Recently on a trip to New Mexico, I took a seat at a “community table” at a local bakery to savor my morning coffee and ended up in a lovely chat with the woman next to me.
My new acquaintance, Kateri, is an actress who had recently moved to New Mexico. She started to tell me about a movie she had acted in featuring Native American twins who were forcibly taken from their homes and separated from each other. I told Kateri that her movie made me think about America’s history of taking Native American children away from their parents and forcing them to attend government-funded Christian boarding schools.
“Yes, I know. I attended one,” Kateri replied, as her eyes filled with tears. She went on to explain the nightmare of attending her Catholic boarding school from first through sixth grade — how they shaved the Native American children’s heads, gave them numbers, forced them to bathe in the same dirty water and did not allow for any joy or dancing or emotions — or for any cultural or tribal ties. Kateri was told that her dream of being an actress wasn’t ethical. She described sexually inappropriate activity involving the children that took place in the basement of the school.
Kateri then told me about how these boarding school experiences “were meant to break the family structure,” and how the scars it left on so many children are still being passed down to new generations of Native Americans. She had to work hard to heal and to get back in touch with her emotions.
At the same time as my heart hurt from hearing Kateri’s story, I was filled with gratitude that she shared it. And I’m honored that she gave me the privilege of sharing it with you. Kateri’s story is all the more poignant during this moment where so many states are (some already successfully) pushing for government-sponsored coercive religion in schools. Though this new trend is certainly not the same as tearing children away from their families as happened to Kateri, it does repeat the wrong of our government forcing religion (a particular version of Christianity) on students. To give just one illustration of the size of the problem, following Louisiana’s 2024 law mandating the display of the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms, 16 states across the country are currently considering a total of 29 bills to require the same.
The parallels between our country’s shameful past and difficult present are not lost on the Rev. Dr. Mitch Randall, who is one of Americans United’s plaintiffs in both of our current Oklahoma lawsuits (challenging the nation’s first religious charter school and the state’s public school Bible mandate). Rev. Dr. Randall attributes his participation in our legal cases and objections to government-funded religious coercion in part to his identity as a Native American in the Muscogee (Creek) Tribe and his knowledge that the government took thousands of Indigenous children in Oklahoma away from their families and indoctrinated them in Christianity.
Now is a critical moment to share stories from our past and present to illustrate the harm of undermining church-state separation. If we are calling on people to join us in a national recommitment to church-state separation, we must first be able to make the importance of church-state separation come alive. Stories do that.
So, here’s some homework for you. What is a story you can tell to illustrate the importance of church-state separation in public education? Maybe you remember your discomfort when you were a student and had to recite “under God” during the Pledge of Allegiance. What was that discomfort rooted in? Maybe you had to stand off to the side when your public school engaged in Christian prayer because you weren’t Christian. Or maybe, like one of my AU colleagues remembers, you had to watch your Jewish class president regularly recite a Christian prayer.
Tell Kateri’s story. Tell your own story, and consider sending it to us so we can share it, too. Just like Kateri, you might find yourself feeling emotional when you tell your story. That’s not only okay — it’s understandable and important to demonstrate. We need to help people get that, at its core, church-state separation is about the basic human right to be free to live and believe as we choose and to be treated equally, so long as we don’t harm others. Please help people both see and feel how crucial church-state separation is — to our children, our public education system and our democracy.
Rachel K. Laser is president and CEO of Americans United for Separation of Church and State.