This is Common Sense: Students should be allowed to practice their faith in school in a way that doesn’t disrupt others and isn’t belittled by the school.
Which is the way things currently are.
There is not a war on Christians or Christianity, and the only way that Christians are at all oppressed is if their practice of faith involves telling other people what to do.
And I reaize this: I was involved in the Evangelical world long enough (briefly, but long enough) to know that many of them believe, as a matter of their own faith, that they are sinners if they cannot excise sin from their community. They must cast Satan out. To those not familiar with that worldview, it might seem silly, even retrograde; I do think it’s silly, myself. But it’s a firmly held religious belief, and then they see the First Amendment telling them they can have any firmly held religious belief they want, and here we are.
But there HAS to be an asterisk on that. Just as there’s an asterisk on free speech. Your rights end where my nose begins. “Hoe your own row…. Grow your own daisies.”
This is just common sense: If I want to do something with myself, if I want to hold beliefs that don’t impact you (except in the convoluted sense that your beliefs are that my actions that don’t affect you are going to send you to Hell anyway), then leave me alone.
It’s like this, and it might seem strange to bring up, but it’s related: Let’s say I’m a Dom (which I’m not, but just roll with it), and my sub’s punishment this weekend is they can’t eat any chocolate. So we’re at a coffeeshop and the server offers us free chocolate, but my sub, with baleful eyes at me, turns it down.
This situation is a bit hyperbolic, but it’s adjacent to a common conversation in the BDSM and adjacent community: Is this including people non-consensually? Have I included the server in our little scenario without their consent?
Where is the line? To what extent are we allowed to involve other people in our scenarios?
The relevance is: These things get complicated when we involve other people. The same is true of our religious beliefs: When we start to involve people that don’t believe what we believe about deity, and then insist that they play along or suffer the consequences, there’s a line that’s been crossed.
If you’re still having trouble seeing the similarity between my chocolate scenario and religious expression, consider how many atheists respond to “I’ll pray for you.” I’m at a stage now where I shrug that off, maybe roll my eyes, but I was once of a mind that that was an intrusion. I didn’t want to be included in the Christian stuff, and it was my right to be excluded from it.
Here’s some more common sense: Civil people can work this out together. We can decide where the lines are, where the gray areas are, and give grace that people are generally acting in good faith and decent intentions. And the people who aren’t, deserve to be scolded, ostracized, or whatever.
At the end, though, I have yet to see real evidence of a war on Christianity in the US. There is a war on intolerance, a war on forced compliance, sure. And I get that, for many Christians, their religious faith depends on forced compliance. But that’s the asterisk on the First Amendment, not the subtext.