The New Yorker comes to Cupertino.
Posted 2005-03-14
This week in the magazine, Peter Boyer reports on how a lawsuit by a teacher who claimed he was discriminated against as a Christian caused an uproar in California. Here, with Matt Dellinger, Boyer discusses the gray area between church and state.
MATT DELLINGER: In the world of religion-in-school controversies, what makes the Cupertino, California, case particularly interesting?
PETER BOYER: What drew me to Cupertino was that, in some really unexpected ways, it offered a case study of the great tensions that are dividing our political and social culture. And what’s most interesting about Cupertino is that these divides aren’t in any way obvious. I mean, Cupertino, in many ways, is a perfect little town—and pretty much considers itself as such. It is very successfully diverse, it is relatively affluent, and, most particularly, it has fostered one of the best public school systems in the country. This, despite all the chronic ills—overcrowding and underfunding—that have afflicted California’s public education system. Politically, Cupertino is reliably Democratic, but there’s a pronounced streak of moderation. Governor Arnold might well find a lot of votes there.
In the lawsuit, a teacher named Stephen Williams brought a federal civil-rights claim against his school’s principal and the district. His complaint was that he had been stopped from distributing historical documents that mentioned God, including excerpts from the Declaration of Independence, and that he had been discriminated against as a Christian.
Yes, but how it was covered was interesting, because it illustrated the media divide. There was a press release with this sensational headline: “Declaration of Independence Banned from Classroom.” (Which was not the case—the entire Declaration of Independence was in the textbook the school used, and a copy of it was hanging in the library.) And, for the most part, the mainstream media sort of avoided the story. The Los Angeles Times and the New York Times did stories, as did the Bay Area papers, but the major television networks pretty much ignored it. The new conservative media, on the other hand, just pounced on it. Sean Hannity had Williams on his radio show “Hannity & Colmes” at least twice, and he moved his Fox News television show to Cupertino for a special hour-long live broadcast that he called “Take Back America.” So that’s one piece of it. You saw, too, elements of the whole debate over multiculturalism and the politics of diversity. Stephen Williams was trying to supplement the regular fifth-grade curriculum with material that emphasized the Christian influence in the founding of our nation. As he sees it, there are “holes” in the regular curriculum. And, indeed, the fifth-grade textbook is a model of multicultural sensitivity. So, that’s part of it. And, of course, at the heart of the case is the teacher’s complaint that, in public schools, tolerance is the most prized value—unless it’s tolerance of Christianity. That assertion had particular resonance in a community that so prided itself on its tolerance.
Why is it important to religion advocates to establish the spirituality of the Founding Fathers?
I don’t really see any sinister motives in the people who want to establish the religious beliefs of the Founding Fathers. I think that perhaps on one level—the individual level—a Christian teacher might believe that there are certain inherent qualities in religion that would benefit young people. But more broadly, in terms of the movement to “take back history” from the secularists, I think that some of it is a sincere effort to correct the record, as they see it. And some of it, probably, is just culture war. You know: The other side has made these gains over the years, and now we’ve gotta fight back and retake some lost ground.
For many years after Engel v. Vitale in 1962, the Supreme Court was fairly strong in its reinforcement of the wall between church and state. But more recently, you write, there have been cases where religious groups have, for instance, won the right to use school facilities. How far might the pendulum swing?
The pendulum is definitely swinging back toward a greater tolerance of the expression of faith in the public forum, including in the schoolroom. You see its expression in battles such as this one in Cupertino—a case that I don’t think would have even been filed a decade or two ago. And you see it in the so-called “Decalogue” cases, those disputes over the placement of the Ten Commandments in public spaces. And a significant element on the Rehnquist Court openly espouses state encouragement of religious belief.
How is this kind of case similar to—and different from—the controversy over the Ten Commandments?
The Cupertino case is like the Ten Commandments cases in the sense that they all turn on the inherent tensions in the First Amendment. It’s a great passage, when you think about it. It guarantees free speech and freedom of religion, but it also forbids the establishment of religion. It’s the interpretation of that “establishment” clause that is at issue in all these cases, and that interpretation has been evolving.
It seems like education has always been a magnet for moral and legal and political debate. What is it about a school classroom that makes it such heated ground?
Yes, the question of religion in schools has been a contested issue for some time, although the nature of the disputes has changed. Up until the middle of the last century, it was more or less assumed that the underlying consensus in America was some form of Protestant Christianity. And many of the efforts to combat government endorsement of religion in schools were basically anti-Catholic in nature—fighting the expenditure of any state money on parochial schools, that sort of thing. In fact, one of today’s liberal groups that fights the establishment of religion in the public square is Americans United for Separation of Church and State—which began as an organization with real anti-Catholic strains. What’s interesting is that the issue has evolved considerably over the last couple of decades, in a way that has brought Catholics and Protestant evangelicals together. You see that union at work in other areas of social conflict, such as abortion.
I actually went to a Catholic elementary school where in the morning you said the Pledge of Allegiance looking at the flag and then you said the Our Father looking at the crucifix. And from the classmates I still know, I’m not sure I can say those rote exercises made us any more patriotic or religious.
It’s interesting, some of the parents who are most pointedly in disagreement with Stephen Williams are those who themselves attended religious schools. And at least one of them has said that being force-fed religion in school had the effect of turning him away from the church.
But it almost seems like Williams’s expressions crossed whatever line they may have crossed not because they were religious but because they were personal. Is the controversy here about the endorsement of religion or about the expression of religious faith?
Well, that’s the very heart of this case. Was Stephen Williams proselytizing in the classroom—which is strictly forbidden, all sides agree—or was he merely misunderstood to be proselytizing because he had openly expressed his own born-again Christianity? It’s a terribly difficult matter to work out. One of the complaining parents told me that the problem with Stephen Williams is that he made it known that he was a Christian, that his faith mattered more to him than anything in his life. And that reality sort of changed the dynamic in the classroom. When Stephen Williams, Christian, was teaching about the faith of the Founders, did it have the effect on an eleven-year-old’s mind of proselytizing? Perhaps, but how do you stop a teacher from being open about his own faith, outside the classroom, without infringing upon his right of free expression?
