Henry Jay Karp is the Rabbi Emeritus of Temple Emanuel in Davenport, Iowa, which he served from 1985 to 2017. He is the co-founder and co-convener of One Human Family QCA, a social justice organization.

As an Iowan, a Jew, and a rabbi who has served the Quad Cities Jewish community for nearly 40 years, I was beside myself when I read Dr. Thomas Lecaque’s guest column in Iowa Starting Line about the school chaplain bill moving through the Iowa legislature. Having made its way through the House and the Senate Education Committee, it is now eligible for floor debate in the Senate.

House File 884 is an offense of the highest degree to every non-Christian faith community in our state. It empowers school districts to hire chaplains “to provide support, services, and programs as assigned by the board of directors of the school district.”

If that sounds innocuous, think again, for the Senate Education Committee has already rejected an amendment that would restrict school chaplains from proselytizing students. So much for religious neutrality in our schools!

Such neutrality is dead when these school chaplains have been given the go-ahead to use their positions to promote their faith among the students. It should go without saying that doing so makes every non-Christian student in Iowa’s public schools—Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Shinto, Sikhs, Atheists, and so on—vulnerable to the evangelizing efforts of these chaplains. That is simply not acceptable.

One can argue, “Who said the chaplain has to be a Christian?” Well, there is another amendment under consideration. It required that school chaplains be “credentialed.” As it states, “if the chaplain holds a certification from a nationally recognized school chaplain professional credentialing organization, that satisfies the following requirements […].”

However, the only organization that fits that description is a Christian organization, The National School Chaplain Association. Here is how they describe themselves: “NCSA is a Christian ministry that provides spiritual care, counseling, and practical community support to Pre-K through 12th-grade students, teachers, and their families.”

The very fact that the National Association of Christian Lawmakers has turned to this organization to assist in creating bills to be presented and considered in various states, promoting Christian education in their schools, makes it abundantly clear that the bill before the Iowa Senate is the product of Christian Nationalists. 

While Senate Republicans did not approve a Democratic amendment prohibiting proselytization in committee, the floor manager, State Senator Mike Pike, has introduced another amendment aimed at addressing such concerns. It would remove the requirement that chaplains be certified with a specific organization, and add language to House File 884 stating that parents could submit a written form instructing the school not to have any chaplain work with their child. 

I agree that an organization that exclusively provides certification of private school chaplains is not in any way acceptable for public schools and is in direct violation of church-state separation. That said, I do believe that anyone who serves as a “counselor” in public schools should require professional certification. That certification should have absolutely nothing to do with theology. Rather, it should be centered on the training and skills of professional counselors. 

The issues that draw students to seek the assistance of guidance counselors can be so serious that it is not hyperbole to classify some of them as life-threatening. We must not ignore the fact that our nation is still in the midst of a pandemic of teenage suicide. Do we really want to place the emotional well-being of our school children into the hands of those who lack professional training and skills in the field of child and teenage psychology, and who replace those credentials with their own theological perspectives? 

As far as this amendment’s provision permitting parents to “submit a written form instructing the school not to have any chaplain work with their child,” this is nothing but a Trojan horse, not unlike the rules permitting student athletes to exempt themselves from pre-game prayers. It is but an administrative tool to allow the schools to wash their hands of responsibility while they allow the power of peer pressure to do the job for them. It is the same mechanism that drives Jewish children to go to school rather than to synagogue on Jewish holidays because they don’t want to “miss tests” or “not play in games” being held on those days. It serves to undermine rather than protect their freedom of religion, a right the First Amendment guarantees to them. 

There is nothing acceptable about this bill, especially since it does not have a provision that protects the students from religious evangelism.  Imposing religion into the public school setting is a line that must not be crossed. Years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court made a clear distinction stating that public schools can teach about religion but not teach religion. In other words, they can teach facts about the various religions, but they cannot promote any one religion over another. 

I can think of nothing more un-American than imposing any one faith ideology upon the innocent children in our public schools. 

It was no coincidence that when the founders of our nation framed our Constitution, the very First Amendment to that Constitution included “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free practice thereof.” 

How quick some Americans are to forget that the earliest settlers of this country came here from Europe, fleeing religious persecution. The Puritans to Massachusetts fleeing the Church of England, the Catholics to Virginia also fleeing the Church of England, the Protestant Huguenots fleeing the Catholic Church in France, and the Jews to New Amsterdam, fleeing the Spanish & Portuguese Inquisitions. The Baptists had to flee to Rhode Island because of the persecution they experienced at the hands of the Puritans. Religious freedom was a value near and dear to our founders, one they did not take for granted. 

Now the Iowa state legislature is seriously considering throwing the First Amendment into the trash heap and, for all intents and purposes, declaring Iowa a “Christian” state, in which all other faith communities are tolerated, until they decide to expel them, or forcibly convert them. Or maybe, if they allow their school chaplains to convert their children, these non-Christian faith communities will disappear in a generation or so. 

My people, the Jewish people, have been in this land since 1654. My synagogue was the first synagogue in Iowa, founded in 1861. We are not going anywhere, we are not deserting our faith, and we are not standing idly by and allowing our state government to proselytize our children.

Recently, our state legislature stripped transgender Iowans of their protections under the Iowa Civil Rights Act. Now these same legislators are going after the rights of non-Christians to practice their religions freely, starting with our children. How sick is that? Do you see a pattern emerging here? If not, look again: your rights may be the next to go. We need to stop them from taking us down a road we will quickly regret, and we need to stop them now.

House File 884 was on the Senate’s debate calendar for April 23, but was not brought to the floor. We do not know whether it will go back on the chamber’s debate calendar in light of Pike’s proposed amendment. (If the Senate did pass the bill with an amendment, the bill would go back to the House.) 

Considering the history of such bills in our legislature, I suspect that even if the school chaplains bill doesn’t return this year, we will see this proposal again in the future.