AP and staff reports

ECRU — Long after the high school football game ended, Lisa Herdahl and Pat Mounce sat on wet bleachers, talking intently under a shared umbrella. The two 36-year-old mothers were discussing something they cared deeply about: the prayers broadcast over the intercom at their children’s schools in the Pontotoc School District. Herdahl opposed the prayers and was taking the county school district to court. Mounce had organized the town to fight back.

”Lisa, don’t you believe in God?” Mounce asked.

”Yes I do,” Herdahl replied.

”Then how can you be against prayer in your children’s schools?” asked Mounce.

”Because nobody believes in God the same way,” Herdahl said.

The disagreement under the umbrella revolved around 16 words, two centuries old: ”Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

Just 16 words in the United States Constitution. Yet hardly a day goes by without a fight over what they mean or how to live by them. Should the Ten Commandments be on display in courtrooms and classrooms in Kentucky? Can a student-led graduation prayer be recited in a Maryland high school? Should a New York City teacher be fired for leading prayers for a drowned student? Can a California company forbid a Sikh from carrying a ceremonial dagger signifying his faith?

The 16 long-ago words foment disagreement, clog courts and feed a continuing battle over basic beliefs. At stake: nothing less than the place of religion in the public life of the United States.

The U.S. Supreme Court, the ultimate arbiter of the Constitution, struggles with how to apply those 16 words, making many of its key decisions on 5-4 votes. The court has tended to avoid controversial religion cases in recent years, but it will soon hear oral arguments on whether public schools can give students the unfettered right to pray at football games. In December, the court heard arguments on whether taxpayers’ money can be used to buy computers and other instructional materials for religious schools.

When the Constitution was new, the United States was a fledgling nation clinging to the Eastern Seaboard of a largely unexplored continent. The young nation was remarkably diverse for its time. Several competing Protestant denominations thrived in the original 13 states, along with a smattering of Jews and Catholics. Religious differences between such groups as Congregationalists and Quakers were strongly felt and hotly debated.

The founders sought to create a society open to all — to keep the nation forever free of the religious wars and persecutions that had ravaged Europe for centuries.

Today, the founders’ words help govern a far different United States — a nation of Mormons and Muslims, Baptists and Buddhists, Scientologists and Christian Scientists.

And the words seem harder to apply.

For Herdahl and Mounce, and for many Americans across the land, these matters are no mere exercises in legalism; they are woven into the fabric of daily life.

”I’m more spiritual than religious,” Herdahl, now 39, says, sitting in the trailer she and her husband share with their children. ”Church,” she says,” is in your heart.”

Raised as a Christian Scientist in San Diego, she remembers classmates teasing her for refusing vaccinations. Her six children, like her husband, were baptized Lutheran.

After her family moved to Pontotoc in 1993 to be near her husband’s parents, she discovered that Christian prayers were being broadcast daily by students on the public-address system. She didn’t think it was right for any group to be preaching to her children in school.

When she complained, she says, administrators suggested her son, Jason, 7, wear earphones to block out the broadcasts. David, her 11-year-old, left the room during a Bible class she considered too sectarian. When his classmates asked why, she says, the teacher told them David didn’t believe in God.

School officials say the earphones were for listening to educational tapes. They deny the teacher called David an unbeliever. Herdahl spent a year trying to change the system. Finally, in late 1994, she wrote to the American Civil Liberties Union and the Washington-based People for the American Way, two groups that believe church and state should be kept strictly separated. Both agreed to represent her.

Her lawyers maintained that both the PA-system prayers and the Bible classes violated the Constitutional clause prohibiting ”an establishment of religion.” The clause, as interpreted by the Supreme Court, means that government must not do anything to ”aid one religion, aid all religions or prefer one religion over another.”

Natchez-Adams Schools Superintendent Dr. Carl Davis said keeping prayer out of schools is impossible. &uot;I submit to you we have prayer in school,&uot; he said. &uot;As long as you have tests you’re going to have prayer in school.&uot;

He says he supports students having their own bible study and prayer time. Prayer has to be led by students, he said. Otherwise, the school may not be able to say no to any faith or belief out there and that may not always be the best for the kids.

&uot;We can’t promote it; we can’t deny it. But we can support it,&uot; Davis said.

Michael K. Whitehead, a Kansas City lawyer who represented the Pontotoc School District, says forbidding student-led prayer would violate the clause guaranteeing ”free exercise” of religion. It is understood to guarantee everyone freedom to worship without government interference.

This is the ground on which many church-state disputes are debated. Is a Texas police officer who wears a half-inch-long cross pin on his collar officially favoring Christianity over other religions, which is constitutionally forbidden? Or is he freely practicing his faith, which is his constitutional right? What about a gospel choir in a public school? Or Muslim public school students seeking a place to observe midday prayers?

For years, religious activists were on the defensive, says Jay Sekulow, a conservative Protestant strategist and chief counsel for Pat Robertson’s American Center for Law and Justice. They were always trying to prove they were not violating the Constitution’s ban on ”establishment of religion.”

Now, he says, they are beginning to get better results by asserting their constitutional rights to free speech and free practice of religion. Sekulow says his group fielded about 102,000 citizen complaints in 1998, the latest number available. At any one time, hundreds of them are in the courts.

Mounce remembers her first reaction to Herdahl’s lawsuit: ”I felt like someone was coming in and trying to change a part of us.”

Mounce grew up listening to Christian prayers on the school intercom and wanted her children to do the same. The prayers shielded them from temptation, she believes, and reminded them of their accountability to God. ”We took it for granted prayer would always be there,” she says.

She agreed with Herdahl that the government shouldn’t tell people what to believe. ”But I don’t believe a second-grader saying a prayer is establishment of religion,” she said.

Mounce, a school board member’s wife, tried to understand Herdahl’s feelings. But she couldn’t help wondering how a woman who baptized her children in the Lutheran church could object to a simple Christian prayer. Sure, a prayer in Jesus’ name might offend a Buddhist or a Jew, but she had yet to meet a Buddhist or Jew in Ecru.

Maybe so, but Mississippi is becoming more diverse, says Neal Biggers Jr., the U.S. District Court judge who heard the Herdahl case. Muslims are building a mosque in nearby Oxford.

Still, in Pontotoc, Herdahl was seen as the voice of liberalism. Rumors flew that she was an outside agitator paid by the ACLU. ”That’s what was going around: ‘She came from the North on purpose to do this,”’ says Joe Martin, owner of Joe’s Barbecue, which he calls the town’s ”gossip shop.”

Herdahl laughs at the suggestion, but she and her family have felt the repercussions. Herdahl says she lost her job at a convenience store when customers threatened a boycott. And her children have faced flak at school.

”Kids said Mom had no respect for anything,” says Richard, now 14. ”I kept getting jumped in the bathroom. But Mama did what was right. They were breaking the law.”

Pat Mounce wishes Herdahl would just let Pontotoc be Pontotoc.

”I tell her, ‘Lisa, you’re wrong,”’ Mounce says. ”This is a Christian community. Our school does not belong to the ACLU.”’

Herdahl appreciates Mounce’s forthrightness. ”I’ve had a lot of respect for her through all this,” Herdahl says. ”She has a Christian attitude. She disagrees with what you’re doing, but she won’t treat you like you’re the scum of the Earth.”