Would this case have sprung up as easily in a different part of the country? Are there parts of the country where a low hum of religious expression is taken for granted?
There are places where a certain hum of religious belief and expression is just part of the atmosphere. But what’s interesting about Cupertino, or, at least, this particular school in Cupertino, is that it was one of those places, in a sense. The principal had allowed a Christian club called the Good News Club to conduct meetings at the school, and the Christian teachers, including Stephen Williams, had been allowed to use the school grounds for prayer groups, outside of school hours.
Will this become another red-state / blue-state issue? If you're for prayer in schools, are you against gay marriage, and vice versa?
The red / blue dichotomy is, perhaps, overplayed, but there really are serious divisions in this country on matters such as moral values, and I think you see that at play here. I think the people who are trying to knock down the “wall of separation” between church and state tend to be people who are also against abortion, against same-sex marriage, and so on. The Alliance Defense Fund, the organization of Christian lawyers that brought the Cupertino case, is involved in those issues in court cases around the country.
The Internet played an important role in this case. Can you talk a bit about that? What does it mean when a national mob can form around a local issue in just a matter of days?
It’s very interesting, and kind of apt, to consider the role that
the Internet played in this story, which took place, of course, in the
heart of the Silicon Valley. The first, great burst of attention came
from the Drudge Report, and then other Web sites, such as the
conservative Free Republic, picked up on it. Instantly, there was an
avalanche of public response—e-mails, telephone calls to the school,
the district, the mayor’s office. Some of it was quite ugly, even
threatening. And Stephen Williams, as well as his lawyers, had to
publicly disavow that kind of support. And when the parents wanted to
take up the fight against the teacher’s lawsuit, they created their own
Web site, which became a base for framing their argument in the news
media. The Internet does have the capacity to elevate a local issue to
the level of national debate. And that happened in Cupertino. 
JESUS IN THE CLASSROOM; Parents loved Cupertino's public schools. Then a teacher said he was being discriminated against as a Christian.
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PETER J. BOYER The New Yorker
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Cupertino, California, is situated at the edge of the Santa Cruz Mountains below San Francisco Bay, sloping eastward into the flatlands of the Santa Clara Valley, more familiarly known as Silicon Valley. The city, which covers roughly eleven square miles, has no downtown, no discernible boundaries, and few physical features that distinguish its broad boulevards and strip malls from those of its neighboring communities, such as Sunnyvale. Cupertino is home to Apple Computer, Inc., and several other high-tech firms, but the town's greatest distinction, its deepest source of civic pride, is its public school system.
Last year, the Cupertino Union School District attained a score of 919 out of a possible 1,000 on the state's Academic Performance Index, and one of its elementary schools achieved a perfect rating. Cupertino has two of the state's top three middle and elementary schools, and two of its high schools have been ranked among the nation's best.
House hunters in the Silicon Valley carefully study school-district maps before making a purchase offer, and for many acquiring a Cupertino address is an important factor in planning their families. The address comes at a premium, with houses bearing an average price of nearly a million dollars. The homes are not especially grand, tending toward a "Brady Bunch" subdivision architectural style, but even when the high-tech stock crash devastated portfolios Cupertino home values increased at double-digit rates (thirty-eight per cent in the past year). "It's absolutely the schools, no question," says Maria Segal, a local real-estate agent, and a parent of three Cupertino students. "It means a difference of hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars over comparable houses in other locations."
The success of Cupertino's schools is partly a function of demography. In most families, at least one parent works in the high-tech industry. Those children who struggle in school (apparently few) are likely to find volunteer tutoring help from a class mother who holds a Ph.D. Cupertino is proudly diverse (the school district's Web site boasts of a student body "representing forty-five different languages"), although it is diversity of a particular sort. The town's population, of fifty thousand, is roughly half white and half Asian, with very few Hispanics and fewer than five hundred African-Americans. The city has almost no low-income housing. The parents of Cupertino's schoolchildren tend to be well-paid strivers (earning a median income of a hundred thousand dollars) with a profound faith in the deterministic power of education. The Cupertino Courier, the local weekly, has reported that some immigrants from China and India migrate to the Bay Area strategically, with the aim of working their way up to Cupertino in time for their kids to enroll in middle school. "You get a lot of pressure to have the children do well," Sarah Beetem, a fifth-grade teacher, says. "That's partly because these parents have had to do well in their home countries in order to get the jobs that allowed them to come to the U.S. They were at the top of their classes all along. They believe in hard work. I never have problems with kids not doing their homework."
Cupertino is a town that, more than most places, measures its prosperity, both civil and individual, by the state of its schools. That is why the community was so deeply struck when, late last fall, Cupertino's schools attracted national attention of an unwelcome sort. In November, a fifth-grade teacher named Stephen Williams brought a federal civil-rights claim against his school's principal and the Cupertino Union School District, asserting that he had been discriminated against because he is a Christian. Williams said that he had been stopped from distributing historical documents to his students because the documents mentioned God.
News of the lawsuit broke during Thanksgiving week, as the city's schools were beginning the long holiday weekend. Larry Woodard, a computer-networking executive who has a child at Stevens Creek Elementary in Cupertino, learned of the suit on Thanksgiving Eve, when he opened his laptop computer and visited his home Web page, the Drudge Report. Its headline declared: "declaration of independence banned at california school!"
