The Bible in the Park by John Blakeman

Author:John Blakeman
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781931968133
Publisher: University of Akron Press

Public School Forums

Public school forums serve as outlets for many types of religious speech and expression, as chapter 3 pointed out. Local churches and other religious groups use school facilities to hold worship services or other religious gatherings during nonschool hours, and students themselves often seek to distribute religious literature or organize religious clubs. District court policymaking must account for a wide variety of schools as forums, from elementary schools to public university facilities. In addition, religious speech occurs not only in facilities devoted to expressive activities such as auditoriums and performance halls; it also occurs in school hallways, between classes, and outside on school grounds.

For the past two decades public schools have been a real battleground for religious activists, especially evangelical Christians from the so-called Christian Right. As scholars of religion and politics frequently note, Christian activists charge that public schools “promote anti-Christian values and [threaten] the ability of conservative Christians to inculcate their values in their own children.”16 The focus of their complaints are often curriculum related, and target “secular-humanist” textbooks that denigrate evangelicalism, ignore creationism, or promote multiculturalism hostile to basic Christian beliefs.17 There is, then, a deeper context for religious speech and public school cases. However, Christian activists who target public schools often do so not through public forum litigation, but instead through school board elections or lawsuits over curricula matters and textbooks. The religious speech and public forum cases represented in this study do concern individuals and churches that wish to use public school facilities for speech-related purposes, but in many of the cases it would be difficult to discern a hostility to public education in general, and indeed a linkage to this broader trend of Christian activists targeting public schools. The local, nondenominational church that wishes to use school facilities to hold a worship service, for instance, is more likely seeking adequate space for its congregation, and is not engaged in some kind of conduct to reform and rid schools of secular humanism. Likewise for individual students who wish to distribute religious literature on a school campus, or form a religious student group and meet in school classrooms. They may be evangelical or fundamentalist Christians linked to the broader Christian right political movement so hostile to public schools, but they are more likely acting as private, individual religious speakers (and evangelists, in a sense) than as spokespeople and activists for a larger social and political cause.

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