Remember a case about a school in Silicon Valley that prohibited a "born-again" Christian teacher from distributing material emphasizing the religious aspects of the Declaration of Independence to his fifth graders? Peter Boyer of the New Yorker has written a very interesting piece about the case in this week's New Yorker. Unfortunately, the article is not available on line, but a Q&A with Boyer about the article is:
http://newyorker.com/online/content/index.ssf?050321on_onlineonly01What Would Jesus Teach?
Issue of 2005-03-21
Posted 2005-03-14
This week in the magazine, Peter Boyer reports on how a lawsuit by a teacher who claimed he was discriminated against as a Christian caused an uproar in California. Here, with Matt Dellinger, Boyer discusses the gray area between church and state.
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In the lawsuit, a teacher named Stephen Williams brought a federal civil-rights claim against his school’s principal and the district. His complaint was that he had been stopped from distributing historical documents that mentioned God, including excerpts from the Declaration of Independence, and that he had been discriminated against as a Christian. Yes, but how it was covered was interesting, because it illustrated the media divide. There was a press release with this sensational headline: “Declaration of Independence Banned from Classroom.” (Which was not the case—the entire Declaration of Independence was in the textbook the school used, and a copy of it was hanging in the library.) And, for the most part, the mainstream media sort of avoided the story. The Los Angeles Times and the New York Times did stories, as did the Bay Area papers, but the major television networks pretty much ignored it. The new conservative media, on the other hand, just pounced on it. Sean Hannity had Williams on his radio show “Hannity & Colmes” at least twice, and he moved his Fox News television show to Cupertino for a special hour-long live broadcast that he called “Take Back America.” So that’s one piece of it. You saw, too, elements of the whole debate over multiculturalism and the politics of diversity. Stephen Williams was trying to supplement the regular fifth-grade curriculum with material that emphasized the Christian influence in the founding of our nation. As he sees it, there are “holes” in the regular curriculum. And, indeed, the fifth-grade textbook is a model of multicultural sensitivity. So, that’s part of it. And, of course, at the heart of the case is the teacher’s complaint that, in public schools, tolerance is the most prized value—unless it’s tolerance of Christianity. That assertion had particular resonance in a community that so prided itself on its tolerance.
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But it almost seems like Williams’s expressions crossed whatever line they may have crossed not because they were religious but because they were personal. Is the controversy here about the endorsement of religion or about the expression of religious faith? Well, that’s the very heart of this case. Was Stephen Williams proselytizing in the classroom—which is strictly forbidden, all sides agree—or was he merely misunderstood to be proselytizing because he had openly expressed his own born-again Christianity? It’s a terribly difficult matter to work out. One of the complaining parents told me that the problem with Stephen Williams is that he made it known that he was a Christian, that his faith mattered more to him than anything in his life. And that reality sort of changed the dynamic in the classroom. When Stephen Williams, Christian, was teaching about the faith of the Founders, did it have the effect on an eleven-year-old’s mind of proselytizing? Perhaps, but how do you stop a teacher from being open about his own faith, outside the classroom, without infringing upon his right of free expression?
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