake Tribune (June 3, 2000)

Santa Fe, Texas, is a flavor of Baptist hard to fathom for those outside the Bible Belt. As recently as the 1990s, the Gideons distributed Bibles at school. Teachers invited students to revival meetings and taught them religious songs. And – most sacred of all – there was collective public prayer before football games.

For any of you reading from outside God’s Country, football holds a place in the South second only to church – sometimes higher. Basketball can be played without invoking the divine, as can baseball, volleyball, or any of the other lesser sports. Marching band, speech and debate, theater – even vocal music all survive without regimented invocation.

But football… that’s different. You can’t play unless you pray. And if you won’t pray, you’re in the wrong town. Maybe the wrong country. So bow your head, dammit – or someone’s gonna get hurt.

For more than two years, classmates of {13-year-old Phil Nevelow}, an eighth-grader, have made him feel like a hated minority.
The bullying reached a climax last month when Phil… was set upon by three teenagers on a school bus; they called him “a dirty Jew” and threatened to hang him.
The prospect of a hanging is what caused authorities to arrest the three teenagers the next day. It’s anybody’s guess when authorities would have gotten around to doing anything about the slurs. Phil’s parents said he has been on the receiving end of repeated antisemitic harassment since the seventh grade–and their complaints to Santa Fe school administrators have gone nowhere.
When kids surrounded Phil on the playground and made the “Heil Hitler” sign, the school system did nothing. When swastikas were scrawled on book covers in front of him, school officials looked the other way. And when he was taunted with: “Hitler missed one! No more Jews! Hitler missed one! He should have gotten you!” his complaints were greeted with official inaction…
Of the system’s poor response, Santa Fe Superintendent Richard Ownby said, “I’m not sure our communications have been real good here.”
The Washington Post (June 24th, 2000)

Yeah, they were kids. But such specific and virulent ideology doesn’t evolve naturally by 7th grade. It’s imprinted by the culture in which they’re raised. Besides, it wasn’t just the kids…

{T}he problem faced by the Mormon and Catholic families… included outright harassment of their children, simply because they weren’t part of the dominant church.
When one of the children in the Mormon family questioned a teacher’s promotion of a revival, the teacher asked the student what religion she belonged to. When told that the child was Mormon, the teacher launched into an attack on Mormonism, calling it a “non-Christian cult,” saying it was of the devil, and telling the child that she was going to hell.
The court also heard ‘uncontradicted’ evidence that students who declined to accept Bibles or objected to prayers and religious observances in school were verbally harassed.
Mormons Today (June 23, 2000)

This mindset may not be typical of people of faith, but it IS what drives the politics of religious aggression. You may serve a Christ who blessed the meek while single-handedly conquering Death and Hell, but that hardly requires my cooperation. Folks clinging to public rituals serve a Messiah who cannot survive without state-mandated obeisance. It makes them desperate, and angry.

You want the freedom to serve your God; they want the state to pressure everyone else to do the same. Salvation via mob rule, lest Jesus somehow fade away like Tinkerbell when not enough people clap.

Such a mindset is always lamentable, but it’s only dangerous when it infiltrates enough secular authority to implement its bidding. It makes little difference whether that authority is federal, state – or a local school district.

Danielle Mason was eleven years old when she was first accused of not being a good Christian… Most Sundays, the Mason sisters attended the biggest and oldest church in town, the First Baptist Church of Alta Loma…
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.
Texas Monthly, November 2000

It hadn’t always been like that in Santa Fe, Texas. As we’ll look at in Part Three, Santa Fe had been a place “where people were strong in their faith but not in their judgments.”

That changed in the 1990s when self-described “Christian Conservatives” began getting involved in local politics and declaring the Word of God superior to the laws of men – which may be true, but which they distorted into a Highlander-flavored dichotomy: “There Can Be Only One.” Either God’s law (as interpreted by themselves) must supplant man’s, or man’s law has thwarted God’s.

That’s like arguing you can either work from home all evening or bring your kids to work with you all day – that one realm must conquer the other. Yes, you’re a parent even while you’re at work; sometimes you may even miss work to take care of your kids. You might periodically catch up on work from home. Neither indicates some sort of irresponsible or sinful compromise on your part – just that you understand the difference between the two roles.

