[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 45 (Wednesday, April 16, 1997)]
[Senate]
[Pages S3247-S3249]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                            PRAYER IN SCHOOL

  Mr. BYRD. Mr. President, I introduced a joint resolution on February 
6 to amend the Constitution in order to clarify that document's intent 
with regard to prayer in our public schools. Senators Lott, Hollings, 
Ford, and Smith of New Hampshire have indicated a desire to have their 
names added as cosponsors. At the conclusion of my remarks I will ask 
that be done.
  Mr. President, my proposed amendment is short, but it 
constitutionalizes what the Supreme Court has upheld on a number of 
occasions; namely, that the Founding Fathers did not intend for 
Government and the schools to be opponents of religion but rather that 
they should be neutral and impartial in allowing the practice of all 
religious beliefs by American citizens and by even the schoolchildren 
of our Nation.
  I have long been concerned by the trends in our schools and in our 
courts to overzealously eliminate all references--all references--to 
religion and religious practices. It is now uncommon and rare to see 
any acknowledgment of the religious underpinnings of major holidays. 
The unfortunate effect of this misguided overzealousness has been to 
send the subtle but powerful message to our children that religious 
faith and practice is something unsanctioned, unimportant, and 
unsophisticated--something that only small handfuls of people practice, 
and usually then only on weekends. Indeed, this exorcism of religion 
from the school day and from most of American life has reached even 
into the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance and other important 
American documents.
  I was here on June 7, 1954, when the House of Representatives, of 
which I was then a Member, added the words ``under God'' to the Pledge 
of Allegiance. The next day, on June 8, the Senate likewise added the 
words ``under God'' to the Pledge of Allegiance. I think it was on June 
20 of that year, 1954, that the President signed the additional 
language into law.
  I understand the thinking of the Founding Fathers when they drafted a 
Constitution that specifically forbade the establishment of a state 
religion and that intended to--and does--protect the freedom of all 
religions to observe the rituals and the tenets of their faith. The 
Founding Fathers and many of the earlier settlers of this country had 
fled from nations where State-sanctioned religions had resulted in 
exclusion from Government participation or even persecution of 
believers in nonsanctioned faiths. They were generally--talking about 
the founders of this Nation, the framers of the Constitution, the 
Founding Fathers, those who voted in the various conventions for the 
new Constitution--they were generally religious men, as the number of 
plaques in local churches here attest, proclaiming proudly, for 
example, that ``George Washington attended church here.'' The freedom 
to worship was important to them, and they sought at all cost to 
prohibit the Government of our Republic--the Government of our 
Republic, not our democracy; our Republic--from assuming the 
dictatorial powers of a king. Indeed, the Federalist Papers 59, in 
discussing the differences between the President and a king, 
specifically observes that the President has ``no particle of spiritual 
jurisdiction.'' There would be no ``Church of America,'' permitted by 
the Constitution.

  But in discussing the qualifications of elected officials and 
electoral college members, the authors are clear in encouraging 
participation by members of all faiths, and they pointedly note that 
religious belief is not a bar to election or selection. So whether you 
are a Catholic or whether you are a Jew or whether you are a Baptist or 
Methodist, Episcopalian is not something that will bar one from 
election. In Federalist 57, James Madison writes: ``Who are the objects 
of popular choice? Every citizen whose merit may recommend him to the 
esteem and confidence of his country. No qualification of wealth, of 
birth, of religious faith, or of civil profession is permitted to 
fetter the judgment or disappoint the inclination of the people.'' But, 
seeking to keep the Government from dictating a particular religion 
certainly did not mean that all public professions of faith must be 
banned, and the courts have sustained that view.
  Chief Justice Warren Burger, writing for the Court in Lynch v. 
Donnelly emphasized what he called ``an unbroken history of official 
acknowledgment by all three branches of government of the role of 
religion in American life from at least 1789.''
  Now, Mr. President, the words ``In God we trust,'' those words appear 
on our Nation's currency. Proclamations of days of thanksgiving and 
prayer, legislative chaplains, the invocation ``God save the United 
States and this Honorable Court'' at the opening of judicial 
proceedings--all these and more reinforce what Chief Justice Burger was 
asserting when he wrote that the Constitution does not require 
``complete separation of church and state . . . (but) affirmatively 
mandates accommodation . . . of all religions, and forbids hostility 
toward any.''
  An acknowledgment that faith is, and should be, a part of the 
everyday life of those who desire it, not just an occasional weekend or 
holiday exercise, is a message that our children need to absorb. 
Schools, principals, and administrators should not react in dismay when 
a student-initiated religious group seeks to meet in a classroom after 
school. What is wrong with that? That sort of extracurricular activity 
should be encouraged, not frowned upon. We need not sanctimoniously 
strike a Christmas carol from the euphemistically named ``Winter 
Concert,'' nor tiptoe around the observance of a daily ``moment of 
silence'' for reflection, meditation, or even, if the child wishes, 
prayer. And it certainly must be permissible to discuss the role that 
various religious faiths have played in world history and in the 
history of our own Nation. Actually, it is imperative to the study of 
history.