Woodard was not surprised. He considers himself a social conservative, and he was always reading about some new outrage in the public schools, often just forty miles up the freeway. "I'm used to seeing things like this-you know, kids are being prohibited from learning about Christianity as it relates to our history," he recalls. "Just look at the students in San Francisco, or Berkeley, where kids are being forced to go live the week in a burka but they're not allowed to learn about the basic foundation of our nation." Woodard opened the Drudge link to a Reuters dispatch, and was dismayed to read that the town that had "banned" the Declaration was Cupertino and that the school involved was Stevens Creek Elementary. Woodard thought there had to be some mistake. He and his wife had found their home in Cupertino by handing their real-estate agent a school-district map showing the school's boundaries, and saying, "Those are your parameters." As a volunteer at the school, and a member of the Parent-Teacher Organization, Woodard had been impressed, discerning at Stevens Creek "none of this P.C. baloney that is so common in schools."
Reading on, he learned that the offended teacher was represented by the Alliance Defense Fund, a nationwide organization of Christian attorneys engaged in battleground culture issues, such as abortion and same-sex marriage. Woodard, a devoted Scout leader, knew that the A.D.F. had been instrumental in the legal fight that eventually resulted in a Supreme Court ruling allowing the Boy Scouts to bar homosexuals from becoming Scout leaders. Just last year, the A.D.F. had helped to persuade the California Supreme Court to stop San Francisco's Mayor Gavin Newsom from issuing same-sex marriage licenses. Woodard says he doesn't object to gay civil unions, but he believes that "marriage is a thing, through history, between a man and a woman for the propagation of the species, and I personally object to the shifting definition of terms within our culture." Impressed by the A.D.F.'s achievements, Woodard had sent a donation to the organization, which is based in Scottsdale, Arizona.
Still digesting the news that his school district was now being sued by the A.D.F., Woodard checked his e-mail and saw that he had a growing list of incoming messages. Some of them were from the office, but many more were from strangers, who let Woodard know that the Stevens Creek principal, Patricia Vidmar, should be fired, and that Woodard himself was, in all likelihood, a godless subversive. The news of the lawsuit, which had been filed in a federal court in Oakland two days earlier, was beginning to excite outrage on talk radio and among right-wing bloggers. One online poster had provided details on how to contact the Cupertino school authorities, and Woodard's e-mail address and telephone number were listed on the school's Web site. Woodard says that he and his family spent Thanksgiving weekend "in a state of shock," and unplugged their phone to avoid an onslaught of calls.
When Woodard drove his child to Stevens Creek the following Monday, armed sheriff's deputies had been posted near the school grounds. Patti Vidmar had also received many e-mails of protest over the holiday weekend. Some politely urged her to change her mind; some were more vulgar. ("I can only say, you people up there are wayyyyyy fucked up. Thank you.") At least one e-mail employed language that was truly vile, and seemed to convey a threat: "Run Patricia, Run!! . . . Fuck you very much communist cunt!!!!!! Hope to see you soon."
In December, Sean Hannity, the conservative New York-based commentator, moved his Fox News Channel television show "Hannity & Colmes" to Cupertino for a special hour-long feature called "Take Back America." Broadcasting live from the performing-arts theatre at the local college, Hannity took to the stage and read the first two paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence, and asked, "As a nation, when these words of Thomas Jefferson fall on deaf ears, where are we? Or perhaps they fall on no ears at all. Because that is what some people say has happened right here in Cupertino."
To conservative politicians and commentators, Cupertino had provided the perfect illustration of secular liberal lunacy. Newt Gingrich, on the talk-show circuit for a book tour, made the Cupertino case part of his routine. "I think that is literally an attack on the very core concept of America," Gingrich told Katie Couric on the "Today" show. "I think all too many schools are afraid to teach about American history, afraid to teach about the Founding Fathers, and afraid to tell people the unique characteristics that make America different than anyplace else in the world."
The parents at Stevens Creek were dismayed by these developments, and many of them were quite indignant. Part of their anger was over the hint of menace now in the air around their school, but part of it was because the lawsuit and its aftermath challenged the community's self-image. "People were really surprised," Sarah Beetem, Stephen Williams's fifth-grade teaching colleague, said. "It was like, 'Not here!' It's probably the most successfully diverse community that I've ever seen. Here it's sort of everybody gets along, there's lots of different cultures, we have culture-day parades. People generally get along very well and are very tolerant."
Larry Woodard, for one, was also perplexed. He and other parents quickly found out that Mrs. Vidmar had not banned the Declaration of Independence. A copy of the document was hanging in the school library, and it was included in the fifth-grade textbook. What Mrs. Vidmar had done was stop Stephen Williams from handing out a three-paragraph excerpt that featured the Founders' beseeching of "their Creator" and "Divine Providence." Woodard saw the lawsuit as "an attack on our schools, it's an attack on us," but he had seen Stephen Williams at school and thought he seemed like "a genuinely nice man, a fine, upstanding man." Williams had been at Stevens Creek Elementary for six years, and was well liked by his students and by his peers. "I feel bad for the guy," Woodard says. "I think, frankly, that he was kind of duped. I think that he was used as a tool by the A.D.F. to promote their agenda."
The activism of evangelical Christians, the rise of what is called the Christian right, is generally attributed to the Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling, which effectively legalized abortion, but the stirrings of a profound cultural disaffection actually began more than a decade earlier. In 1962, the Court, under Chief Justice Earl Warren, ruled on Engel v. Vitale-a decision that, in the view of many conservative Christians, amounted to an eviction of God from the classroom.
Before that ruling, religion and public education had mixed to a degree that would later seem unimaginable. Some middle-aged New Yorkers can remember attending Cardinal Spellman Clubs, or their Jewish equivalent, in public schools. They can remember, too, beginning each school day with a ritual recitation:
Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon Thee, and we beg Thy blessings upon us, our parents, our teachers, and our Country.
