The Jarretts immediately took Lucius out of scripture classes and put him into “non-scripture”, where Lucius sat in the library drawing. “He wasn’t even allowed to do school work, because that would have disadvantaged those kids who were doing scripture.” As soon as they could, they enrolled Lucius in ethics, which they now describe as “fantastic. It is exactly what we thought religious teaching would be about – generalised morality, how to be a good person, how to live a good life, how to deal with conflict.” And yet avoiding God at school is not quite that easy. “It’s all well and good to say 'I chose my child not to take the special religious education program',” says Dr Cathy Byrne, an expert in sociology of religion at Southern Cross University. “But it doesn’t stop them being confronted by the chaplain at the front gate or being handed a special invitation to the church-funded BBQ.”

THOSE who comfort themselves with dusty old notions like secularism and the separation of church and state might be under the impression that God was expelled from state schools a long time ago. Far from it. God is still working assiduously in our government schools, not just in scripture classes but in the playground and the counsellor’s office, on school camps and excursions, during breakfast and lunch programs and special mentoring exercises.

The debate over the role of religion in Australia's public schools was ignited earlier this month, when the High Court ruled in favour of Queensland father Ron Williams, who challenged federal funding for the National Schools Chaplaincy scheme. The court ruled the funding model, with money going directly to religious organisations rather than students, was invalid. Opponents of the scheme see the judgment as an opportunity to redirect funding to areas of “genuine need”, as Greens Senator Penny Wright describes it. “More teenagers now die in suicide than in car accidents. We have a crisis in youth mental health, and the time for amateurs has now passed. We now need qualified mental health workers and support workers in schools.” Wright describes the chaplaincy program, which has been taken up by 391 NSW state schools, as “purely ideological – a blatant push to have Christianity in public schools.” She is particularly incensed at the timing. “They are pouring $250 million into this at the same time as they are ripping $30 billion out of education in the long term and abandoning the last two years of Gonksi funding.” But the High Court judgment does not spell the end of religious chaplains in public schools, and had nothing to say about the separation of church and state. The public school system remains wide open as the next “mission field” for evangelical churches, which remain free to provide chaplaincy services on the approval of a school principal in NSW. “I didn’t actually ask the question, could we, should we, maybe we could, I’m saying the church must engage with schools,” says Angela Jolly, CEO of Schools Ministries Group, which oversees the chaplaincy program in schools across South Australia.

In a recent video presentation, Jolly made clear her intention to “provide a Christian presence at every school in South Australia”. It doesn’t have to be a chaplain, she said: “It might be a breakfast program, a lunchtime program, a mentoring program. There are lots of different organisations and mission groups that are providing services to schools. “We need to recognise that people aren’t building communities around churches any more; they are building communities around schools. So if we are not connecting and engaging, we need to be doing that.” The ultimate goal, she said, is to “help [students] understand that their purpose in life is to have a relationship with Jesus.”

THE MANTRA of “free, compulsory, and secular” has been the philosophical bedrock of public education in Australia since at least 1870. But that is not to say that God has been absent from our schools. From at least the 1880s, when the NSW Public Instruction Act established a dual system of secular instruction, public schools were obliged to make time available for general religious education and special religious education. Today, special religious education – or scripture – is taught to about a third of NSW's 750,000 public school students,mostly from the Catholic and Anglican churches, and predominantly by volunteers. Parents are given a choice about whether their child will participate, and instruction in a specific denomination may be provided if sufficient parents request it and the religious provider can meet that request.

In some primary schools, ethics classes are offered if parents have indicated a demand for them and the provider, Primary Ethics, can supply a teacher. The scripture sector say their members make up the second largest volunteer force in the state after surf lifesavers. But many question whether the volunteers' training and qualifications are adequate to justify placing them in front of children in contemporary classrooms. “Scripture was traditionally delivered by the major churches by friendly mums or grannies who had some time on their hands,” Byrne says. “It stuck to the simple message of being nice, forgiveness, and doing the right thing.” But now, she says, religious instruction in schools has been hijacked by missionary organisations such as the Scripture Union, Access Ministries, Hillsong, and other extreme Christian evangelisers. “Their teaching is anti-science, homophobic, and discriminatory against women, non-Christian believers, atheists and critical thinking.” Former evangelical pastor Joel Pittman can attest to this first hand. Pittman took scripture classes in the Penrith area. In the classes he would explain to the children how they would have at some stage broken virtually all of the Ten Commandments, and how therefore they are going to hell. “And then after that, we say, ‘but there is a solution! And then in your nice little state high school, we would offer people the opportunity to become Christians, in class. And we would have the whole class shut their eyes, and ask that if they wanted to become Christian, and nine times out of 10 every single kid in the room did it.”

Pittman went from having a youth group with five or six kids at the start to having 90 kids in his youth group, "which was twice as large as the one I had at church". He would then sign the kids up for Encounter Weekends, where they would learn about casting out demons and speaking in tongues. Christians deny that SRE or chaplaincy is about proselytising. According to Peter James, the CEO of Scripture Union Queensland, chaplains "are there to provide emotional and spiritual support in schools”. He says even secular research shows that 70 per cent of Australians claim some attachment to religion, and that "many state governments recognise that complete child development involves not only cognitive, emotional, physical and social but also spiritual”. So why should religion be kept at home, James asks? “The chaplaincy program is about putting a person in the school who has training to do all the work a secular youth worker would but who also has the training to do religious work if the parents and child want it.” For parents and children, however, it is not as simple as opting in or out of scripture classes. “You can't say there is a choice when a school also has a chaplain or a god-bothering breakfast and lunchtime program, or when there is a religious prayer at assembly, or a before school program run by Hillsong or various other evangelical or mega-church groups," says Byrne. "There is absolutely no way that a parent can be across all that and there is no mechanism for them to opt out of it.

"Parents' and children's right for freedom of and from religion are being violated by education departments in this country.” Many church groups now openly regard public schools as the next “mission field”, and show no lack of enterprise in going beyond mere chaplaincy or SRE. “In Australia, the state school is a very powerful and potent instrument for a sense of community, actually generally stronger than a local church,” Reverend Peter Robinson, CEO of Christian group Genr8, which is the largest provider of school chaplains in NSW. A recent post on Genr8’s website suggests a range of ways that church and scripture teachers can get involved in school activities, including lunch groups, youth groups and school camps. “Lunch groups are good, but short,” it says. “On a camp there for three days! Chat to [students], stay up with them, help with bedtime duties … Take a list of names. Remember students and what their lives are like, pray for them…. Don’t miss this opportunity to link them up.”

Meanwhile, Youth Alive NSW, another interdenominational Christian group, runs welcome-to-school parties for year 7 students starting at high school. “We want every new student in high school for 2014 to experience the love and support of their local Christian community," the youth group says on its website. For Ross and Kathryn Jarrett, the decision to withdraw their son from scripture elicited an unlikely degree of solidarity. “When I heard what had happened, I also took my son out of scripture,” says friend and Christian Ellie Elia. “I used to be a scripture teacher when I was a youth worker. There are absolutely golden people out there who allow students to explore the Christian story in an open-minded manner, but there are other people out there who are more fundamental, and who create a fear and distrust and anxiety, rather than thinking creatively about spirituality and what life is about and how we relate to one another.”

Additional reporting by Amy McNeilage