Unlike, say, locals at a heated school board meeting…

When a Catholic mother took issue with school prayer, a woman behind her called out, “Catholics aren’t Christians anyway.” During a recess, a woman approached Debbie to inquire what religion she was. “A school board member leaned over and said, ‘Don’t worry. She’s Baptist—she’s one of us,’” Debbie recalled. “And I thought, what does ‘one of us’ mean?”
Texas Monthly, November 2000

There were, of course, ways of finding out who was “one of us.”

The lawsuit had been filed anonymously due to fear of retribution towards the kids and families involved. Petitions began circulating in the community seeking support for these football prayers; anyone refusing to sign was suspected of being one of “them” – anti-Christian and anti-community. Those under suspicion were publicly shunned, some were threatened. You learned to be careful what you said, how you said it, and to whom.

School officials circulated a similar petition among students to see who would sign and who wouldn’t, so they could identify trouble-makers. Youth pastors quizzed their teens about who they thought was behind the lawsuit – insisting they needed to know in order to ‘pray for them’.

In Santa Fe, “us” meant conservative, it meant white, it meant football, and it meant Baptist. Some of those things are easy to identify, and to screen out those who don’t “fit in.” Other types of “them” are obvious enough once you highlight their heresy – Mormons, Jews, even Catholics generally own up to their faith once under a little pressure.

When it comes to those within the faith, however, dissent can be trickier to isolate, and to cull from the true believers.

Which takes us into Part Three…

Santa Fe ISD v. Doe (2000), Part One: Overview

January 3, 2017June 4, 2023 ~ Blue Cereal

If I could conceive that the general government might ever be so administered as to render the liberty of conscience insecure, I beg you will be persuaded, that no one would be more zealous than myself to establish effectual barriers against the horrors of spiritual tyranny, and every species of religious persecution.
George Washington, Letter to the United Baptist Chamber of Virginia (May 1789)

On the surface, Santa Fe Independent School District v. Doe (2000) rose out of fairly mundane circumstances to become a defining moment in jurisprudence involving prayer and public schools.

Santa Fe is a rural district in southeastern Texas, not far from Galveston. They typically began home football games with prayer, and included similar expressions of faith during graduation. A Mormon family and a Catholic family complained, and the case worked its way up to the Supreme Court.

The school modified its policies along the way so that students first voted on whether or not to have an opening prayer at games, and when they voted ‘yes’ (there was never really any doubt about that part) they’d cast ballots to see who would lead it. The district hoped this would make the prayer a student-driven activity and insulate it from constitutional challenges.

It didn’t.

The Supreme Court declared that the prayers were taking place on school grounds using school equipment at a function many students were required to attend. While other students were technically there “voluntarily,” the games were such an entrenched part of school culture that for all practical purposes they were an essential school function.

Any praying over the intercom, no matter how authorities attempted to obfuscate the school’s role, violated the establishment clause. This case thus joined Lee v. Weisman (1992), Wallace v. Jaffree (1985), and others dating back to Abington and Engel in the early 1960s as a clear statement of exactly where that “wall” between church and state was to be built – at least when it came to schools and corporate prayer.

The First Amendment’s Religion Clauses mean that religious beliefs and religious expression are too precious to be either proscribed or prescribed by the State…
It must not be forgotten then, that while concern must be given to define the protection granted to an objector or a dissenting nonbeliever, these same Clauses exist to protect religion from government interference.
James Madison, the principal author of the Bill of Rights, did not rest his opposition to a religious establishment on the sole ground of its effect on the minority. A principal ground for his view was: “Experience witnesseth that ecclesiastical establishments, instead of maintaining the purity and efficacy of Religion, have had a contrary operation”…
Lee v. Weisman (1992), Majority Opinion

The First Amendment, as applied to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment, prohibits government from promoting one religion over another, or religion in general. Period.

That’s the important stuff to remember if you’re gathering up case law, or studying for an American Government exam. It’s the part which will be cited as precedent in any similar subsequent cases. You really don’t even need to finish this post, let alone read Parts Two or Three.

If that’s you, thanks for dropping by. Catch you later.