The prayer had been composed by the New York State Board of Regents, as a way of honoring the nation's "spiritual heritage" without offending any particular denomination. The Herricks Union Free School District of New Hyde Park was among those which required the daily devotional, and it prompted a protest by a group of parents in the district. Joined by the American Civil Liberties Union, the parents, on behalf of ten students, filed suit against the district, claiming that the daily prayer violated the First Amendment's "establishment clause," directing that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion." The parents lost their case, and an appeal, in state courts before the Supreme Court accepted it. The attorneys general from New Jersey, Connecticut, and twenty other states filed amici-curiae briefs on behalf of the school district. The court, by a six-to-one vote, ruled the prayer unconstitutional. Billy Graham decried the ruling ("The framers of the Constitution meant we were to have freedom of religion, not freedom from religion"), and Senator Sam Ervin, of North Carolina, wondered whether "the Supreme Court has held that God is unconstitutional." Congress undertook hearings on prayer in schools. "Impeach Earl Warren" billboards appeared along the nation's highways.
But the course was set. Other court rulings expanded upon Engel, and public-education administrators, facing the prospect of lawsuits, disentangled themselves from activities that could be interpreted as an endorsement of religion. State universities adopted rules forbidding student religious groups from using school facilities that were available to other registered campus groups. Some public-school districts felt obliged to forbid overt individual prayer. Beyond campus, strict state-church separatists, often backed by the A.C.L.U., pushed the issue into the public square, gaining the removal of Christmas creches and other religious symbols from municipal sites across the country.
Many Christians considered themselves in the curious position of a marginalized, even persecuted majority. On the whole, the mainline, progressive Protestant denominations did not take up their cause-and saw their memberships decline-even as the evangelical movement experienced explosive growth. Roe v. Wade's legalization of abortion finally touched off a Christian backlash, spawning such groups as the Moral Majority and, later, the Christian Coalition in an effort to turn the American political mainstream from its secular course by mobilizing conservative Christian voters.
The corollary to these political efforts was an attempt to roll back some of the legal gains made by the A.C.L.U. and its allies on the secular left. A handful of attorneys began to take up the cause of Christian litigation, or what became known as "religious freedom" cases, and as the Supreme Court became more conservative they began to achieve important victories. First among them was the landmark 1981 Widmar v. Vincent decision, with the Court ruling that the University of Missouri (Kansas City) could not constitutionally bar a registered religious group from equal access to the university's facilities. In 1984, an election year that produced a Reagan landslide, Congress expanded on the Widmar decision with passage of the Equal Access Act, extending access to religious groups in public secondary schools.
The most prominent of the new Christian litigators was Jay Sekulow, a Brooklyn-born Jew who had converted to Christianity while attending college. A fierce and nimble courtroom litigator, Sekulow argued, and won, several First Amendment cases before the Supreme Court in the nineteen-nineties, including a key 1990 victory (Westside Community Board of Education v. Mergens) that upheld the constitutionality of the Equal Access Act. Sekulow was twice named one of the "100 Most Influential Lawyers" by the National Law Journal, and came to be revered by evangelicals as a Christian Clarence Darrow. Now the evangelicals wanted their own A.C.L.U. In 1990, Sekulow became the chief counsel of the American Center for Law and Justice, founded and initially funded by the television evangelist Pat Robertson.
Three years later, an alliance of conservative mega-ministries-including Dr. James Dobson's Focus on the Family, Campus Crusade for Christ, and the Florida-based Coral Ridge Ministries-established the Alliance Defense Fund. The A.D.F. began as a funding pool for Christian litigation ("a type of giant Religious Right ATM," an opposition group called it), underwriting lawsuits and developing litigation strategy for allied lawyers across the country, including Sekulow's group.
To run the operation, the founding ministers hired a former federal prosecutor named Alan Sears, who had been executive director of the Reagan Justice Department's Meese Commission on pornography. The A.D.F.'s mission includes the marquee culture frays-abortion and gay marriage-but its core issue is the church-state tension inherent in the First Amendment. The A.D.F.'s purpose is to dismantle what its literature refers to as "the so-called 'wall of separation' " between church and state, and the alliance has had a hand in two dozen cases before the Supreme Court in the past decade.
In the A.D.F. view, the "wall of separation" (Justice Hugo Black's term, quoting Jefferson), as currently understood, is a false construct erected by forty years of bad court rulings and cowed public bureaucrats, and had to be demolished. Two key cases in New York, where Engel v. Vitale itself had originated, helped to dismantle this wall. The first, Lamb's Chapel v. Center Moriches School District, was argued before the Court by Jay Sekulow in 1993, and indirectly involved one of the A.D.F.'s founding ministries, Dobson's Focus on the Family. Lamb's Chapel, an evangelical church on Long Island, had sought the use of a local school building for an after-school showing of a Dobson film, "Turn Your Heart Toward Home." The district refused, citing its own rule, created to avoid church-state entanglements, that forbade use of school facilities by any religious organization. The Court, affirming (and slightly expanding) its Widmar decision, ruled 9-0 in the church's favor. More important, perhaps, was Justice Antonin Scalia's concurring opinion, joined by Justice Clarence Thomas. The Justices, part of an important faction of the Rehnquist Court, were inclined to do away with an important piece of case law governing church-state questions-the so-called "Lemon test" (named after a plaintiff), which held that any state action must be ruled unconstitutional if it had the purpose or primary effect of promoting religion. Scalia saw benefit in state encouragement of religious faith, and has cited Justice William O. Douglas's words from a 1952 ruling (often invoked by religious conservatives): "We are a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being."
The second case, decided in 2001, involved a pastor who wanted to conduct meetings of his after-school youth group, the Good News Club, in a Milford school room. The Milford district declined, likening the Good News Club to a midweek Sunday-school worship meeting, and the minister filed suit. Again, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of opening school grounds to religious activity, deciding that if school facilities were generally open to any outside group, such as the Boy Scouts, they could not be closed to religion.
Taken together, such decisions mapped a remarkable turn in the abiding quandary of church-state tensions on the school grounds. Not only prayer but actual worship was now back in the classroom, albeit after school hours. Such victories energized evangelical Christians. And loosened their wallets. Today, the A.D.F. has an annual budget nearing twenty million dollars, and Sears, its director, has expanded the organization far beyond its original role of funding and strategy coordination. The A.D.F. has its own in-house direct-litigation team (including a "same-sex marriage division") to complement the force of some seven hundred and fifty allied lawyers nationwide.
