For my part, school seemed to be an elaborate play where each of the actors—teachers, classmates, parents—pretended not to notice that we were on opposite sides of an epic, spiritual battle between good and evil. It was a tenuous truce that relied heavily on the First Amendment: no matter how much they disagreed with us or how often we picketed their churches, teachers were agents of government and barred from punishing us for our religious activities. But more, it relied on mutual consent to keep up the pretense—our shared willingness not to speak, for instance, of the nine-foot-tall picket
...more