School Prayer: A Community at War

By Slawomir Grünberg and Ben Crane
Premiered: July 20, 1999

The battle cry on both sides is "religious freedom" when a Mississippi mother takes a stand on prayer in her children's public school. While most of Pontotoc County rally together to preserve a cornerstone of their faith, Lisa Herdahl is a lone voice calling for separation of church and state. Raising complex issues about tolerance, filmmakers Slawomir Grünberg and Ben Crane chronicle an impassioned clash of principles in which the Constitutional right of an individual collides with the deep-rooted tradition of a community. (56 minutes)

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Transcript:

Slawomir Grünberg, filmmaker: For me religious freedom was complicated because I had to deal with religious war in my own family. Coming from a family of Jewish, Catholic, Russian Orthodox and Atheist, I was in the middle of this battle, of this war and when I look at myself and when I look at the world's conflict, I see the similarity. I can, I can see that the war can start, can get a spark in — within the family even.

Ben Crane, filmmaker: The story in this film is about a community, which is torn between the law of man as set down by Supreme Court precedents, and the law of God as they understand it from reading the Bible and from attending church. And the people in this community feel that to respect the law of man means to risk losing the moral backbone of their community.

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