In Rhode Island, a lesson in religious freedom - for atheists
At the tender age of 16, Jessica Ahlquist has already endured more verbal abuse than most people experience in a lifetime.
A high school student in Cranston, Rhode Island, Jessica has been taunted and threatened at school, targeted by an on-line hate campaign, and called “an evil little thing” by a state representative on the radio.
Her crime? She asked school officials to remove a “school prayer” banner from the auditorium of Cranston West High School. Addressed to “Our Heavenly Father,” the prayer banner was presented to the school by the class of 1963 and has been affixed to the wall as a mural ever since.
At the school committee hearing to consider the issue, public outrage turned the meeting into a religious revival. Angry citizens lined up to proclaim their allegiance to God, quote the Bible, and condemn Jessica to hell.
“If you take the banner down,” one woman testified, “you are spitting in the face of God.” Another banner supporter warned: “You can’t vote to take this down and say that you’re standing with God.”
After the school committee bowed to public pressure and voted to keep the banner, Jessica’s father (supported by the American Civil Liberties Union) filed suit on her behalf.
On January 11, U.S. District Judge Ronald Lagueux ruled in Jessica’s favor and ordered the banner removed. It was an easy case. For over 60 years, the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly held that promotion of religion by public school officials violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.
“When focused on the prayer mural,” wrote the judge, “the activities and agenda of the Cranston School Committee became excessively entangled with religion, exposing the committee to a situation where a loud and passionate majority encouraged it to vote to override the constitutional rights of a minority.”
Undeterred, supporters of the prayer banner are holding a “prayer rally” this week to urge the school committee to keep fighting.
Jessica may be in the minority in Cranston, but she’s in good company as the latest in a long line of Rhode Island dissenters - beginning with the state’s founder, Roger Williams.
Williams, who was himself verbally attacked, was banished from Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1635 for objecting to the entanglement of religion and government that, he believed, corrupted both.
He founded Rhode Island as the first government in history with no established religion and a commitment to protect liberty of conscience for every person. As a deeply religious Christian minister, Williams vowed to put an end to centuries of oppression and coercion by erecting what he called “a wall or hedge of separation” between the “Garden of the Church and the Wilderness of the World.”