  Especially in these troubled days, it is important, in these very 
significant ways, to send a positive message to children about private 
faith and religious practice. They spend 6 or more hours a day in 
school, 180 days or more each year. More and more, in a society where 
both parents work, schools are where children absorb much of their 
``life instruction'' and develop behavioral and social attitudes, in 
addition to academic knowledge. School is one of the few places besides 
church where clean and positive messages are, or should be, instilled 
in our children, counterbalancing the pervasive violence and seamy 
morals of television. We put a premium on the diversity of education 
that they receive in literature, history, geography, science, and 
mathematics; yet, most public schools are a spiritual dead zone--a 
spiritual dead zone--completely devoid

[[Page S3248]]

of even the unspoken understanding that religious faith ought to play a 
part, perhaps a major part, in people's lives. For fear of offending 
the sensibilities of the few--we are living in this age of so-called 
``political correctness.'' I don't know what that means, and I don't 
care and don't intend to change my ways and attitudes to be in 
accordance with ``political correctness.'' For fear of offending the 
sensibilities of the few, we have denied the needs of the many. A 
climate of openness and an acknowledgment that many people, including 
children, can profess and practice different faiths, are needed in our 
schools, which should not be a spiritual wasteland where even the mere 
recognition of any spiritual faith is banned.
  Mr. President, I am normally and naturally reluctant to amend the 
Constitution. But I am not one who would say never, never amend the 
Constitution. Regarding amendments to require a balanced budget, or to 
provide the President with the line-item veto, I have been vociferously 
and adamantly opposed. These amendments would fundamentally alter the 
checks and balances established in the Constitution. But on the 
financing of political campaigns, I have been willing to seek a 
constitutional remedy to that scourge of public trust, a scourge that 
no legislation has ever been able to control. And on this issue of 
openly acknowledging and accepting the role that prayer and religion 
can and ought to play in our lives, I believe that an amendment to 
reaffirm the appropriate neutrality of the Constitution toward prayer 
and religious activity in school is necessary to swing the pendulum 
back toward the middle, toward the neutral middle, away from both the 
existing pole, where the state seems, at least, to have become inimical 
toward the exercise of religious freedom, and away from the opposite 
and clearly unconstitutional pole of dictating one religious profession 
of faith over any other. We do not have to completely discourage any 
recognition of a Supreme Being in order to avoid favoring one religious 
faith over another. And to do so is, in effect, a form of religious 
discrimination which the Founding Fathers would never have sanctioned.
  The sum total of this collective effort to bend over backwards to 
avoid any recognition of a Supreme Being in our schools has had the 
extremely damaging effect of making any expression of such a belief 
appear to be undesirable, unfashionable, and even something to be 
studiously avoided. If one mentions a Supreme Being in some circles, he 
is considered to be unsophisticated. Children pick up on such messages 
quickly. And as a result, we have produced several generations of young 
people largely devoid of spiritual values in their daily lives. 
Everywhere they turn, they meet the subtle, and perhaps not so subtle, 
putting down of spiritual values.
  Recently, I noted an article in the Washington Post which proclaimed 
that only 40 percent of U.S. scientists believe in God. Although this 
is precisely the same percentage as was revealed in a similar survey in 
1916--and I am glad it hasn't deteriorated or gotten worse in the 
meantime, and that is almost worthy of some amazement that it hasn't--I 
find such a result personally unfathomable.
  Who, more than a man or a woman of science, should be more acutely 
aware that the wonders of the universe could not have just happened? 
Who, more than an astronomer or a mathematician, or a physicist, or a 
biologist, intimately familiar with the laws of probability, could 
better understand the impossibility of the wonders of the universe and 
all creation occurring simply as a byproduct of fortunate accident?
  I wonder how many of these scientists who answered the poll, which 
indicated that only 40 percent of the scientists believe in a Supreme 
Being, have read Charles Darwin? Well, no less a pioneering scientific 
intellect than Charles Darwin, the originator of the theory of natural 
selection--I have the book here in my hand--refused to rule out a 
Divine Creator; and he even refers to a Divine Creator in his book, 
``The Origin of Species.''
  Darwin asks a very penetrating question, and I'm reading from page 
193 of Charles Darwin's volume of ``The Origin of Species.'' Here is 
the question that he asks: ``Have we any right to assume that the 
Creator works by intellectual powers like those of man?'' Now, that is 
an incisive question because I think we are prone to think of God's 
intellect in the context of what we think to be or know to be our own 
intellectual processes, our own intellects. But Darwin asks the 
question: ``Have we any right to assume that the Creator works by 
intellectual powers like those of man?'' That is a great question.

