Bush’s Emotional Call for Prayer in the Public Schools is Criticized

President Bush’s emotional call last week for a constitutional amendment permitting voluntary prayer in the public schools has been criticized by the American Jewish Congress.

Bush “seems once again to be exploiting religion for short-term political gain, as he did when his administration endorsed school-sponsored graduation prayers or government funding of parochial schools,” Henry Siegman, the organization’s executive director, said in a statement.

The president called for the amendment in a June 6 address to the annual convention of Southern Baptists in Atlanta after describing how he wept as he prayed before ordering the bombing that began the war against Iraq.

Bush then described his outrage that a fifth-grader in a public school had been prevented from reading her Bible during school recess.

“My friends, the day a child’s quiet prayer group during recess becomes an unlawful assembly, something’s really gone wrong,” Bush said.

He said those who oppose school prayer “forgot that the First Amendment was written to protect people against religious intrusions by the state, not to protect the state from voluntary activities by the people.”

The president then added: “In that spirit, once again, I call on the United States Congress to pass a constitutional amendment permitting voluntary prayer back into our nation’s schools.”

Siegman charged that by linking the incident with the fifth-grader to voluntary prayer, Bush confused the concepts dealing with separation of church and state.

“No one knowledgeable about the First Amendment believes that students acting wholly on their own initiative may not pray or read the Bible to themselves,” Siegman said. “That is what freedom of religion is about.”

But, he added, “prayers composed or organized by school officials, even if attendance and participation is nominally voluntary, involves government in religion in precisely the way” the First Amendment was “intended to prohibit.”

This is the third time this year Bush has urged a constitutional amendment allowing voluntary prayer. His persistence on the subject has surprised many observers, who thought he did not share the ideological commitment on this issue expressed by his predecessor, Ronald Reagan.