The neutering of religion.

Two years ago, the 103rd Congress enacted the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, responding to a decision of the Supreme Court in 1990 that had diminished the protection afforded by the First Amendment to free exercise of religion. Now Congress appears agitated about the other provision in the Religion Clause, which prohibits an establishment of religion. Earlier this year Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kans.) and House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) made supportive noises about a school prayer amendment, but then left the contentious issue to languish in the hands of a very junior member, Congressman Ernest Istook (R-Okla.).

In 1962 the Supreme Court ruled in the Engel case that the no-establishment provision prohibited the recitation of pablum-like "inoffensive" prayer such as that composed by the New York Board of Regents. A year later in the Schempp case, the Court forbade the devotional reading of the Bible or the recitation of the Lord's Prayer. Congress responded promptly with a flurry of activity to overturn these decisions by constitutional amendment, but these efforts died a deserved death, because they would have permitted government officials to compose prayers and to require children to say them. As one wag has put it, there will be prayer in schools as long as there are math exams. But it is a recipe for disaster to have the state determining what we should pray for and how to pray for it. No biblical believer should be content with the reduction of our prayer life to some meaningless formula such as, "O God, if you are, help me, if you can."

So far this year there has been only one brief hearing in a House subcommittee on this issue, drawing comment from leading constitutional scholars like Professors Michael McConnell of the University of Chicago and Douglas Laycock of the University of Texas. Both professors oppose amending the Constitution to permit "voluntary" prayer in public schools. But they have enlarged the terms of the debate considerably beyond the narrow focus of earlier efforts to reverse the Supreme Court's decisions in Engel and Schempp. The current focus of the debate is on whether a constitutional amendment is necessary to secure an equal footing for religious adherents in the public forum.

Why the fuss? Is not America recognized the world over as a haven for those of all faiths and of none? Although it is true that nowehere else in the world does religion thrive with as much diversity and freedom as in this country, balanced commentators agree that we should not be content with the status quo on religious freedom in America. According to Laycock, what we need is not a constitutional amendment but a broader consensus that "government should neither encourage nor discourage religion, but rather government should be neutral toward religion." The problem, Laycock suggests, is that too many governmental officials are anything but neutral toward religion: "in their zeal to avoid any encouragement of religion, many school boards, governmental agencies, and lower courts have actually discriminated against religious speech and religious practice."

I noted in an earlier column ("At Jefferson's University," April 21) that this sort of discrimination was at the center of the dispute between Christian students at the University of Virginia and the university administration, which was willing to use student fee activity funds to support Muslims and Jews, but not Christians. Professor McConnell, who argued the case for the students, and Professor Laycock, who filed a brief in support of the students, can rejoice that the Court accepted their views when it ruled 5-4 on June 29 that a state university cannot grant student fee money to some students while withholding it from others on a religious ground. The Court held that this sort of practice is not neutrality, but is bias pure and simple.

The genius of the American attitude on religious freedom is that we think that religious freedom is promoted by avoiding any establishment of religion. In other words, nonestablishment of religion is for the sake of free exercise of religion. Unlike England and Sweden, we have here no official state religion. We note with pride that that sort of arrangement is bad for nonmembers of the established church who are typically treated as second-class citizens deprived of important civil liberties. We add that establishing a religion is bad for the "preferred" religious community, which is typically sapped of its ongoing vitality precisely because of its character as an established church. In short, we have managed to overcome the dangers of state-imposed dogma, and we have come very far down the road from the dangers of governmentally coerced faith that plagued our founders. So far down that road, in fact, that we now run the risk of official governmental hostility against all religious expression in the public square, relegating religion to the realm of private opinion and practice.

This tendency is the result of several decades of court opinions that have taken us not in the direction of governmental neutrality in religious matters, but relentlessly toward increased secularization. For example, one of the standards that currently governs the interpretation of the no-establishment provision expressly requires a "secular purpose" for all law or governmental practices. Fair enough, if what is meant is that the law should genuinely serve the public order, the good of the common weal. But this standard is regrettably held by some to mean that the political process should be completely immune from the influence of any member of society who believes in God and who thinks that his or her belief has relevance to the burning social issues of our day.

On its face this attitude of hostility to religion is antidemocratic, for the vast majority of Americans (nearly 90 percent) profess a belief in God. And a secularist hegemony that demands toleration of its own ideology but is scornful of all other views is profoundly antipluralistic. Yet a secularist bias persists among the shapers of our culture. It is found not only in editorials of leading newspapers, but even in opinions of the Supreme Court, which has never formally repudiated its shocking standard in the Lemon case (1971) that a law may be invalidated as a violation of the noestablishment provision if it "tends to divide us politically along religious lines." The Supreme Court itself has never relied on this standard to invalidate an act of Congress or a state law, but lower courts have invoked the standard frequently to do a lot of mischief.

As America drifts from a quasi-establishment of WASP hegemony toward a thoroughgoing secularism, we should be wary of trading one establishment for another. What goes around comes around. The established in one era can become the persecuted in another, at severe cost. Historically, that cost has included fines, imprisonment, exile, and death. It took Catholics a long time--until Vatican II's Decree on Religious Liberty in 1965--to acknowledge officially the evils of governmental coercion in matters of religious faith. Now that our church has clarified this issue for Catholics, we have a duty both to avoid any seeking of governmental power to advance our own religious convictions and to resist the powerful trend in our society to limit free speech to nonbelievers. Both of these tendencies are un-American. It is time for all Americans to reclaim our heritage of freedom from governmental control of religion, while affording to all--religious believers and nonbelievers alike--equal access to the public forum for the shaping of the policies that affect our common destiny.