No, God is Not Absent from Schools

When I was in high school, I competed on the Academic Decathlon team in its first two years of existence. One of the competition categories was speech, in which we had to give a prepared speech and then an extemporaneous speech in front of a panel of three judges. The first year’s subject was World War II; you’d think that being both a history buff and someone with an interest in a military career at the time that the speech would have been a cinch.

It was an unmitigated disaster. My nerves got the best of me and I forgot the entire middle section of it and was so flustered by the time I got to the extemporaneous speech I could barely get my lips to move. I had the lowest score of the competition across all the brackets. It was humiliating.

So when it came time to prepare the speech for my second year of competition, I knew I needed something I was so passionate about that I could just rattle it off as a conversation, albeit a one-sided conversation, if my mind went blank of my prepared speech. The topic was the Bill of Rights and we had free choice of a topic concerning any of the first ten amendments. I chose public prayer in school.

You’d think that as an active church member and youth group leader, I’d be in favor of public prayer in school. But I never have been, both for the legal reasons once I understood them but also because somewhere along the way, probably in fourth grade when our upstairs neighbors went to parochial school, I learned that many of the earliest parochial schools in the United States were started because Roman Catholic students felt excluded by the specifically Protestant prayers led by teachers and administrators in public schools. I didn’t think that was fair when I was 9, I didn’t think it was fair when I was 17, and I sure don’t think it’s fair at my current age.

However, as I opened in my speech the second year, “Dear Lord, help me to do well with this speech so I don’t embarrass myself like I did last year.” I went on to lay out the reasons, primarily legal but also moral, that public prayer in school is wrong: it’s a violation of the doctrine that Congress, and by extension all forms of government, can’t give preferential treatment or appear to endorse any particular religion. I even used the word “antidisestablishmentarianism” properly in the speech as part of my argument. 

I closed it by taking on exactly the sentiment that I saw multiple times on Twitter and Facebook over the past few days (and in the days following every other school shooting or mass shooting since social began) that makes my blood boil: that the absence of public prayer (and, no doubt for some, also the lack of the 10 Commandments and the Beatitudes hung in each classroom) leads to the absence of God from our schools. That argument was used in my high school days about truancy, marijuana use, and pregnancies. It was just as wrong then as it is now when people, almost exclusively Christians and usually but not always more socially conservative Christians, at that, use it to explain why 150,000 or so school children in America have experienced the trauma of a mass shooting since 1999. 

It’s false that there is no prayer in school, for starters. To state the obvious, people pray in school all the time. Faculty and staff pray for patience, wisdom, and for their students. Students pray for understanding and that the studying they did helps them on the test…or that they do well on the test even though they didn’t study. But each person prays to God as they understand God and by whatever name is most comforting to them personally, be it Father, Lord, God, Allah, Jesus, or any of the other possibilities. No one imposes that from above. No one can tell a student he or she can’t pray, or a faculty or staff member, for that matter, as long as the prayer is private. And let’s face it, Jesus is pretty keen on private prayer, at least according to Matthew 6; I personally think God is pleased by that individual piety far more than by any rote recitation of prayer that might be an obligation more than a choice for many participants.

Secondly, Jesus cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” in his physical anguish, but I’m pretty sure any human being would feel abandoned in that moment. However, feeling abandoned isn’t the same as being abandoned. I think saying that God must be absent from places where bad things happen is an expression of the feeling of abandonment much like the echo of Psalm 22. But God who is always, everywhere, and unconditionally loving can’t be absent from anywhere. No action of a human government is going to keep God out under normal circumstances and God who is love is definitely going to be present with those who are in the midst of trauma.

Thirdly, God was so very present in Parkland that we got a taste of God’s call for justice and righteousness from the students whose lives have been upended by this latest—and God, do I wish it were the last but fear it will not be!—mass shooting. That these students are calling FOUL on the adults in this country who have refused to act to keep them safe by doing the one thing that has kept mass shootings from happening in almost every other country in the world is heartrending and convicting. Theirs is the voice crying out in the wilderness that echoes in this week’s Gospel passage for the first Sunday in Lent, the message of John the Baptist that Mark links to Isaiah 40:1-11 (NRSV):

Comfort, O comfort my people,

   says your God. 

Speak tenderly to Jerusalem,

   and cry to her

that she has served her term,

   that her penalty is paid,

that she has received from the Lord’s hand

   double for all her sins. 

A voice cries out:

‘In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord,

   make straight in the desert a highway for our God. 

Every valley shall be lifted up,

   and every mountain and hill be made low;

the uneven ground shall become level,

   and the rough places a plain. 

Then the glory of the Lord shall be revealed,

   and all people shall see it together,

   for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.’ 

A voice says, ‘Cry out!’

   And I said, ‘What shall I cry?’

All people are grass,

   their constancy is like the flower of the field. 

The grass withers, the flower fades,

   when the breath of the Lord blows upon it;

   surely the people are grass. 

The grass withers, the flower fades;

   but the word of our God will stand for ever. 

Get you up to a high mountain,

   O Zion, herald of good tidings;

lift up your voice with strength,

   O Jerusalem, herald of good tidings,

   lift it up, do not fear;

say to the cities of Judah,

   ‘Here is your God!’ 

See, the Lord God comes with might,

   and his arm rules for him;

his reward is with him,

   and his recompense before him. 

He will feed his flock like a shepherd;

   he will gather the lambs in his arms,

and carry them in his bosom,

   and gently lead the mother sheep. 

No shepherd who gathers lambs in his arms will ever abandon them. No mothering figure will ever walk away from her children, whether she gave birth to them or not. This is the promise of a relationship with God that Jesus asks us to claim. No one who is seeking a relationship with God is going to want one if those of us who claim to have faith say that God absconds from tough situations. I beg you: please stop saying that God is absent. If you do feel that God isn’t present, acknowledge the feeling and then claim the reality that God is with you. Please, please, please.