Sears also began an ambitious training-and-education program, designed to inculcate in lawyers the constitutional nuances of Christian litigation. The A.D.F. operates what it calls a National Litigation Academy, which is really an intensive seminar provided to attorneys in exchange for the promise of devoting four hundred and fifty hours of pro-bono work in the cause of Christian litigation. The organization provides law students with Blackstone Legal Fellowships, which offer a crash course in Biblical and natural law. It is finding no shortage of students eager for instruction, including many from top-tier secular universities-what participants jokingly call "the University of Babylon." ("The main campus would be in Cambridge.")
Not least, the A.D.F. runs a national media department, which is adept at exploiting the fact that the secular left is increasingly defined, in the minds of many, not by what it is for but by what it is supposedly against-Christmas, the Boy Scouts, the Pledge of Allegiance, and traditional marriage. If the recent holiday season seemed especially disputatious, it is partly because of the A.D.F.'s Christmas Project, which included broadcast ads and mass mailings to thousands of schools proclaiming, "It's Okay to Say Merry Christmas." The project highlighted the secular excesses of various municipal entities-holiday parades in which Christmas symbols were banned, school concerts without carols, and so on-and the subject filled columns and occupied talk shows for weeks.
When the organization takes on a new case, the media department quickly summarizes the facts in stark terms ("No More Discrimination Against Louisiana Pro-Lifers") and dispatches a release to its lengthy media list-national and local, secular and religious. Eric Finley, who writes the releases, says that he never knows when the media is going to bite, although it could not have been hard to predict interest in the Cupertino case ("Declaration of Independence Banned from Classroom").
Stephen Williams's admirers regard him as a born teacher, a man of abundant patience and gentle bearing, in the Mister Rogers mold. His sunny aspect and ingenuous manner (producing such exclamations as "Really neat!") seem infinitely better suited to a grade-school classroom than to the world of finance, which had been his first career.
Williams had come to California as a boy, when his father, a Cornell computer-sciences professor, was hired by I.B.M. in San Jose. Stephen attended Cupertino schools, and became a competitive swimmer at the University of California at Berkeley, where he majored in economics and sang in the men's a-cappella chorus. After college, Williams went to work for an economic consulting firm in Berkeley, but he quickly found corporate life a bad fit. He returned to school for a teaching certificate, and when he was hired by the Cupertino district, eight years ago, he believed he had found his calling.
Williams came to agree wholeheartedly with the consensus about Cupertino's schools, and he decided that Stevens Creek was the best of them. He enjoyed the staff, and he admired the school's principal, Patti Vidmar. He was constantly amazed by the quality of his students (one of whom once volunteered to explain quantum theory to him), and, in turn, most parents were impressed by Williams. Joanne Campbell, who is a single mother, says that her son Ryan had difficulty at Stevens Creek until he landed in Williams's class. "My son has had several problems with teachers in this school-just not getting along with him, or being too forceful with him. And Ryan, from the minute he was in his classroom, loved him, and said so when he first came home. I think he's wonderful. When I first met him, I thought, Wow, what a sweet guy."
Williams was happy in his work, and he would amuse his colleagues at lunchtime with tales of the single life. But in truth his personal life was deeply unsettled, filled with what he now recalls as "a lot of searching and seeking." He considered himself a nominal Christian, though not necessarily a deep believer. He found himself drawn to a church with an evangelical character, and soon he was joining church groups and establishing a new circle of friends. On the morning of April 16, 2001, the day after Easter, Williams awoke before dawn, seized by an urge to read the Bible. "I didn't know where to begin," he recalls, "and decided on John, since that is my middle name."
It was a fateful choice. Of the four Gospels, John's is the account that most forcefully and directly portrays Jesus as the son of God, the redemptive gift to man. The narrative is not uncommonly associated with personal conversion dramas, such as the one Williams experienced that morning. "All I can say is that, as I started reading, this overwhelming conviction that it was all true filled me to the depths of my heart and soul," he says. "All previous times of reading the Bible, I felt that it just didn't really apply to me. This time, I couldn't put the book down. After denying it for most of my life, I now knew in my heart that passages like 'Jesus answered, I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me' were completely true. As I read passages like John 15:26-'When the Counselor comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth who goes out from the Father, he will testify about me'-I knew that the Holy Spirit was doing that very thing in that moment as I was reading the Book of John. It was the most important, transformational moment in my life."
Williams felt compelled to share his experience. In the coming days, he sent e-mails describing his transformation to his colleagues at school. He told them about feeling random bursts of sudden, uncontrollable joy, and of driving on the freeway with tears flowing down his face. His lunchroom talk was now about his salvation, and when the 2002-03 yearbook was dedicated to Williams and two other teachers, he contributed an autobiographical portrait that amounted to a testimonial to Christ. "I thank the Lord daily for revealing himself to me and his son Jesus Christ," he wrote, "and setting me free from living a meaningless existence, to one of such purpose, filled with more love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, and self-control than I ever thought possible. Praise the Lord for saving us from being lost, and setting us free to enjoy life the way God created it to be."
"Mr. Williams was a brand-new Christian-I mean, just brand, spanking new," says Kim Item, a Stevens Creek parent who met Williams at a prayer group. "I, too, had had a radical experience with God. When I met Mr. Williams that day, his whole face was lit up. And he goes, 'I just met Jesus Christ!' and he was all excited. And I was just sitting there, quiet, because I know exactly what a radical testimony is."
