NEWS STORY: Prayer Protests Planned at High School Football Games

c. 2000 Religion News Service UNDATED _ As the high school football season kicks off, some fans plan to pray in the stands in protest of the Supreme Court’s decision in June that declared a Texas policy permitting student-led prayer before games unconstitutional. From “No Pray! No Play!,” an effort at the Santa Fe, Texas, […]

c. 2000 Religion News Service

UNDATED _ As the high school football season kicks off, some fans plan to pray in the stands in protest of the Supreme Court’s decision in June that declared a Texas policy permitting student-led prayer before games unconstitutional.

From “No Pray! No Play!,” an effort at the Santa Fe, Texas, high school where the policy was banned, to calls for a special weekend of prayer in October, activists are galvanizing grass-roots support to have prayers at football games anyway. Church-state separationists aren’t thrilled with the end run but say the prayerful protests are legal if school officials remain neutral.


The political football of prayer already has been in play in Asheville, N.C. There, the Rev. Ralph Sexton, pastor of Trinity Baptist Church, is chairing the “We Still Pray” movement.

Sexton said he had expected about 25 people for a mid-July meeting to discuss a plan of action to respond to the Supreme Court ruling. Instead, more than 400 people showed up at his independent Baptist church.

At a “We Still Pray” rally a month later at Asheville’s Reynolds High School, North Carolinians not only filled the football stadium, but caused highway gridlock on the roadways leading to the site. Some on the highways, their back windows painted in white shoe polish with the words “We Still Pray,” exited their cars and prayed in the median and at the sides of the road.

And on Aug. 25, the first home game for Reynolds High this season,“spontaneous prayer broke out” after the national anthem, Sexton said.

“There was no one leading the prayer and for that reason you heard prayers in different places at different times,” he recalled. “When I got through praying, there were still other people praying. Some people just had their heads bowed.”

As Sexton and others plan to continue their effort in Asheville, across the country, organizers made similar plans for the season’s first football game at Sante Fe High School, whose prayer policy was struck down by the nation’s highest court.

The National Day of Prayer Task Force, based in Colorado Springs, Colo., is encouraging the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer after the national anthem at the Friday (Sept. 1) game, embracing an effort led by an organization called “No Pray. No Play.”


“It’s detrimental to our First Amendment rights when the Supreme Court does not allow for student-led prayer to take place at these games,” said Mark Fried, media coordinator of the prayer task force, which hopes the movement will spread nationwide.

“It’s traditional and … it’s an expression of religious freedom and when that is being limited, it’s a wake-up call.”

Others embracing the movement include the Mississippi-based American Family Association, the Washington-based Christian Defense Coalition and the Christian Coalition of Georgia.

Tim Wildmon, vice president of the American Family Association, a conservative Christian organization based in Tupelo, Miss., said his organization has issued an “action alert” encouraging the post-anthem prayers and is promoting the idea on its radio stations.

He said the movement has especially galvanized evangelical Christians living in the South.

“This is as much tradition as the national anthem, so people are a little bit angered,” Wildmon said. “Nobody likes being told they have to stop a tradition.”

The Christian Defense Coalition has set the first weekend in October as a time for encouraging public prayer at high school football games nationwide as a way to “peacefully resist this unjust Supreme Court decision,” said its director, the Rev. Patrick Mahoney, in a statement.


Sadie Fields, chairman of the Christian Coalition of Georgia, wrote a column in her group’s July bulletin insert _ distributed to hundreds of churches and activists statewide _ supporting football-prayer initiatives like those that have developed over the summer.

“I’m not sure that it needs to become an organized effort, so to speak,” she said. “I think that it has more meaning if it’s coming directly from the people sitting in the pews and on the bleachers, exercising their right to pray according to the dictates of their faith in their local communities,” she said.

But not everyone is cheering on these prayers.

Steve Benen, spokesman for Washington-based Americans United for Separation of Church and State, said the efforts are legal when they don’t involve school officials. But he questions their propriety.

“If there are groups encouraging people to stand up after the national anthem and announce these prayers en masse, that may be legal, but it might not be particularly respectful of religious minorities, and for that matter, it’s not particularly respectful of prayer,” said Benen.

He thinks the efforts make prayer a weapon rather than an act of worship.

“To use it as some kind of rhetoric to remind religious minorities that they’re in the minority is really just being a bully, which doesn’t seem very Christian,” he said.

American Atheists President Ellen Johnson says the actions amount to a “public display of disrespect” and encourage anarchy.


“While on the surface, it is it not illegal for people to participate in the worship service of their choice, there is no choice in this situation,” she said in a statement.

(OPTIONAL TRIM FOLLOWS)

Should the demonstrations edge into the legal realm, the American Center for Law and Justice, which represented the Sante Fe school district before the Supreme Court, stands ready.

On Thursday (Aug. 31), the law firm founded by religious broadcaster Pat Robertson announced in a statement that it will defend any school district that gets sued for allowing “spontaneous prayer” at high school football games.

“As students and members of the community are permitted to stand up and cheer for their team, they are also permitted to stand up and recite a religious statement, including a prayer,” said Jay Sekulow, chief counsel for the Virginia Beach, Va.-based law firm.

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Eds: For more information check the following Web sites:

_ http://www.westillpray.org

_ http://www.noplaynopray.org

_ http://www.atheists.org

_ http://www.afa.net (American Family Association)

_ http://www.aclj.org (American Center for Law and Justice)

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