Religion and Ridicule (1999)

One Muslim boy was laughed at and scolded for mispronouncing ‘Christ’ during a Grade 4 Christmas pageant, a former student has testified.

“Everyone laughed at him and the teacher told him if he didn’t have respect for our religion, he would be taken out of the Christmas,” Megan Williams 17, recalled.

Williams who was a student at Brunskill and Greystone elementary schools, was testifying at a tribunal hearing a complaint from a group of parents protesting religious practices at Saskatoon public schools...

In the city’s 550 public elementary classrooms, 108 started the day with the Lord’s Prayer in 1996. Some teachers also include Bible readings during the school day.

In other testimony, a rabbi and religious scholar said that forcing children to recite the Lord’s Prayer in school is indoctrination, not education...”All religious groups have within them strands of intolerance, but most people are offended by this idea. We are not in the Ayatollah’s Iran, I hope,” said the rabbi, who has studied Islam, Judaism and Christianity.

“Prayer as an act of worship has to be engaged, in order to be meaningful, as a voluntary act of faith. Here it is a coercive act of worship, which is meaningless.”

The school board allows non-Christian children to leave the room during prayers and readings or to simply not participate or quietly say their own prayers...

The Board has been considering a new policy to allow multi-faith prayer in schools, but the change can’t happen under current provincial law.

‘Right now it’s the Lord’s Prayer or nothing,’ said the Board’s lawyer outside the hearing...

quoted from Canadian Press-Saskatoon July14, 1999.

Having read the article ‘Religion and Ridicule’ (Toronto Star, July 14, 1999) regarding the use of the Lord’s Prayer in some of Saskatoon’s public schools, I was immediately sympathetic to those in protest. Freedom of worship is a freedom that Canadians of various religious persuasions have laboured hard to institute and preserve, including those well versed in the Lord’s Prayer.

But in considering the matter further I think it important to rightly identify the crime.

That a child could be ridiculed for having beliefs which differ from the majority of his classmates is indeed criminal, if not in law, at least in principle. It is bad behaviour and indeed bad religion if that is what the religion teaches. But when ridicule runs contrary to what the religion teaches, is the religion or in this case, the Lord’s Prayer to blame?

A good thing used badly does not make it bad. Just because Johnny ‘the browner’ gets ridiculed by his classmates for getting an ‘A’ in a math test is no reason to rid our schools of testing. No doubt our children would prefer such measures, but it is possible to deal with the ridicule without eliminating exams. Otherwise the remedy could prove worse than the ailment it was intended to cure.

The same thing holds true for a good thing coerced. A message badly delivered can cast aspersions on the message itself, but it need not invalidate it. For those of us who sat through English literature badly taught or Social Studies fraught with political bias, we had to learn to separate the message from the messenger. 

(No doubt, those who taught us were convinced that but for strong arm tactics, there was no other way we’d learn!) Wisdom necessitates we differentiate the two.

But what if the message itself is to blame? Is the Lord’s Prayer too Christian ‘specific’ to be of benefit to those of non-Christian belief? Specifically, does its content strengthen or undermine good relations within schools, especially among those of different faiths? Does it compliment or negate the noble goal of education to foster good relations within its diverse population?

Looking at the text, I think it fosters good relations:

Our Father in heaven

Hallowed be your name.

Your kingdom come

Your will be done

On earth as it is in heaven.

Give us this day, our daily bread 

Forgive us our sins as we forgive everyone who sins against us. 

And lead us not into temptation

But deliver us from evil.

Openly I confess to not knowing as much about Islam, Judaism and Christianity as does the rabbi who takes issue with the use of this prayer. However, the prayer is seemingly built on common ground. It makes no mention of the two bones of contention that Islam and Judaism both have with Christianity, namely Jesus’ divinity and his resurrection from the dead. 

Instead it reinforces shared essentials: God our Father, whose name is holy; the appeal to His good will being done; our common need for daily bread; the imperative to forgive; and the need for His help in our struggle against evil. 

From an educational standpoint, it means learning what is common to religious activity regardless of the religion, i.e. God and good behaviour. To appreciate religious diversity begins with an appreciation of what we share, which the Lord’s Prayer does not contravene.

This makes me sympathetic to the Saskatoon education board’s unwillingness to pursue the ‘no prayer’ option, which is the only alternative they have under current provincial law.

Anyone who raises children these days can’t help but be overwhelmed by the flood of images our children are exposed to, too many of which are violent, inhuman and profane. Image after image, at a speed and intensity too overwhelming to curb, are wearing down the infrastructure of our children’s resistance to wrongdoing and the results are distressingly obvious.

If we continue to shelter our children from the divine imperatives of forgiving one another and resisting evil, of giving thanks for daily bread and giving heed to God’s will; we really can’t be surprised when they are unforgiving, ungrateful and self obsessed.

In which case you say the Lord’s Prayer is not enough. No it isn’t, but I’m convinced it helps.

The only year in which my classmates and I were forced to say the Lord’s Prayer was in Grade 10, when we had to say it in Latin. Conclusively it did nothing to make us either Christian or Latin. But when the adolescent impulse arose to lose patience, to retaliate, to not forgive, among those voices aligned with our collective conscience to resist, was a fledgling Latin one.

In that regard, our children don’t have it as good as we did. And they are suffering for it. More boards of education than just Saskatoon’s know it. Littleton knows it. And inwardly, I think we all do. In our angst that religion not ridicule, we have ridiculed religion. We have forbidden it from the classroom. Consequently, our children’s education is being deprived of an essential ally they need to exercise good will.

I think we can do better.