Prayers on the Wrestling Mat
And proposed "Christian" coercion in our public schools
Photo by Chris Chow on Unsplash
It was 1971 or 1972 before a home wrestling meet and my fellow high school teammates and I were warming up. As the crowd gathered in the gym, one good friend and teammate stood up and said something like, “Hey guys, let's gather here at the center of the mat and pray.” Let’s call him Sam. I remember being uncomfortable, but I didn’t want to either ignore Sam or say no, or tell him I thought it wasn’t a good idea to put everyone on the spot like that. We might not have all been Christians, but we were all enculturated into the rhythms of Christianity. That’s how it was then, and that’s still how it still is in much of rural America.
So we gathered at the center of the mat, sat down, and Sam led us in prayer. He’s a great guy, but he likes the sound of his voice, and he went on a bit long. Long enough for me to open my eyes and take a peak around. I saw that one of our teammates hadn’t joined us in prayer and was continuing to warm up.
Alone.
That prayer divided the team. As well-intentioned as Sam was, all of us sitting and praying were coerced because of peer pressue, and our teammate was ostracized. A wall had been put up between us, and many of us weren’t sure what side of the wall we wanted to be on, and I don’t think any of us wanted a wall at all.
But once there’s a wall it’s hard to tear it down. The assembled crowd also saw that wall, and many of them likely drew opinions about which side of the wall each of us was on. The wall extended through the crowd and rippled through the neighborhood and the entire school district, even if only subconsciously.
A Jewish buddy of mine was there to watch the match. Let’s call him Dave. Maybe his little brother and sister were there too. Maybe his Mom and Dad. They were our neighbors and the first Jewish people I had ever met. They welcomed me into their home with warmth and kindness and introduced me to food and customs I was unfamiliar with. It was a gift. I wonder now what that family felt about that middle of mat prayer. I’m sure they were accustomed to things like this happening, but when everyone in the audience had come together to support the wrestling team, my friend who started the prayer had inadvertently isolated that lovely family.
In college, I wrestled for the University of Northern Iowa under the legendary Coach Chuck Patton. Once we had a dual meet with recent college grads who were part of a touring group representing the Fellowship of Christian Athletes (FCA), and they made a presentation to the crowd encouraging everyone to join them in their faith. I sat next to a Muslim teammate as we quietly listened. I wondered if his parents were there, as they didn’t live far away. I didn’t think much more about it then, but there were certainly Jewish people in the stands and perhaps people of other faiths or no faith.
More walls. More isolation for those not Christian, when everyone was there to cheer on the team, not to be preached at.
One of their wrestlers confided in me he didn’t really share the mission of the FCA. He just wanted to travel and keep wrestling for a while after college and maybe make the Olympic wrestling team.
He never did.
To give you a sense of the origins of this post, I have a hard time sleeping and often lay in bed for hours trying to get back to sleep. As many readers know, fear and anxiety about some parts of our lives often raises its ugly head and bites us in those lonely middle-night hours. It’s comforting for me to know that’s in part because when we wake up, the most primitive parts of our brain engage first with their immediate fight-or-flight thought processes. That worked well for our ancestors on the African savannah. Not so much today.
Oftentimes when I can’t sleep, I listen to the BBC podcast In Our Time with host Melvyn Bragg. Melvyn and his guests talk about science, culture, history, philosophy, and more. If I can’t sleep, I might as well be learning something. It’s always interesting, but in their calm and thoughtful discussion, I often fall back to sleep listening to it. Which is a good thing. Thanks Melvyn.
One night this week as I was listening, they were talking about the genius of Albert Einstein. I learned that when Albert was a little boy the educational system he was in tried to convert him from Judaism to Christianity. Yes, when he was a little boy. Thanks to his and his parent’s resistance, they failed.
My brain, still in fight-or-flight mode, and trying to protect little Albert, decided I needed to fight, and so I got up and started writing this.
Iowa Republican lawmakers advanced a bill out of a subcommittee Tuesday that would allow public school districts to hire chaplains to “provide support, services, and programs for students.”
According to the Iowa Starting Line, SSB 3092 and HF 2073 would give school boards the power to hire chaplains or recruit them on a volunteer basis. The bill requires no training, and the chaplains would only have to pass a background check.
Sen. Sarah Trone Garriott (D-West Des Moines), a Lutheran minister and a former chaplain found the bill’s premise to be offensive.
“I was a hospital chaplain,” she said. “I spent a year in a credited, clinical pastoral care education program in a hospital 50 to 60 hours a week supervised learning how to be a chaplain because the skills that are required, the professional ethics, the boundaries to understand that a chaplain is not a counselor, they’re not psychologists, they’re not missionaries to proselytize.”
Trone Garriott also noted the risk of having untrained people tend to vulnerable groups.