Perhaps inevitably, Williams began to think about his work in a new light. He studied the state's content standards for public schools, and took the measure of the curriculum that he had been teaching. As it happens, California's standards for teaching fifth-grade history are filled with references to the importance of religion in the nation's founding-"Describe the religious aspects of the earliest colonies," "Identify the significance and leaders of the First Great Awakening," and so on-so much so that when the standards were first published at least one atheist group complained that they improperly favored religion. Williams says that he began to see a discrepancy between the state's standards and the history curriculum that he was teaching. "If you look through the textbook, you can see where there are holes."
Williams made it his purpose to fill those holes. "What I felt obligated to do as an educator was to teach the California standards," he says. "And so I've tried to supplement materials where necessary."
The fifth-grade history textbook used in many California schools is McGraw-Hill's "A New Nation: Adventures in Time and Place," which is a model of multicultural sensitivity. One of the book's authors is Dr. James A. Banks, an influential authority on, and proponent of, multiculturalism in education. Banks has advanced such ideas as "a pedagogy of liberation," by which classroom instruction is freed from the one-way recitation of perceived "facts" and opened to a joint teacher-student learning exercise about the relativistic nature of human experience. In teaching about America's westward expansion, for example, the instructor might ask students to consider the meaning of the word "west": "It wasn't west to the Lakota Sioux," Banks has observed. "It was the center of the universe. That was their home."
The textbook presents the nation's founding as a sort of pageant of ethnicities. The Declaration of Independence is indeed included in full, along with an annotated version for ten- and eleven-year-olds. The annotated version omits all references to "nature's God," "Creator," and "Divine Providence." To the subject of the Great Awakening, the religious convulsion that arguably helped feed the fires of the American Revolution, the textbook accords only brief mention.
For Williams, teaching the Founders' faith by using the Declaration was an easy enough task; he excerpted and photocopied the paragraphs mentioning "nature's God," "their Creator," and "Divine Providence." For other supplementary material, he turned to the Internet. Eventually, he came upon the Web site of an organization that seemed ideally suited to his circumstances. It was called Gateways to Better Education, and its motto summed up its purpose: "Keeping the Faith in Public Schools."
The Gateways Web site includes a link to an article advising teachers on ways to emphasize Christian faith in school ("Get a copy of your state standards. Know your rights and your students' rights") and offers various resources to Christian teachers, including a link to the organization's Holiday Restoration Campaign, in which holidays are an occasion to teach about the day's religious foundations. Holiday Restoration cards-pamphlets that point out cracks in the church-state wall-are offered for sale at the Web site's online store. One of them, an eight-page Easter card, features the Easter Bunny, who explains that the true meaning of Easter is rebirth through Jesus Christ. "The teacher raises all the objections commonly heard from public school educators," the promotional material explains, "but in this story, the smart little bunny is very familiar with U.S. court cases. He helps the teacher understand that teaching about Jesus at Easter is legally permitted. The card also includes legal documentation, Constitutionally-sound lesson plan ideas, and more!"
Williams ordered a batch of those Easter cards and distributed them to his colleagues, stuffing their boxes at school. He also prepared an Easter assignment, derived from the card. The assignment asked students to choose from among such options as writing an essay on themes from the Gospel of Luke (betrayal, sacrifice, and resurrection); reviewing some of the teachings of Jesus, such as the parable of the Good Samaritan, and applying its lessons to modern life; and interviewing a Christian family about the meaning of Easter.
Using the Web and other resources, Williams compiled a package of supplementary material, including Samuel Adams's "The Rights of the Colonists," William Penn's "Frame of Government," and John Adams's diary-each of which contained pointedly religious allusions. Williams also made copies of excerpts from "George Washington's Prayer Journal" (a document of uncertain historical authenticity), the history of "In God We Trust" on currency and coins, the history of Presidential proclamations of a National Day of Prayer, and, more obscurely, "The Principals of Natural Law," by the Swiss jurist Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui.
Although this supplementary material became the center of the dispute in Cupertino and the cause of Williams's lawsuit, the material itself is not what got Stephen Williams into trouble at Stevens Creek. History is only one of the subjects that Williams taught, and the materials represented a tiny fraction-he claims less than five per cent-of the supplements he prepared. In any case, only one of the documents, the Day of Prayer proclamation, was ever actually distributed to the class. What got Williams in trouble was his enthusiastic expression of faith.
In June, 2003, Williams married a woman he met at his church, a Ph.D. candidate in microbiology at Stanford. Last summer, they had a child, a baby girl, whom they named Magdalene Deborah. Williams e-mailed the news to his Stevens Creek colleagues, adding the note that, just as Mary Magdalene had been Jesus' friend, he hoped that his Maggie would love Jesus, too. It was the sort of sentiment that Williams felt free to share with the school community, partly because the principal, Patti Vidmar, had fostered an atmosphere of tolerance at the school. Williams had come to her last year with plans to start a Good News Club at Stevens Creek, and Mrs. Vidmar shepherded the plan through the district for approval. Vidmar, who is a Christian, also supported a mothers' prayer group, and otherwise seemed relaxed about the propinquity of religious expression and the schoolroom. Kim Item, the Christian parent at Stevens Creek who has spoken of her own "radical experience" with God, recollects stopping by the school one day with a stack of leaflets announcing her church's Easter picnic at a nearby park. "I walked into the office," Item says, "and I said, 'Can I pass these out on the school grounds?' And the school secretary said, 'No! We cannot have you pass out anything religious at this school.' Well, Mrs. Vidmar pipes up and she goes, 'Let me see one of those.' And she looks at it and she goes, 'Well, I don't see anything wrong with this. This is a church that's having an Easter-egg hunt at a park.' And that was my first experience with Mrs. Vidmar."
Williams did not realize that his new zeal was becoming a subject of school talk and, to some, a matter of concern. "We have Jewish teachers, we have all kinds of Christian teachers, we have a Muslim aide, we have a lot of Hindu parents," says Williams's colleague Sarah Beetem. "People sort of said, 'Well, O.K., but he's kind of heavy into this, and he doesn't really need to tell us all these things.' "
Parents are a common presence at Stevens Creek (the "parents' mafia," one mother calls it), and those parents who didn't already know about Williams's religious experience soon heard. Now classroom discussion of religion, which had not been controversial before, began to be considered in a new context.
