See You at the Pole: Evangelicals, Public Schools, and “Student-Initiated” School Prayer in 1990s America

Abstract

Histories of school prayer have typically concluded in the late 1980s, when court rulings and stalled legislation conclusively barred the door on the return of state-sponsored prayer to public schools. Through an analysis of See You at the Pole, a nationwide initiative formed in 1990 that mobilized millions of American students to gather annually to pray at their school flagpoles, this article argues that the 1990s witnessed not the waning of religion in public schools, but rather its revival in “student-initiated” forms. By tracing the pivot from debates over state sponsorship of religion to debates over students’ rights of free expression, this article establishes the 1990s as a major turning point in legal, political, and religious histories of school prayer. Further, this study of See You at the Pole illuminates how bipartisan, pluralist legitimating logics that crystallized in the 1990s underlie the phenomenon that scholars have recently termed “Christian nationalism.”