On Second Thought.. .

Fear and doubt dominated the initial clerical reaction to the Supreme Court ruling against the New York State Board of Regents' prayer for schools. In their second thoughts most Protestant and Jewish religious figures seem to have decided that the court was right.* Last week 46 Protestant and Jewish clergymen and lay leaders in the Kansas City area issued a statement opposing any form of worship in the public schools as an invasion of "privacy of belief." "The worship of God," said the statement, "is by nature a voluntary expression and ought not to be associated with the coercive functions of the state." Church magazines as different as the liberal Christian Century and the conservative Christianity Today have backed the court ruling. More support came last week from the big (circ. 1,136,000) Presbyterian Life in an editorial entitled "Keeping Our Shirt On." The regents' prayer, noted the magazine, "was really a rather limited, circumscribed prayer directed to a limited, circumscribed God." In its next session the court is expected to decide whether other religious expressions in school-such as Bible readings and the recitation of the Lord's Prayer-also breach the wall between church and state. The justices will have a variety of such practices to think about.

Last week the superintendent of Oklahoma City's public schools announced that Bible reading would continue in classes; a school district in Colonie, N.Y., decided to substitute a short period of silence for optional contemplation in place of the banned regents' prayer. In Hicksville, L.I., the board of education has approved the recitation of the rarely sung fourth stanza of The Star-Spangled Banner-"Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just; And this be our motto: 'In God is our trust' "as a daily prayer.

Such efforts to circumvent the court's decision seem to reflect the will of the public. Last week a Gallup poll indicated that 79% of those questioned in a nationwide survey favor the continuation of religious observances in the public schools.

-*A majority of Roman Catholic leaders deplored the court decision from the start and still do. Archbishop Lawrence J. Shehan of Baltimore said a fortnight ago that "secularization threatens to become a sort of state religion established by court decree."

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