But for those choosing to push on… it’s in the specifics of the Santa Fe case that things get interesting. It’s in the personal stories behind the decision that that we find some of the most persuasive examples of why that “wall of separation” is so essential to civilized society.

In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own. It is error alone that needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself.
Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Horatio Spofford (March 17, 1814)

Children who failed to demonstrate proper “belief” were emotionally and physically abused by peers, and in some cases by adults as well. Teachers, parents, and community leaders manifested behavior and attitudes more consistent with witch hunts from the Middle Ages than educated 21st century professionals at school board meetings.

It was devastating for those not in the majority, and corrupting for those who were.

This isn’t a faith-based blog, so I’ll spare you extensive citing of scriptures revealing what Jesus & Co. thought about defying secular government or prioritizing public demonstrations of faith.

I’ll stick to more traditional sources and clearly documented modern American ideals as expressed by our Founders and interpreted by our courts. Our Framers weren’t perfect, but they were a uniquely talented and educated bunch. They were certainly idealists in some ways, but none were under any illusions regarding human nature.

When the power, prestige and financial support of government is placed behind a particular religious belief, the indirect coercive pressure upon religious minorities to conform to the prevailing officially approved religion is plain. But the purposes underlying the Establishment Clause go much further than that.
Its first and most immediate purpose rested on the belief that a union of government and religion tends to destroy government and to degrade religion…
The history of governmentally established religion, both in England and in this country, showed that whenever government had allied itself with one particular form of religion, the inevitable result had been that it had incurred the hatred, disrespect and even contempt of those who held contrary beliefs. That same history showed that many people had lost their respect for any religion that had relied upon the support of government to spread its faith.
Engel v. Vitale (1962), Majority Opinion

It will be tempting to dismiss Santa Fe, TX, as an anomaly. A particularly virulent small-town community in which things got out of hand.

But the dynamics are no different from those of any homogenous group willing to blur faith and secular institutions. The stories are chilling, but not because folks in Santa Fe were particularly horrible individuals. The stories are troubling because the folks in Santa Fe are just like most people – and humans in their natural state are tribal, and violent, and cruel, and narrow-minded.

Civilization is difficult. It requires individual sacrifice, and collective authority to maintain the boundaries and behaviors we’ve agreed in our more rational moments are necessary for the good of the whole. Our Framers didn’t enshrine religious liberty in the First Amendment to be poetic, or codify some behavior they figured would naturally occur anyway. It was added to the Constitution because they knew that some very important things required perpetual vigilance and extreme measures to defend.

Natural law may decree that all men have unalienable rights, but it certainly doesn’t suggest it’s in our nature to defend those rights for others at all times in all places, whatever the inconvenience to ourselves. Hence this bit:

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…
The Declaration of Independence (1776)

Does it hurt anyone for there to be a short prayer at graduation, or over the intercom before a football game? Maybe. Maybe not. We can argue about that another time.

But does it hurt anyone for an institution like a public school to become an arbiter of the supernatural? To pick winners and losers in their spiritual journeys? To supplant parents, clergy, or the Holy Spirit in shaping beliefs and fomenting attitudes?

Probably, yeah. And once it starts, even a little, it’s difficult to leaven only selected parts of that loaf.

Such mingling of state and faith is harmful enough towards dissenters, or anyone not demonstrating sufficient enthusiasm for whichever theology happens to be in vogue that year. That’s what we’ll look at in Part Two. The stories are troubling, but sadly not particularly surprising.

In Part Three, we’ll focus on something too often and too easily overlooked in these discussions – the inherent damage done to faith itself when mingled with secular institutions and authority.

That persecution is harmful for the persecuted is self-evident; that it’s equally harmful for the persecutors is in many ways a far more uncomfortable truth.

The real problem in Santa Fe was much bigger than whether or not to pray at a football game. It was about what the leaven of state authority does to genuine faith, and the corrupting power of monolithic belief. It was about how easily we move from stifling dissent to crushing dissenters – all in the name of defending religious liberty.

It’s why we should remain dogged in our defense of the First Amendment, now and always, no matter how inconvenient and unreasonable it might periodically seem to be. No matter what sorts of nuts it may seem to be protecting.

It’s at such times, strangely enough, that it’s most actively and crucially protecting us.