Jesus at the 50-yard line
Moral relativists on the right love to charge school districts with "indoctrination," except when they don't
Joe Kennedy is on a mission from God. For conservatives, he’s the latest installment of Joe the Plumber, the regular guy in the crosshairs of anti-American elites and their religion of political correctness.
His is a simple story. A football coach that feels personally called by the the Lord, and “required” by his faith, to pray on the 50-yard line after each game, thanking the Almighty for the safety of his players, and for the blessed opportunity to participate in the sport.
What started for him as a solitary practice that he’d perform alone eventually drew eager students into his post-game prayer circles. Even players from opposing teams joined in.
When a coach from one of those opposing teams congratulated the leaders of the Bremerton School District - Kennedy’s employer - for being supportive of his post-game prayers, the tide turned on him.
District bosses immediately asked him to keep his prayers private so the district could avoid breaches of the Constintution’s prohibition against public religion. According to ESPN school officials informed him that “employees had to be neutral, meaning they could not even indirectly encourage or discourage students from engaging in religious activity….the rules were meant to comply with the school district's constitutional responsibility.”
After longsuffering negotiations back and forth between the district and the coach, Kennedy decided to go full on religious justice warrior.
He took to Facebook and wrote “I think I might just have been fired for praying.”
When he wrote that post he had not been fired, but the message spread and his district, predictably, recieved thousands of phone calls and emails from around the country regarding his post-game prayers with students.
Kennedy sued his district for infringing on his First Amendement rights.
The courts sided with the Bremerton School District, concluding that the school district “would have violated the Establishment Clause by allowing Kennedy to engage in the religious activity he sought.”
Further, they said:
Kennedy’s attempts to draw nationwide attention to his challenge to the District showed that he was not engaging in private prayer. Instead, he was engaging in public speech of an overtly religious nature while performing his job duties. The District tried to accommodate Kennedy, but that was spurned by Kennedy insisting that he be allowed to pray immediately after the conclusion of each game, potentially surrounded by students
[…]
When BSD’s superintendent became aware of Kennedy’s religious observances on the 50-yard line with players immediately following a game, he wrote Kennedy informing him what he must avoid doing in order to protect BSD from an Establishment Clause claim. In response, Kennedy determined he would “fight” his employer by seeking support for his position in local and national television and print media, in addition to seeking support on social media.
But that wasn’t the end of the line for his justice march.
Kennedy’s case is now primed to get a favorable look from the Supreme Court, and his story is a cause of causes for right-wing media outlets and the popular punditry.
Here’s a sampling:
And….
And…
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You get the idea.
That right-wingers would cloak themselves in the biblical wrapping paper to support coach Kennedy is not a shocker. That they do it at a time when they are hypervigilant about any mild indicator of public school “indoctrination” is yet another runner in their irony marathon. While they talk repetively like Rain Man about how “schools should just teach math and reading” as if anything thing outside of those two subjects is Maoist rascality, they are mightily inattentive to problems with an educator leading young people in Christian prayer.
We can be logically assured that if Libs of TikTok found teachers leading students in Wiccan or Islamic prayer, right-wingers would be towing a very different line.
As a Christian, I empathize with Kennedy when he says prayer is how he “helps these kids be better people." Prayer is difficult to research convincingly, but I believe in the evidence that prayer can calm our nervous system, help regulate negative emotions, decrease anxiety, and increase self-control. For young people, prayer is associated with better student outcomes, and church attendance improves GPA’s and lowers dropout rates. Jesus is good for humanity. And, in my opinion, godless young people are vulnerable to a host of moral, intellectual, and social dangers. These are my private beliefs. You are free to disagree. It’s all fair game for discussion so long as we are talking a private citizens.
While my sympathies are with coach Kennedy as an imperfect Christian, I think is case is weak on a few fronts.
First, I detect ethical problems with the way he frames his case in the Wall Street Journal, saying “with all the bad things I’ve done in my life, it still surprises me that I was fired for praying.” Given his employer’s documented attempt to accomodate his right to pray in multiple ways, and his refusal to accept any of the accomodations that would have protected him and appeased his employer, Kennedy knows damn well he wasn’t “fired for praying.”
Lying this way must be an addtion to list of “all the bad things I’ve done in my life” he talks about.
Further, the Kennedy told one interviewer that he never wanted his case to become a big public fight, so why did he use social media like an experienced self-promoter to make himself the center of a outrage-of-the-day story that has now reached the Supreme Court.
Second, relatedly, Kennedy admits that he has a life-long problem with understanding and abiding by the rules of society. He has said “I was a terrible kid. My adoptive parents did their best, but I was always getting in trouble. The Marine Corps became my ticket out of the fights, group homes and foster care.” There is nothing wrong with that profile. Jesus looked for the troubled souls more than any other group. Yet, it is a profile that logically supports a case for him being a poor employee, one unable to accept direction. I would think Kennedy’s disorderly conduct with his employers would trouble all of the conservatives who love to say “if only he would have complied” to people of color who find themselves at the wrong side of police abuse, or to students of color disproportionately suspended from schools for “defiance.”
For us, they love to preach the rules, standards, obeying authority, and so on. For themselves, not so much.
Finally, the idea that Kennedy’s form of prayer is a Christian issue assumes that Christians (and our bible) agree with him. For me, it’s a no. The school district’s preference for him to pray in private matches my understanding of what the bible instructs us to do. In Matthew 6:5 we are told “When you pray, don’t be like the hypocrites who love to pray publicly on street corners and in the synagogues where everyone can see them. I tell you the truth, that is all the reward they will ever get.”
According to Christian research firm Barna Group, Americans agree with the bible and Kennedy’s school district bosses on the matter of private versus public prayer.
See:
Apparently, the inerrante Word of God and most praying Americans are wrong, and in keeping with Kennedy’s self-described history of oppositional defiance, he is right.
And, the Right is right there with him. Given the conservative majority on the Supreme Court it is more than possible that Kennedy will move his case from the 50-yard line into the end zone.
If so, that won’t end the season. It will only create demand for us to recruit more thoughtful coaches, judges, educators, and policy-makers.