  Darwin continues the dovetailing of his scientific theory with the 
works of the Creator when he writes this on page 194: ``Let this 
process go on . . .''--he is talking about the process of natural 
selection--``Let this process go on for millions of years; and during 
each year on millions of individuals of many kinds; and may we not 
believe that a living optical instrument . . . might thus be formed as 
superior to one of glass. . . .'' He speaks of a living optical 
instrument--in other words, the eye, which can adjust itself to light 
and to distance, and so on, automatically and virtually immediately; 
whereas, the best camera that the Presiding Officer, Pat Roberts, has 
will have to be adjusted a little bit for light and distance, and he 
will have to look through it a little bit and adjust this and adjust 
that. Well, that is what Darwin is talking about when he says: ``Let 
this process go on for millions of years; and during each year on 
millions of individuals of many kinds; and may we not believe that a 
living optical instrument (the eye) might thus be formed as superior to 
one of glass, as the works of the Creator are to those of man?''
  So Charles Darwin himself is not backward about speaking of a 
Creator. ``Let this process''--the process of natural selection--``go 
on for millions of years; and during each year on millions of 
individuals of many kinds; and may we not believe that a living optical 
instrument (the eye) might thus be formed as superior to one of glass, 
as the works of the Creator are to those of man?''
  So it is clear that even such a scientific genius as Darwin did not 
think it to be unsophisticated to believe in a Creator, or make 
reference to a Creator, a Supreme Being.
  I have read and reread many times, Mr. President, the account of 
creation as set forth in the Book of Genesis in the Holy Bible. I 
thought it well to read Darwin's theory of ``Natural Selection'' also. 
And I have done that. As a matter of fact, when I first read that book 
some years ago, and it made reference to the Creator in Darwin's 
``Origin of Species,'' I was somewhat amazed. I never thought that, 
after hearing about Darwin's theory--the theory of evolution, and so 
on--I didn't think he would be so unsophisticated as to make any 
reference to a Supreme Being, to a Creator. But I found differently.
  So it is clear that such a scientific genius as Darwin did not feel 
the need to rule the Creator out of creation just because man in his 
limited, narrow, finite intelligence might be arrogant enough to do so. 
It may just be that such surveys reveal only the desire of some in the 
scientific field to avoid appearing unsophisticated to their 
colleagues. For in the minds of many misguided people, to be truly 
intelligent one must avoid any alignment with the alleged superstition 
and naivete of religion. What poppycock! For any serious student of 
science not to express wonder at the mystery of life and the universe 
and to claim instead that it is all purely a result of an accidental 
natural physics or chemical reaction is surely an admission of true 
ignorance and arrogance.
  This is not something I know a great deal about, Mr. President. I 
don't profess such. But I can tell you one thing. There is a hunger in 
this Nation for a return to spiritual values. It can be seen in the 
misguided tragedy of the Heaven's Gate cult, looking for a space ship 
lurking in the tail of a comet to take them to Heaven and away from 
this miserable, material world. It can be seen in the political 
strength of the religious right.
  Mr. President, I am not of the religious right. I am not of the 
religious left. I just plainly believe in the old-time religion which I 
saw exemplified and practiced by two humble parents--foster parents of 
mine--over the years that I lived with them. It can be seen in the need 
for our children to focus on something beyond material things in which 
to anchor their perceptions

