Schooltime Religion

Instead of playing outdoors or roughhousing in the halls during their lunchtime recess, almost half of the 280 pupils at Michigan's Bangor High School were munching their apples and sandwiches in seven classrooms. They were getting religious instruction in a U.S. public school, and thus stirring up a statewide controversy over the oft-debated provision in the U.S. Constitution prescribing separation of church and state.*

Originator of the weekly lunchtime sessions is Bangor's mild-mannered School Superintendent Homer Hendricks, 40, a Methodist. After hearing a talk by a local Roman Catholic priest stressing the need for closer ties between Bangor's churches and its youngsters, Hendricks decided to fill the gap. With the support of local clergymen and parents, he made available each Tuesday a classroom for any minister who would spend the 45-minute lunch recess with pupils of his faith. Attendance is entirely voluntary. For the first sessions, held early last month, 100 pupils showed up, some with their Bibles. By last week seven clergymen--including Lutheran, Methodist, Episcopal and Roman Catholic--were bringing their texts and lunches to Bangor High School.

Reaction was quick to come. Resort Owner Irving Fidelman, of nearby South Haven, declared that he would test the legality of Hendricks' experiment, probably on the grounds that using school classrooms for religious instruction is an unauthorized use of tax-supported public property: "Children meet in the school as Americans ... There should be no division ... to set them apart.'' His own three children, he added, were getting instruction in the Jewish faith outside school four times a week. In Lansing, State Senator Charles S. Blondy blasted the Bangor sessions as "an improper intrusion of religion in the field of government ... a backdoor method of bringing religious instruction into the schools."

Last week the local Christian Science reader, Mrs. Kenneth Overton, who had been holding lunchtime sessions with three pupils, notified Superintendent Hendricks that she was withdrawing from the program on advice from her church's headquarters in Boston. But Superintendent Hendricks and his friends in Bangor were undismayed. Says Hendricks: "We're not particularly concerned with the outside opposition . . . We're going right ahead."

Another such controversy flared in New Mexico. It began last fortnight when Attorney General Richard H. Robinson denounced as "constitutionally objectionable" the weekly nondenominational devotional meetings held by pupils at the high school in Roswell (pop. 25,000). Argued Robinson: "Church and state must be kept separate ... [In Roswell], the students know that on Wednesday morning at 8:15, religious services will be held upon their public-school grounds. Their principal has so announced on Tuesday . . . That there is no direct duty to attend may not be an answer [to the question of legality]."

The Roswell board of education retorted that it saw nothing illegal in the weekly meetings, which were originally planned to combat juvenile delinquency. The school principal agreed to one change: he would not announce the meetings publicly beforehand. Said the Roswell Record: "It appears extremely doubtful to us that the attorney general's opinion had good and sufficient grounds . . . We all must make an effort to convince the high-school students that devotion and decency are virtues to be cultivated and admired."

At last week's meeting 200 students, twice as many as ever before, jammed the Roswell high-school theater for Bible reading and prayer.

* The First Amendment: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof . . ."

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