The Interfaith Alliance of Iowa has issued an action alert. They explain:
The bill would allow school districts to employ or engage volunteer “chaplains” to provide support, services, and programs for students. The bill allows for unlicensed and unregulated chaplains with or without training.
The only requirement for employing or engaging a volunteer chaplain would be to pass a background check for employed or volunteer chaplains.
The bill states chaplains are not required to have a license, endorsement, certification, authorization or statement of recognition from the board of educational examiners.
Last March I wrote Drowning Public Schools in the Bathtub to Promote GOP Ideology about school vouchers. One of my conclusions was:
“It’s brilliant: Republicans using public money to fund private schools that will teach their ideology. It’s a near-perfect plan by Republicans to maintain power into the distant future by manipulating the minds of our children with taxpayer money.”
Republicans trying to put chaplains in public schools is more of the same. It’s all about manipulation, power, and converting our youth to right-wing “Christian” nationalism. This likely isn’t your parents or grandparent’s Christianity. It’s a form of Christian Dominionism defined as “the theocratic idea that … Christians are called by God to exercise dominion over every aspect of society by taking control of political and cultural institutions.”
That’s what our Republican governor and legislators are trying to do.
I’m grateful to have many Christian friends and lefty pastors who find this Republican “Christian” National Dominionist effort wrong-headed. I'm grateful that Senator and Minister Sarah Trone Garriott and the Interfaith Alliance of Iowa oppose it. I’m also grateful that I remember enough of my Sunday School lessons to know that this form of “Christianity” isn’t really Christian and that it is abusive of non-Christians (Daniel Henderson does some of the very best writing about this dominionism and Christian Nationalism here.)
So, who would want to serve as “chaplains” to our public schools in this situation? I know some local ministers, other religious leaders, and lay people who might want to, and I sincerely believe that in general, they mean well, that their counseling services might be helpful, and that as good people, they would not want to impose their religious beliefs on students. Heck, I would write a letter of recommendation for them.
But what I think is irrelevant. We have professional training for school counselors for good reasons.
Yet, these aren’t the only people I fear who would want these proposed chaplain positions. I’ve been to innumerable small-town city council meetings, school board meetings, and other political meetings over the years and I know that there are dominionists who would use those appointments to coerce children to engage in their radical form of “Christianity.” Some pastors of local militant churches that preach anti-LGBTQ + hate, divisiveness, and the end times from the pulpit and in council and school board meetings that I have attended will see this as an opportunity to grow their flock and maybe even supplement their pay if they get the job. I’ve heard them call our public school teachers “groomers” and “pedophiles.” Some of them make Moms for “Liberty” types seem benign.
Once after a trans man spoke at a nearby city council meeting, one preacher stood up and said something to the council like, “Why do you care what he thinks, he’s not a Christian and Christians are the best people and you need to listen to us…” before the Mayor shut him down. Other potential “chaplains” demanded a task force to purge every book in the public library they didn’t like, implied that a librarian be fired because they were gay, that police needed to step up enforcement at a local park because gay and trans people walked there, and that his group be allowed to approve the plays a local theater troupe performed.
At more than one meeting they came after library board members, threatened their jobs, and then tried to intimidate the city council and mayor.
They will see these chaplain positions as an opening. An opening to convert some children and ostracize others. Maybe for pay. To grow their flock, and as an opportunity to wander the halls of our public schools, to look over the shoulders of students, teachers, and staff to expose and condemn what they don’t approve of.
It’s a recipe for disaster, putting our children at risk, and potentially our school districts in legal peril.
All to coerce our children and grandchildren into their faith and Republican ideology.
And if they aren’t hired or allowed to be counselors, they will do what Republicans increasingly do—play the victim. Oppressors who play being oppressed for political and social gain.
Sam, my friend who led us in prayer on that wrestling mat ended up being a public school teacher and eventually a superintendent of a public school in one of Iowa’s smallest rural districts. We don’t keep in touch, and we only see each other at funerals. We joke that these events are more than funerals, they are also class reunions, and more fun than a typical funeral.
While I don’t know what Sam would think of this chaplain legislation, I do know that despite him leading us in prayer in the center of the wrestling mat so long ago, he would never let a public school he led allow any employee or volunteer coerce any of the children into his faith, or undermine their own. After all, my Jewish friend David was Sam’s dear friend as well.
On another matter, Iowa Republicans have put forward legislation that would require schools to have students sing at least one verse of the national anthem every day. First, it’s a red herring. Something that distracts us and the legislature from doing things that will actually help Iowans.
Second, it’s a trap. A simple-minded trap where if Democrats in the legislature don’t support it, Republicans will say Democrats aren’t patriotic.
So don’t fall into the trap. Call it for what it is. Republicans don’t want teachers to teach controversial parts of our history, and demanding kids sing the national anthem without learning context is just more whitewashing our history.
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