[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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