One graduation, beyond the pomp and circumstance

Most of the time, high school graduations are like weddings — comfortable, traditional and predictable.

Certainly, that would have been the case with the commencement exercises at Russell Springs, Ky., High School in the spring of 2006, had graduation speaker Megan Chapman followed her pounding heart and went with her first impulse.

“I had decided to do something on ‘The Road Less Traveled,’” she recalled recently. “That seemed like the safe way to go.”

But somewhere between uncertainty and the podium, she changed her mind. And that, to quote the poet Robert Frost, has made all the difference.

Chapman is now a student at Liberty University, the first person to be offered (and to accept) a “Stand Up for Liberty” scholarship for her public stand on a Christian-related issue. Last week, that same scholarship was offered to Carrie Prejean — Miss California in the Miss USA pageant and an outspoken advocate of “traditional marrage values” — after Prejean spoke at Liberty’s convocation.

“It was quite a blessing for my family,” Chapman said. “We’re blue-collar Kentucky — my mom works in a chicken factory, my dad is an auto mechanic — and my going there (to Liberty) wouldn’t have been in our budget.

“I really have to thank the ACLU for making the whole thing possible.”

Or, more specifically, a fellow Russell Springs senior who decided to make the school’s annual graduation prayer a legal issue.

“Our school always had a prayer at graduation,” Chapman said, “and a student chaplain was elected to lead it. I noticed just a few days before graduation that nobody had applied for that position, so I put my name in.”

About the same time, the activist student opposed to the prayer was filing a lawsuit through the local ACLU chapter. The school administration vowed to adhere to its tradition anyway, then wavered when a judge issued a restraining order. Suddenly, Megan Chapman found herself dodging phone calls from newspaper reporters and hiding from television news teams.

“At the time,” she recalled, “I was afraid I would just blurt out something that would get taken the wrong way.”

One of those calls was not from the media, however, but Matthew Staver of the Liberty Counsel, a Lynchburg-launched and Florida-based organization specializing in church and state issues.

“He couldn’t get through, so he finally called me on my cell phone and offered to help,” Chapman said.

One possible compromise was to have Chapman designated as simply another graduation speaker, removing the term “chaplain.”

“That meant having an election,” Chapman said, “and my twin sister Mandy ran it.”

Chapman won in a landslide, and planned to “deliver a message” that her classmates were overwhelmingly in favor of a prayer. The day of the event, however, the Russell Springs principal asked Chapman to keep her religious views out of her talk.

Never a high profile student, Chapman was scared. Not because of the restraining order — it’s not as if a SWAT team was poised to rush the stage and arrest her if she went over the line — but because she didn’t have a speech written.

“I had no idea what I was going to say,” she remembered, “but I just trusted in the Lord, and it came out all right. I talked about my life and what a difference God had made in it.”

Suddenly, a remarkable thing happened. Almost in unison, the senior class at Russell Springs stood up and read the ‘Lord’s Prayer’ together. TV cameras rolled, and Chapman became an instant heroine in her little corner of Kentucky.

“It was just ... amazing,” she says now. “It triggered a whole revival in our town.”

I happen to be an admirer of Thomas Jefferson, a believer in reasonable separation of church and state, and opposed to anyone forcing a political philosophy or religion on anyone else.

Still, it was hard to have a conversation with Megan Chapman and not feel some sympathy with her point of view.

“Is it democracy,” she asked, “when one person in a group can take away what everyone else wants to do?”

Moreover, she seemed too nice to be classified as a religious zealot.

“I really worried that the student who filed the lawsuit would get booed or something when he took the stage,” she said, “so Mandy and I were pleading with everyone to be respectful. And they were.”

And both Chapman twins went to Liberty, and Russell Springs had its prayer, as usual, the next spring.

Personally, I just have to applaud Megan Chapman for making a graduation speech different.