If I could give advice to a young me, I would tell myself to question authority. One of my biggest problems with 14-year-old Mark is that 14-year-old Mark was a bright kid, a nice kid, but he believed what people told him. He was happy to be the worker bee. He was happy to be the chess pawn. In a lot of families, black families, children are not allowed to question their elders. I would tell him to question everybody. Do it respectfully, but question everything, and you’ll be okay.
XIV.
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Harrison Hopkins: South Carolina Secularist
“I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church and State.”
Harrison Hopkins has never been particularly religious. In his junior year at Laurens District 55 High in Laurens, SC, a public school, he learned that the graduating class was required to vote at an annual senior class meeting on whether a prayer should be read at graduation. After doing some research, he contacted the South Carolina ACLU and the Freedom From Religion Foundation to inform them about the vote. Laurens High responded, after receiving a letter from the FFRF, stating that the prayer would not take place.
Once the prayer issue hit the local news, attention grew. He was told that Jesus loved him by some and that he would be jumped by others. On graduation night, the student body president, one of the speakers at the ceremony, stated that the controversy had strengthened his faith. He decided to read a prayer, which was greeted with a round of applause. Harrison isn’t particularly surprised that his desire to remove the school prayer has been treated with such hostility, as he understands that many within his South Carolina community have never had their religious faith challenged. He says he wants basic fairness and for religious people to understand that their religion is one of many, that no religion deserves special privilege within a public school or government.
I was born and raised in the South. When my parents divorced when I was in first grade, I lived with my dad. I went to church on Wednesdays with my neighbors up the road from first to fifth grade, mostly for social reasons. I moved in with my mom, in Southport, NC, a coastal city, in sixth grade. I miss that place. During my eighth grade year, we moved inland to Deep Run, NC, which is in the middle of nowhere. My mom and I never went to church. Later, I moved back in with my dad in Waterloo, SC.
I can’t remember a time when I truly believed in God or religion. Like everyone else, I was born an atheist. Unlike most everyone else, I was never forced into attending church when I was young. I didn’t know the word “atheist” until I was in seventh or eighth grade. I was on the computer, and I came across it. I looked it up, and I thought, “That’s what I am!”
My old home in Deep Run was in a rural area where everyone is really religious. When I told people that I was an atheist, they had no idea what that was. They thought it meant that I was a devil worshipper. I had the fun job of explaining to them that I was not. I enrolled at Laurens District 55 High at the start of my junior year. Here in Laurens, I have been the only outspoken atheist. Until recently, though, there hadn’t been any problems.
During my junior year, I learned about my public high school’s graduation ceremony. I found out that the school puts the choice of whether or not to hold a prayer at the graduation ceremony to a vote by the graduating senior class. When I learned this, I was in my AP U.S. History class. My teacher stressed that this procedure was in place as a way for the school to legally put prayer into the graduation ceremony. That didn’t sound quite right to me. I started doing research on my own and found the case of Eric Workman, who had been the valedictorian at Greenwood High School in Greenwood, SC. His school did the exact same thing that mine was attempting to do, and he filed a complaint with the Freedom From Religion Foundation. The dispute ended up going to court, and the court ruled in Eric’s favor, stating that the school could not leave the decision of whether to have a prayer at a public school’s graduation ceremony up to a vote. I was hopeful that I might be able to do something to stop my school from holding such a vote, too.
In January of my senior year, I started looking up information on the subject again because my graduation was only a few months away. I stumbled across a Facebook group for Jessica Ahlquist, who, I found, had been fighting the display of a prayer banner in her public high school in Cranston, Rhode Island. I joined the group. In one of the group chats on the page, I mentioned that my school had historically held a prayer at graduation following the results of a vote by the senior class. I was interested in doing something about it.
In April, I learned that a senior class meeting was to be held. I decided to ask around and find out what was supposed to happen there. I discovered that, as I expected, the purpose of the meeting was to vote to determine whether or not we would have a prayer at graduation. I came home and began investigating who I would need to contact. While doing that, I got a Facebook message from Jessica Ahlquist asking if I was going to do anything about the vote. I decided to act.
I filed a complaint with the Freedom From Religion Foundation and the South Carolina ACLU. The next day I received a response from the FFRF stating that they had sent a letter to my school explaining why the vote was illegal, stressing that prayer at public high school graduation ceremonies had been ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, and that the school needed to immediately stop the holding the vote. This happened a week before the meeting was to be held. At the meeting, there was no mention of the possibility of a prayer. There was no vote. I thought, “That was easy.” In the packet that they handed out, however, there was a document that said that the graduation ceremony would not be over until a prayer had been read.
I scanned that page and sent it to the Freedom From Religion Foundation and the ACLU. They both sent letters to the school asking for assurance that there would not be a prayer at graduation. The school finally responded and said that while the vote had been cancelled, they still believed there had been no court with jurisdiction over South Carolina that had ruled that prayer was unconstitutional at public high school graduation ceremonies in all circumstances. They contended that by following a law in South Carolina, the South Carolina Student-Led Messages Act, they were still allowed to give speakers time to deliver an opening and closing message that the school could not review. Despite the ambiguity, I still won a partial victory: the possibility of an official, school-sponsored prayer no longer existed.
My desire to remove the prayer from the ceremony stems from a desire for basic fairness. Prayer at a public high school graduation ceremony excludes people who aren’t of the Christian faith, not to mention that it violates the First Amendment of the Constitution. There is no telling how many other atheists, Jews, Muslims, or people of different faiths have gone through my school’s ceremony and felt as though the graduation ceremony wasn’t as much theirs as it was any Christian’s. I thought that it was time for somebody to stand up and tell the school that what they were doing was not right. We’re supposed to have a secular government, and the schools are part of the government.