Editor’s Note: This week, “The Wall of Separation” blog is featuring the essays and videos submitted by the winners of Americans United’s 2024 AU Student Contest, which asked high school and college students to reflect on their vision for church-state separation. Submissions do not necessarily reflect the views of Americans United.
Like many other young people in the United States, I grew up in a very small, very Protestant town. There often wasn’t much to do for fun, especially in the years before I was old enough to get my driver’s license. Instead, much of the social scene in my town revolved around school or church, or in many cases, both.
The main social events at my public middle school consisted of prayer meetings with donuts on Wednesday mornings before school, Sunday night youth group meetings at a local church, and after-school Bible studies on Fridays. After school dances in the sixth grade, many of the kids’ parents would drive them to the nearby church for an “after party” in the church basement featuring snacks, soda and biblical trivia games.
I used to beg my parents to let me attend these part-religious, part-social gatherings, but they were often hesitant. I come from a practicing Catholic family. We attended Mass every Sunday and often talked about what it meant to be Catholic in a Protestant community that, despite being Christian, still differed in some of its common beliefs. My parents were hesitant to send me off to some non-denominational Protestant church, worried that the pastors there might talk me out of my Catholicism.
In part because of my Catholic upbringing, I have always been interested in religion and politics. My personal interests inspired me to join a research team earlier this year led by Professor Orit Avishai at Fordham University where I studied the impacts of Christian Nationalism on public schools. In particular, I tracked the progression of state bills across 15 states that would allow public and charter schools to employ chaplains as spiritual counselors to some of the United States’ most vulnerable and impressionable citizens: children.
These bills, often posited as a way to reduce strain on overworked, underpaid teachers, counselors and school support staff, threaten to upend the foundational principle of separation between church and state by muddying the line between secular counseling and spiritual counseling. By positioning chaplains as counselors and mentors, and outsourcing mental health care to them, schools are putting their non-Christian students at risk of ostracization from their peers, discriminatory treatment by their schools, and even proselytization.
In my research, I reviewed many hours of recorded state committee hearings where members of the public were able to provide testimony regarding the passage of these bills. The bills differ from state to state and testimony differs from person to person, but there were several key themes in all the material I reviewed. First, I do believe that some of the legislators responsible for this legislation have good intentions. They recognize the mental health crisis happening among America’s youth and claim that school chaplains are “just another tool” in the toolbox for America’s schools. However, I also believe that these legislators are misinformed and that the organizations helping them craft these bills capitalize on that misinformation in order to push their own agendas through.
One of these organizations is the National School Chaplain Association (NSCA), which was involved in the drafting of the original school chaplain bill in Texas. As Texas State Rep. James Talarico (D) pointed out during a House debate on SB 763, the Texas chaplain bill, the NSCA’s “stated purpose” is “‘To enhance His presence by infiltrating the system and supporting Christians functioning and operating inside the school systems.’” The use of the word “infiltrating” is incredibly concerning because it implies secrecy. If these methods were legal and ethical, secrecy would not be necessary.
In the three states that have passed these bills so far (Texas, Florida, and Louisiana), legislators assert that no student will be required to see a religious chaplain while attending school, but this caveat means little in terms of equal treatment. For students who are not religious or who practice a different religion from the chaplains at their schools, they will be denied a resource that their Christian peers have access to. If under-credentialed school chaplains take the place of legitimate mental health counselors in schools, Christian students will miss out on valuable counseling and non-Christian students may not have access to any counseling services at all.
School districts have reacted to these bills in a surprising way. While some community members expressed concerns about the infiltration of religion in public schools, most of the pushback to these bills came from the same overworked teachers and administrators the bills are purportedly meant to help. In Texas, each of the state’s school districts had to vote to approve the employment of chaplains in their public schools and determine parameters for the hiring of these chaplains. An overwhelming majority has voted against the measure in both conservative and liberal areas. Some schools felt implementing the measure would be too much of a burden and would bring contentious, constitutional debates right to school doors.
So how do we stop these bills before they take over school board debates around the country? I believe the best way to convince someone of something is to meet them where they are. If the principle of separation between church and state isn’t enough to convince them, we must show Christian legislators who support these bills how they can negatively impact Christian children, too. I am reminded of my parents’ fears that the Protestant youth pastors at my town’s popular local church would talk me out of the Catholicism they raised me in. Christian doctrine is complicated and Protestantism is highly decentralized in the United States. Each church might believe something different from the next. Who is to say that the Christianity a school chaplain practices is the same Christianity the student they’re counseling practices? If protecting the religious freedom of non-Christian students is not enough for these legislators, show them the differences between Christian sects. Maybe then they’ll start to take notice, to understand what it feels like to fear religious indoctrination.
