Editorials

...in part, their fears about "secular humanism" and "atheistic indoctrination" are the products of overheated imaginations...

...It is, in fact, very much like the technique that the religious right employs against "secular humanists" or "atheistic liberals.'' The only excuse for this sort of thing is the old line about fighting "fire with fire," and we don't think that's good enough...

...The administration has put a proposal before the world on reducing nuclear arms...

...Today it remains overwhelmingly Christian...

...Its foreign policy still must meet the challenges of Central America, the Middle East, Poland - and now the Falklands...

...In either case, official prayers, however arranged so as to be "voluntary," are more apt to discredit religious faith and the morality it sustains than to foster respect for them...

...It is a technique that a clever copywriter could use against the woman's movement or the nuclear disarmament movement...

...One of the products of that search was the Supreme Court's 1962 ruling that school-sponsored prayers in public classrooms violated the First Amendment to the Constitution...

...In an age when government touches on ajmost every aspect of life, that formula is one for the permanent parking of religious beliefs altogether...

...But prayer in public schools is not the solution they think it is...

...He thinks the 1962 ruling should be reversed, but he doesn't explain why...

...was overwhelmingly Protestant...

...If nothing else, supporters of prayers in public schools should take heed of the example of Great Britain, where such a longstanding institutional ritual has done nothing to reinvigorate religion, to reinforce morality, or even (note carefully...

...No one will ever convince me that a moment of voluntary prayer will harm a child or threaten a school or state...

...Yet by the end of his address, Lear was himself arguing in favor of a "visceral" appeal to people in defense of all the good causes (of course...

...In part, their worries about moral and religious decline are valid...

...Either those prayers will be doctrinally specific, and offensive to those of differing beliefs, or they will be empty, and offensive to those of any strong beliefs...

...Said Lear: the right employes emotion and fear to manipulate people...

...As for the innumerable objections to such official prayers, the president brushed them aside...

...but his incapacity to be convinced is hardly evidence that his proposal does not involve potential harms - to children, to social peace, and to religion itself...

...Those advertisement are aimed at "the moral majorita-rians," a group that is never identified but is held accountable for the most outrageous examples of book-burning and even found guilty of wanting to establish a dictatorship in America...

...To state the case against prayers in public schools, one need not hold with the doctrinaire argument that insists religious people must park all their beliefs at the door the moment they enter governmental territory...

...That reconciliation was not so pressing as long as many minorities were concentrated in regional or ethnic enclaves where they could establish a dominant cultural tone, just as a nonsectarian Protestantism was wont to do at the national level...

...That may well be true, but it is still no reason why faith and prayer must be officially institutionalized in the public schools...

...The search for an honest pluralism has continued...

...Perhaps no one will ever convince the president, not even with a suitable anecdote...

...People are too beset with their everyday lives, he explained, to deal with complexity...

...But it may also explain the unfortunate character of People for the American Way's recent advertizing...

...And it has created ample opportunities for political demagoguery about "banning God from the schools.'' Nonetheless, the Court's ruling has always struck us as a sound reading of constitutional principles in today's circumstances, one that protected the rights of parents and children, kept government from a dangerous sort of religious entanglement, and preserved the religious authenticity of prayer...

...In any case, he has organized "People for the American Way," a group dedicated to using the media to counter the influence of the new religious right...

...They are both television preachers with a natural capacity for packaging the pieties of their separate worlds...

...These are the issues on which its performances should be judged in the coming congressional elections...

...For a long time, the U.S...

...Now President Reagan is offering a constitutional amendment authorizing official but voluntary prayer in the public schools...

...At the same time, it promises nothing less than the fullest citizenship and freedom of conscience to those of every religious belief and to those of no religious belief at all...

...They believe that reinstituting prayers in public schools will lend an official legitimation to belief in God, if not even,to Christianity, and that this legitimation, in turn, will help reverse what they perceive to be a growing tide of disbelief and immorality...

...It has inspired a good many lamentations about the decline of America...

...THE AMERICAN WAY...

...TRAVELERS FROM ABROAD have never failed to note, sometimes with pleasure, sometimes with astonishment, the extent to which the United States is a singularly religious nation...

...In practice, it has not always been easy to reconcile the reality of a religiously infused culture with the commitment to equal respect for differing beliefs...

...They see prayer in public classrooms as a symbolic way of "taking back" those classrooms from a secular humanist enemy...

...Those who have worried about the government's inserting itself between parent and child should recognize here a blatant example of this trend...

...The ads combine tabloid-style headlines and a few shocking examples or quotations with a list of vague charges that might apply to a much wider group of Americans...

...One hopes that conservatives in particular, since they have the administration's ear, will be clear on this point...

...The message had to be delivered suitably coated with emotion and entertainment...

...Norman Lear is to politics pretty much what Jerry Falwell is to theology...

...And in terms of constitutional amendments, the Hatch amendment, dealing with the crucial issue of unborn human life, deserves far greater attention than prayer in schools...

...Lear, in fact, is far and away the more successful "prime-time preacher" of the two of them...

...Faith in God, he said, is a source of our strength as a nation...

...But time, mobility, and the addition of more strands of belief - and of non-belief, too - eroded that modus vivendi...

...The president's school-prayer amendment comes at a bad time - at least for getting any serious scrutiny and debate...

...perhaps it was inevitable that he would square off against upstart Falwell...

...Those who have raised questions about "value-free" sex education in the classrooms ought immediately to perceive the far more dubious enterprise of dogma-free prayer...

...It would be a shame for a school-prayer amendment, like the recent tuition tax-credit proposal, to serve only as a political IOU to a religious constituency, a debt that may prove ultimately uncollectible but meanwhile be eminently distracting from the pressing issues of the hour...

...Some of the fair-minded people that Lear has signed onto his Board of Advisors - Theodore Hesburgh, Martin Marty, Marc H. Tanenbaum, and others - ought to raise objections...

...He was amiable, to be sure, but in good liberal fashion he eschewed challenging the substance of the religious right's platform and complained, instead, about the way that Falwell and Company went about their business...

...It continues to push a distinctive economic policy that promises either redemption or ruin, depending upon your point of view...

...Lear spoke about this effort not long ago at a luncheon sponsored by the National Council of Churches' Information Committee, and he didn't do a very good job...

...It has provoked sporadic local defiance and often gone quietly unobserved...

...What is relatively simple, however, is that giving school districts the power to endorse prayers, requiring school teachers to proclaim them, and asking school children to join in - voluntarily or not - is an exercise certain to do injury to the deepest conscience of numerous citizens...

...This was probably said in defense of his "I Love Liberty" television extravaganza, a kind of "Let Poland Be Poland'' for the First Amendment...

...Prayer, said the president at a cememony on May 6, has always sustained Americans in crisis...

...to prevent the inroads of socialism...

...Others are clearer than the president...

...That ruling has never sat well with a large proportion of the public...

...How religious beliefs and symbols can find a place in public life consonant with pluralism remains a complex question...