Where else would you find a mushbrain argument like this except in The American Conservative? For it not only sees the decline in religiosity in America as a bad thing, but, importantly, blames it on the lack of mandatory prayer in schools, which, they say, makes religion seem "taboo" to kids and weans them from their faith.
Implicit in all this is that the First Amendment is a bad thing, at least insofar as it is held by the courts to apply in schools. Also implicit is the idea that religion is a good thing. The argument, also implicit, is that we should change the First Amendment, or at least the way it's been interpreted, so that kids can not only pray in schools (which they can-on their own), but have organized prayer in schools.
So here is the argument:
1.) Religion has declined in America not because of increasing wealth, well being, education, but because of the increasing secularization of education. Author Helen Andrews gives two lines of evidence for this conclusion:
A new report from the American Enterprise Institute has a different explanation. "The most likely causes of declining religiosity are the increasingly intense role that more and more secularized educational institutions play in children's lives," author Lyman Stone writes, plus "the continuing delay and decline of marriage." It is not education that makes people less religious, he argues, but specifically secular education.
There's no further mention of marriage in the article, though it's also supposed to contribute to America's godlessness.
I haven't read the report, and maybe they have real data about this, but I doubt it, for the "increasingly intense role" of secularized education simply means the banning of mandatory school prayers in American schools, which occurred in the Sixties. And, as the chart below shows, the real increase in "nones"-those lacking affiliation to a church or feeling that they have no religion-has occurred after 1970. When I went to secondary school in the sixties, there was already no school prayer, and yet since then the loss of religion has skyrocketed. If the author's argument is correct, nonbelief should have begun increasing in the 1960s, not as late as 1975, and of course there would be no reason for a continual increase.
2.) In fact, the decline of religiosity is imputed almost solely to a "more secular schooling" rather than people becoming less religious because they either give up faith or were raised in a less religious home. The New Atheists take a hit:
That education would have something to do with secularization fits with what we know about when secularization happens. Contrary to the New Atheists' heroic pose, the rise of the "nones" is not driven by the mature decisions of adults but by habits being formed (or not) in childhood. " The story of secularization in America is not mostly a story of lots of people who were raised religious leaving their religious faith as adults," Stone explains. "It is a story of fewer people having a religious upbringing at all."
Yes, but why are people having less religious upbringings? Even if this were the case, It must be a case of the priorities of the parents, not the absence of prayers in schools.
3.) Further evidence for the importance of religion in schools comes from-get this-countries where religious school systems shift to secular ones:
Stone points to test cases in France and Turkey where secularization followed not just from expanded access to education but from shifts from religious to secular schools. "If educational attainment drives secularization, then spending two more years in school should reduce religiosity, even if that school is a religious school," he theorizes. In fact, longitudinal studies have found that attending a religious school is associated with greater religiosity later in life.
But of course when you're immersed in religious education during the whole day, and that's taken away, you're not going to be as wedded to faith. But that's different from having a two-minute school prayer once a day: the frequent drill in America in the Sixties. In religious schools you're marinated in delusion all day.
3.) Equally dubious is Andrews's argument that if you can't pray in school, kids see that as abnormal, a taboo. And that makes them less religious.
But if the AEI report is right, there is something irreplaceable about those hours between nine and three. The atheist's knockdown argument against school prayer - that there are plenty of other hours in a day to pray in - was based on a fallacy. Society either teaches its children that religion is something normal or something taboo. Banning prayer from schools teaches them that religion is not normal.
Seriously? If there's no mandatory prayer in school, people are going to think religion is taboo? I doubt they'd think of it at all. And if they asked "why can't we pray in school", they could get an answer from Andrew Seidel of the Freedom from Religion Foundation: you are allowed to pray in school on your own time; it just can't be mandated. You can pray in the cafeteria, at recess, on the playground, and so on, and no teacher is going to stop you! In fact, they wouldn't be allowed to stop you.
Andrews is making a desperation argument based on the unstoppable secularization of America. But she's not going to get her school prayer, and the "nones" will continue to increase. So it goes.
Prayer isn't banned in public school. Kids can pray. The government cannot impose prayer on a captive audience of other people's children. This is an easy distinction to grasp and this article goes out of its way to conflate the two. It's twaddle. https://t.co/VfcwQNS2kl
- Andrew L. Seidel (@AndrewLSeidel) May 15, 2020
h/t: Barry
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