Istook's prayer amendment: more of the same. (Church And State).

Oklahoma Republican Representative Ernest Istook is nothing if not dedicated to the dubious principle that U.S. public school children need additional constitutional protection to pray. On December 20, 2001, he and seventy-four colleagues introduced a constitutional amendment seeking "to secure the people's right to acknowledge God according to the dictates of conscience."

These high-sounding phrases--redolent of moral purpose and sober demeanor--are fine but aren't needed. The First Amendment, as interpreted by decades of jurisprudence, gives full protection to all citizens to worship if and how they choose without governmental pressure or preference.

Istook's proposed amendment goes on to say:

   Neither the United States nor any State shall establish any official
   religion, but the people's right to pray and to recognize their religious
   beliefs, heritage, and traditions on public property, including schools,
   shall not be infringed.

This section extends the amendment's scope to public buildings, including courthouses, and suggests that the people of the United States don't have the right to "recognize their religious beliefs, heritage and traditions"--a demonstrably unproven, and indeed inaccurate, assertion.

To disguise the fact that prayer amendments have long been held to be presumptively coercive, the Istook amendment (H.J.R. 81) says that the government "shall not compose school prayers, nor require any person to join in prayer or other religious activities." The First Amendment ban on religious establishment has long been interpreted to include such bans, and most state constitutions contain provisions forbid ding mandatory religious observances.

Still, Istook and his colleagues are using sheer emotionalism to advance their shopworn cause. Invoking the tragic events of September 11, as well as the good feelings traditionally emanating from the Christmas season, House Majority Leader Dick Armey claimed, "In these uncertain times when our nation and our very freedoms are threatened, Americans need the power of prayer more than ever."

The Istook amendment is only the latest in a nearly four-decade-long attempt to overrule the U.S. Supreme Court decisions in the early 1960s against mandatory, school-sponsored prayer. Attempts to change the Constitution and "restore" coercive school prayer to the approximately one-half of the nation's school districts that required or allowed it in 1962 failed in 1964, 1967, 1971, and 1984. In all of these instances, about 60 percent of the voting numbers favored the proposed amendments, falling short of the two-thirds vote required for constitutional change. This points up the wisdom of the framers in requiring that a high degree of consensus be achieved (two-thirds of both houses of Congress and three-fourths of state legislatures) before the Constitution is amended.

A previous Istook Amendment in the House in 1998 fell well short (sixty-one votes!) of the two-thirds support needed for passage. It contained a school voucher component which may have cost the amendment a few votes. In early 1995, House Speaker Newt Gingrich had promised an early vote on a school prayer amendment but Judiciary Committee chair Henry Hyde (Republican--Illinois) held the measure hostage until Istook allowed the school voucher component to be added.

Supporters of the new Istook amendment claim that it represents a broad cross section of the nation politically, religiously, and regionally. But an examination of the seventy-five sponsors of H.J.R. 81 suggests that this is not the case. There are seventy Republicans, four Democrats, and one Independent (who ususally votes with the Republicans) listed as sponsors. Two of the four Democrats are from Mississippi, the most heavily Baptist state in the union and a state noted for religious conflict in the schools. A third Democrat--Ralph Hall of rural East Texas--votes with the Republicans more often than he votes with his fellow Democrats. The fourth Democrat is William Lipinski of Chicago, a social issue conservative.

Religiously, 80 percent (sixty of the seventy-five) of the sponsors are Protestants, far above the 57 percent Protestant affiliation in Congress. Significantly, a clear majority (forty of seventy-five) of sponsors are Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians--the three groups whose members have been most supportive of previous school prayer amendments. At the grass-roots level these religious groups are strongly pro-school prayer, even if their leadership groups have been much less supportive. In particular, most of the severe conflicts over school prayer that have ended up in federal courts have occurred in Southern Baptist-dominated communities in the U.S. South.

Only eleven (15 percent) of the sponsors are Catholics, while three are Mormons and one is Greek Orthodox. No Jewish or religiously nonaffiliated members have sponsored the Istook amendment.

Regionally, the South dominates the list of sponsors. Fully forty-three of the seventy-five hail from the eleven states of the old Confederacy and the six culturally southern border states. It is highly significant that 57.3 percent of the sponsors but only 36.3 percent of all members represent the religiously more monolithic and culturally Protestant South. This regional/religious divide appears in almost every church-state debate.

A majority of the House members from Alabama, Mississippi, and Oklahoma are sponsors of the Istook amendment, as is half of the South Carolina delegation. Almost half of the members from Indiana and Missouri have joined this newest fight to amend the Constitution.

Ideologically, almost all of the sponsors reflect the right wing of the Republican Party and represent districts that are culturally and religiously more monolithic than the nation. They don't reflect the pluralism and diversity of the United States as a whole.

Even in times of economic dislocation and foreign military involvement, these members persist in provoking another major constitutional challenge to our rights and liberties. But, in the charged emotional atmosphere in the wake of the September 11 attacks and the ongoing "war against terrorism," the outcome of this new church-state imbroglio is hard to predict.

Edd Doerr is president of the American Humanist Association and Americans for Religious Liberty. Albert J. Menendez, associate director of Americans for Religious Liberty, is a church-state research specialist and demographer. The two are authors or co-authors of more than forty books.