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The club at Patrick Henry High certainly would. The group was founded two years ago with encouragement but no specific stage managing by local youth pastors. This afternoon its faculty adviser, a math teacher and Evangelical Free Church member named Sara Van Der Werf, sits silently for most of the meeting, although she takes part in the final embrace. The club serves as an emotional bulwark for members dealing with life at a school where two students died last year in off-campus gunfire. Today a club member requests prayer for "those people who got in that big fight [this morning]." Another asks the Lord to "bless the racial-reconciliation stuff." (Patrick Henry is multiethnic; the prayer club is overwhelmingly white.) Just before Easter the group experienced its first First Amendment conflict: whether it could hang posters on all school walls like other non-school-sponsored clubs. Patrick Henry principal Paul McMahan eventually decreed that putting up posters is off limits to everyone, leading to some resentment against the Christians. Nonetheless, McMahan lauds them for "understanding the boundaries" between church and state.
In Alabama, the new school-prayer bill attempts to skirt those boundaries. The legislation requires "a brief period of quiet reflection for not more than 60 seconds with the participation of each pupil in the classroom." Although the courts have upheld some moment-of-silence policies, civil libertarians say they have struck down laws featuring pro-prayer supporting language of the sort they discern in Alabama's bill. In the eyes of many church-club planters, such fracases amount to wasted effort. Says Doug Clark, field director of the National Network of Youth Ministries: "Our energy is being poured into what kids can do voluntarily and on their own. That seems to us to be where God is working."
Reaction to the prayer clubs may depend on which besieged minority one feels part of. In the many areas where Conservative Christians feel looked down on, they welcome the emotional support for their children's faith. Similarly, non-Christians in the Bible Belt may be put off by the clubs' evangelical fervor; members of the chess society, after all, do not inform peers that they must push pawns or risk eternal damnation. Not everyone shares the enthusiasm Proffitt recently expressed at a youth rally in Niagara Falls, N.Y.: "When an awakening takes place, we see 50, 100, 1,000, 10,000 come to Christ. Can you imagine 100, or 300, come to Christ in your school? We want to see our campuses come to Christ." Watchdog organizations like Americans United for the Separation of Church and State report cases in which such zeal has approached harassment of students and teachers, student prayer leaders have seemed mere puppets for adult evangelists, and activists have tried to establish prayer clubs in elementary schools, where the description "student-run" seems disingenuous.