"The crux of the problem is, if you look at Mr. Williams in general, he was extremely vocal about his beliefs," says Armineh Noravian, a Stevens Creek mother whose son was in Williams's class last year, when the troubles began. "If you talk to teachers, they'll tell you that he was very vocal about his beliefs outside the classroom. And I believe what happened is that his behavior carried inside the classroom. You would notice that he wore a Jesus ring, he had a little Cross pin that he wore in class. He had a Bible and some worship CDs on his desk. And he would sometimes talk about his Bible classes, and about singing Bible songs with his Bible buddies over the weekend. It's not hard for a ten- or eleven-year-old kid to pick up that this man is a devout Christian, a practicing Christian who loves his faith and is very serious about it. It was not hard for him to establish, very early in the year, who he was and what his religious beliefs were."
Noravian says that she heard similar concerns from other parents. She became alert to signs of proselytizing in Williams's class.
According to Williams, one morning soon after the start of the 2003-04 school year, his class had just finished reciting the Pledge of Allegiance when a student asked why the Pledge included the words "under God." The effort by a California man to have the reciting of the Pledge in school declared unconstitutional was in the news at the time, and Williams invited a classroom discussion of the subject. "At the end of the day, my principal came in and asked, 'What are you doing teaching about God?' " Williams recalls. "And I was kind of taken aback a little bit. But then I thought back and said, 'O.K., it must have been the "under God" discussion we had for a few minutes,' and I explained what happened. And she said, 'O.K., that sounds reasonable.' But that was kind of the start to this."
A parent had heard about the discussion and called Patti Vidmar. The scene was repeated a few weeks later, after a classroom discussion of Christopher Columbus. Williams told the class that one of Columbus's roles in his expedition was as a Christian missionary, and he explained that a Christian is "someone who follows the teachings of Jesus Christ." Again, Mrs. Vidmar appeared in his classroom moments after the school day ended and asked about the Columbus discussion. Williams says that she seemed satisfied by his explanation, but he began to sense trouble. "The pattern had developed that almost anytime there was a reference to God or Christianity or Jesus a student would go home and obviously tell a parent, and the parent would call immediately to Patti, and then Patti's in my room within twenty minutes," he says. "It was a really efficient process."
Williams began to try to preempt the process by reviewing with Vidmar in advance those assignments that he feared might inspire protest. His class had read "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe," C. S. Lewis's fanciful tale of betrayal, sacrifice, and forgiveness, which is often read as a Christian allegory. Williams showed Vidmar an assignment sheet he'd used in the past, which included nine suggested activities, one of which was to discuss the Narnia tale as an allegory. Vidmar questioned the assignment, but approved it. In November, 2003, she sat in on his lesson about Thanksgiving. The winter holidays passed without incident, and Williams taught a multicultural holiday lesson, spread out over the course of several days.
In April, 2004, Williams distributed his Easter card, featuring the Constitution-wise bunny with tips for Christian teachers, to his colleagues. Some of the teachers weren't pleased. "I find it offensive that he feels he needs to proselytize to the rest of the teachers," Sarah Beetem says. "For one thing, there are some who are Jewish. And for those of us who are Christian, excuse me, but I belong to my own church. I am not interested in having you tell me that this is what you should do. I know what I'm supposed to do in a public school." Shortly thereafter, Williams presented his Easter assignment to Vidmar for approval. "Easter and Christianity should not be part of your classroom instruction or discussions," she wrote to him in an e-mail, denying approval. She told Williams that he was being "insensitive to our diverse religious community by insisting on focusing on your own beliefs in the classroom."
Williams noted that there had been no complaint about his winter-holiday assignments, when he asked his students to explore the origins of Hanukkah, or during Dewali, when he explained the Hindu festival of lights. When studying Ramadan, he asked his students to consult primary sources, such as the Koran. "You're applauded for teaching about other religions," he says. "But as soon as God or Christianity or Jesus Christ comes up, there's this immediate 'Oops, separation of church and state-that's not O.K.' "
Patti Vidmar was in a bind. Parents had complained about Williams, and parents, she knew, talked to other parents. "I can tell you that a lot of parents, including some I know personally, complained about Mr. Williams," says John Bartas, who has three kids at Stevens Creek. "Two Jewish parents that I know of, they seemed to be the most unhappy ones-well before the lawsuit. There'd been a general scuttlebutt in the parents' community that sooner or later somebody was going to sue the school over Williams's proselytizing."
Mark Davis, a San Jose attorney who represents the school district, says that Vidmar was trying to protect Williams and the district. "She really tried to be careful with this," he says. "She thought she was helping him, because his materials, and some of his discussions, were generating parental complaints. And she said, 'Just for your own good, there are certain areas I don't think you should go into.' " But Williams was determined. Early last May, he distributed a handout to his class that he did not clear with Vidmar. It was the history of the National Day of Prayer proclamations, with President Bush's proclamation printed on one side of the sheet. When Armineh Noravian saw it, she e-mailed a complaint to Williams and sent a copy to Mrs. Vidmar. It was the first complaint against Williams that had a name attached to it.
"He established himself and the Founding Fathers as Christians," Noravian says. "So that's the American past, and he himself, the teacher-that's a big authority figure. He then brought into the formula another person who calls himself a Christian-this is George W. Bush. . . . Now you have him linking himself to the Founding Fathers and to the current President, with this glue of Christianity and the glue of prayer. Now, even an adult would be scared to stand up and question this guy, let alone an eleven-year-old."