[[Page S3249]]

about right and wrong and good and evil.
  In today's turned-around, upside-down society with its diminished 
values and its emphasis on easy money, casual sex, violence, material 
goods, instant gratification and escape through drugs and alcohol, our 
young people need to know that it is OK to have spiritual values, it is 
OK to follow one's own personal religious guideposts, it is OK to pray, 
it is OK to recognize and then to do morally the right thing, it is OK 
to go against the crowd, OK to read the Bible, and OK to read Darwin's 
theory of natural selection--who knows? This may have been God's way of 
creating man--and that such activities are not strange, or uncool, or 
stupid, or unsophisticated.
  The language of my amendment is as follows: ``Nothing in this 
Constitution, or amendments thereto, shall be construed to prohibit or 
require voluntary prayer in public schools or to prohibit or require 
voluntary prayer at public school extracurricular activities.''
  I will not take the time today. But one day I want to take the floor, 
and I want to quote from every President's inaugural speech--every 
President's, from Washington down to Clinton's--to show that every 
President was unsophisticated enough to make reference to the Supreme 
Being in his inaugural speech. All we need to do is travel around this 
city and see the inscriptions on the walls of the Senate and on the 
walls of public buildings and museums and monuments to understand that 
the framers of the Constitution, the founders of this Republic, 
believed in a higher power. They believed in a Supreme Being. Isn't it 
folly to claim that the schoolchildren of this Nation should not say a 
prayer, not be allowed to say a prayer in an extracurricular exercise, 
at a graduation exercise, if the students want to have a prayer? Who 
would claim that the framers of the Constitution would be against that?

  So my amendment is simple language. It mandates nothing and it 
prohibits nothing. It simply allows voluntary prayer in our schools and 
at school functions for those who wish it. Such a course correction is 
needed to restore balance to a raft of court decisions in the past 
several years that sometimes in their eagerness to maintain the ``wall 
of separation'' in church/state relations have seemingly ruled against 
the freedom of a large majority of believing Americans to publicly 
affirm their faiths.
  Such a situation is not right, it is not fair, it is not wise, and it 
certainly is not what the framers had in mind. Their intent was the 
freedom to practice one's individual faith as one saw fit. Somehow we 
have gone far, far afield from that original and very sound conception 
to a point where any public religious practice is actually discouraged. 
That is certainly the wrong track for a nation founded largely on moral 
and spiritual principles, and any serious scrutiny of the state of 
American culture today clearly demonstrates just how badly off track we 
have wandered.
  So I urge all Senators to carefully consider my amendment, and it is 
my hope that the Committee on the Judiciary will hold hearings this 
year. This is an urgent matter--an urgent matter for the future of our 
children and for the future of our country. There is nothing political 
about it. It doesn't need to be.
  Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Mr. Lott, Mr. Hollings, 
Mr. Ford, and Mr. Smith of New Hampshire be added as cosponsors of my 
resolution.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. BYRD. Mr. President, I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Who seeks time?
  Mr. ASHCROFT. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. BOND. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for 
the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

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