Churches join forces calling upon School Board to reverse its decision

By L.A. Williams
Correspondent
Christian Action League of North Carolina, Inc.

WHITEVILLE — Receiving a red New Testament from Gideons International had been a rite of passage for Columbus County fifth-graders for nearly three decades until this school year when education officials, fearing legal action from the American Civil Liberties Union, banned the practice.

But more than 550 residents representing at least 30 churches in this close-knit, rural county joined forces late last week to call for the Board of Education to reverse its decision and to let board members know that the Alliance Defense Fund will offer them legal support if they do so.

"We can't just get a letter from the ACLU and roll over and give up our religious liberties," said Kip Godwin, who helped organize the Jan. 3 meeting and called on the Rev. Mark Creech, executive director of the Christian Action League of North Carolina, to address the issue. "I think people left encouraged and believing that their voices could be and would be heard."

It was standing room only at Trinity Baptist Church when the Rev. Creech took the crowd back in time to examine the intent of the writers of the First Amendment, then brought them forward to evaluate the current argument over Gideon Bibles in schools and challenged them to boldly defend their religious freedom.

"Never has there been such a vicious attack on religion in the public square," Creech said of the national rise of secular humanism. "We've seen on every level of government in this nation, which without question was founded on Christian principles, Christians are now being shown the door if not being barred from entering the house of government or state in the first place."

Taking some of his message from Mathew Staver's "Faith and Freedom," Creech said radical secularists intend to remove from the state or its property "every vestige of Christian content or influence," from Christian decorations during the Christmas and Easter seasons to displays of the Ten Commandments.

"... No national days of prayer on city property, no praying in Jesus name at city council and state government meetings and no sharing Bibles with elementary grade students," he said characterizing the current climate as a "vast departure" from our nation's foundations.

"Devout Christian people, largely speaking, are not looking to form a theocracy. But we are contending that people of faith should have an equal opportunity to express their convictions as those who hold to non-theistic or secularistic views," Creech said, adding that religious expressions are too often treated as second class forms of speech.

While today's conventional wisdom decries Christianity as "intolerant, absolute, inflexible and authoritarian" in fact an "enemy of freedom," Creech pointed out that it is the Christian worldview of man as created in God's image that led the founding fathers to proclaim our "inalienable or God-given" rights in the first place.

Perhaps John Quincy Adams, the sixth President of the United States, said it best: "The highest glory of the American Revolution was this: it connected in one indissoluble bond, the principles of civil government with the principles of Christianity."

It seems the U.S. Supreme Court was well aware of the founding fathers' intent in 1892 when it proclaimed without reserve that "this is a Christian nation," and that "our laws and our institutions must necessarily be based upon and embody the teachings of the Redeemer of mankind."

But sadly, as Creech pointed out, less than a century later in 1989's County of Allegheny v. American Civll Liberties Union, the High Court tossed aside the original understanding of the Constitution and declared that the purpose of the First Amendment was to mandate that the government remain secular.

Further muddying the waters is the Lemon Test, a three-pronged standard based on Lemon v. Kurtzman in 1971 that courts now use to rule on religious issues. According to the Lemon test, government involvement with religion is constitutional only if the government's action has a legitimate secular purpose; does not have the primary effect of either advancing or inhibiting religion; and does not result in an "excessive government entanglement" with religion.

"The problem with the Lemon test is that it injects a great deal of subjectivity into its application, and from the very onset requires that the religious practice be secularized in order to pass Constitutional scrutiny," Creech said. "Thus, religion is placed on the defensive, having to secularize its meaning and expression."

For example, a nativity scene by itself is unconstitutional, but magically becomes constitutional when secular holiday symbols are placed within its context; a public school group singing Silent Night might indeed be silenced themselves unless they also sing "Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer." Some courts have used the Lemon Test to rule student initiated graduation prayer constitutional while other courts have used the same test to rule it unconstitutional.

Lower courts have also fallen victim to the confusion created by the Lemon test, Creech asserted.

"For almost every federal district court ruling that states one position on a matter of religious liberty, there is another ruling from another federal court stating just the opposite position," he said, with Bible distribution in public schools being no exception.

Nonetheless, Creech encouraged the Columbus County crowd, among them representatives from Gideons International, that the Bible distribution there, as in Cumberland and Harnett counties where the controversy came up just a few months ago, was not in violation of the Establishment Clause, according to the Alliance Defense Fund.

A legal organization that works to educate the government about important constitutional rights, ADF has offered to defend pro bono any of the three counties' school systems should they rescind their Bible distribution bans and then face a lawsuit from the ACLU.

Such a suit would likely be based on Peck v. The Upshur County Board of Education, the case the ACLU uses to scare boards into believing that religious materials can't be given to elementary age students because of their impressionability. But the ADF points out that the Supreme Court completely rejected that argument three years later when it ruled in the case of Good News Club v. Milford Central School.

"In that case, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that it is entirely constitutional for school districts to permit the distribution of Bibles to students pursuant to a policy of equal access for literature distribution by outside groups," Creech said. "And that, the age of students is irrelevant to the constitutionality of such a policy."

Creech said schools that allow other outside organizations to distribute information to students cannot prohibit religious groups from doing the same. He said schools should consider where they place the religious literature (a table in the hallway usually works well since uninterested students can simply pass by) as well as when it is made available (before school starts or just after it ends seems most workable).

While no one is pressured to take a Gideon New Testament, Ed Worley, a member of the organization in Columbus County, said most fifth-graders are eager to receive them. In fact, he's only had about a half-dozen elementary students turn down the offer in the past 25 years. That enthusiasm is one reason the group targets fifth grade as opposed to secondary students, although they did take New Testaments into Columbus County high schools this school year after the elementary school ban was in place. Because they were not allowed to take the books to fifth-graders they hope to distribute Testaments to both fifth and sixth-graders next school year, Worley said.

He will take the Gideons' written request to the Columbus County Board of Education, which may be discussed as early as the board's Feb. 11 meeting.

Monte Herring was the only one of the five-member board to support Bible distribution when the annual request was made last year. According to Godwin, the ACLU had written the board a letter in 2006 threatening a lawsuit if they allowed the Bible distribution. The school board had already voted to do so for that school year, but promised to reconsider the decision the next time the Gideons asked. So when the 2007 request came last spring, following advice from the school system attorney, the board voted 4 to 1 to ban the handout at the elementary level but did allow Gideons to take the New Testaments into high schools.

Godwin said the issue attracted very little attention at first, but came to the public's notice in November when Gideons were visiting churches and explaining their work. They mentioned the change in local school policy, and word began to spread among churches about the latest erosion of religious freedom.

Godwin said after seeing letters in the local newspaper on the issue and after reading about the similar turns of events in Cumberland and Harnett counties, he contacted the Christian Action League and the ADF to see what could be done. Phone calls to churches and an opportunity to speak on a local Sunday morning radio show helped spread the word about the Jan. 3 meeting and get the grassroots effort under way. By the time hundreds gathered at Trinity Baptist in Whiteville, already more than 1,700 signatures had been collected on petitions asking for the School Board to allow Bible distribution to resume.

Godwin, Creech and others at the meeting last week were glad to see the school board's attorney and two school board members at the event.

"I genuinely appreciate their willingness to attend this meeting. It demonstrates, I trust that they have open minds and have the best interest of the school system at heart," Creech said in his closing.

"The Christian Action League, along with the Alliance Defense Fund stands ready to assist the School Board in doing the right thing. But we also stand ready to assist a concerned citizenry to see that the right thing gets done."