After Noravian's complaint, Vidmar, having consulted with the district, insisted on approving in advance anything that Williams planned to distribute to his class. That week, Williams says, he showed the principal a stack of material from which he might choose one or more handouts for a class lesson on the influence of religion on the Founders. This material included writings of John Adams, the clauses in various state constitutions establishing religion, Washington's "Prayer Journal," "The First Prayer in Congress," excerpts from Blackstone's "Commentaries" on natural law, and a page of quotes called "What Great Leaders Have Said About the Bible." (The page quoted nine Presidents and Jesus.) Vidmar told Williams that he could not distribute or discuss any of the documents. He then proposed a shorter list of three documents: the three paragraphs excerpted from the Declaration of Independence and excerpts from William Penn's "Frame of Government" and from Samuel Adams's "The Rights of the Colonists."
Vidmar wrote to Williams, "The materials you submitted yesterday are once again of a religious nature and are not appropriate to be used with your fifth grade students because the district honors separation of church and state in school." She asked to see Williams's weekly lesson plans for the rest of the semester, and warned him that if he continued his effort to introduce religion into the classroom he would be disciplined.
"On the one hand, yes, it was the Declaration of Independence that he wanted to distribute, or part of it," says Davis, the school-district attorney. "But, on the other hand, if you looked at the packet, you didn't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that this whole packet is geared toward religion and, in particular, Christianity. He was pulling out bits and pieces of it, and I think that was the problem the principal had."
Williams decided to get in touch with an attorney. "What was happening to me in this situation was not right," he says. "I just wanted to teach the California standards accurately. I felt like the policies that were put in place over me were preventing me from doing my job." As it happened, the Gateways to Better Education Web site has a link to James Dobson's Focus on the Family site, which has a link to the Alliance Defense Fund.
Lawyers from the A.D.F. and the school district exchanged letters and phone calls last spring, but the conflict remained unresolved when the new school year began. About a month into the term, Williams and Vidmar sat down for his annual "goals conference," in which the teacher broadly outlines his instruction plans for the school year. Williams says Vidmar brought along a packet of material, approved by the district, and she told Williams that he was to choose his handouts only from that material. Vidmar said that if Williams deviated from her instructions, he could be fired. None of the material that Williams had been using was in the packet. "That was basically the last straw for us," says Joshua Carden, one of the A.D.F. attorneys working on the case. On November 22nd, Williams filed suit in federal court.
Williams's opponents acknowledge that the timing of the A.D.F.'s filing, on the eve of the Thanksgiving holiday, was tactically brilliant. "My background is in public relations," says Nathalie Schuler Ferro, a Stevens Creek mother actively involved in the school's public defense. "You have forty-eight hours to respond to anything in a crisis. Well, they filed this thing the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, and everybody's leaving, and you have already lost the P.R. campaign." The A.D.F.'s framing of the story-"Declaration of Independence Banned from Classroom"-shaped the news stories for several days. When the district finally did answer, pointing out that the Declaration had not been "banned," its public response was constrained by its lawyers. A group of parents, in close communication with the school, took up the defense in less muted tones. They set up a Web site, and, with Ferro acting as the unofficial spokesman, they have argued the school's case in the press and on blogs.
The parents' group supporting the school and Mrs. Vidmar has itself become a subject of dispute, with some parents believing that the group became too strident. Joanne Campbell attended some meetings of the group and joined its e-mail list. "But what I found was they were all bashing Mr. Williams and putting him down," she said.
Sarah Williams, Stephen's wife, took her husband's critics to task in a letter to the local paper, urging parents to use caution in spreading stories about her husband's supposed proselytizing. One story going around had Williams writing Bible verses on the blackboard-but it turned out to be passages from Maccabees, cited for a lesson on Hanukkah.
Some of the parents are motivated by a practical concern. Because of California's quirky formula for funding schools, the Cupertino district, despite its relative affluence, is among the lowest funded in the state. Last November, a local parcel tax that would have supported the schools was narrowly defeated, and some parents worry about the effect the Stevens Creek controversy will have on older voters, who tend to be skeptical about increases in school taxes. One such voter is Ralph Otte, a retired teacher and the school liaison for his chapter of the American Legion. Since the lawsuit, Otte has made it his business to visit the school, attend community meetings about the controversy, and read the fifth-grade history textbook. "What happened to the Creator?" Otte asks. "They've just written him off. I want my money to go for a better book than that."
Stephen Williams maintains that he never meant to cause such a controversy, and that "never in my wildest dreams did I think this would have the national media attention that it did." He continues to teach at Stevens Creek, though there are awkward moments. When school resumed after the Thanksgiving break, a staff meeting became a venting session directed at Williams. "There are a few people who will eat with him," Sarah Beetem says. "A lot of the staff will not. A lot of the staff will not talk to him, other than about specific school-related things. I think they still feel hurt and betrayed. I think everyone wishes he would go away." Even some who support Williams have expressed their dismay. Kim Item, who is one of Williams's class mothers, wrote him a three-page letter in which she lamented that the C. S. Lewis book "is one of the last Christian books left in the public school, and now is probably about to be removed." The morning after one particularly contentious community meeting, Item walked up to Williams, put her finger in his face, and said, "Mr. Williams, you have to stop. This is not your fight, this is God's fight. You're trying to play God, and it's got to stop!"
The incremental reopening of the schoolhouse door to religion brings up the very sorts of question being contested in Cupertino: When does teaching about religion become proselytizing? The state's "Guidelines for Teaching About Religion" says that a teacher can instruct about religion but can emphasize no particular religion. In attorney conferences before the suit, a district lawyer pointed out that Williams's disputed material all highlighted the role of the Christian faith in the nation's founding. To that, A.D.F.'s Josh Carden responded, "You're not going to find a lot of Muslim Founding Fathers."
Around Stevens Creek, the atmosphere remains charged, as Larry Woodard discovered when he returned home from work recently to find his wife and children visibly upset. The school had been locked down by police that afternoon as they searched the area. Two girls had reported seeing a man with a gun on the school grounds. "Nobody in our house has slept well since," Woodard says. The man turned out to be a parent who had come to pick up his child. The "gun" was a cell phone.
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