Judge Awards Christian Student $150K After School Compelled Idol Worship

A young Christian woman who sued after her high school allegedly coerced her into participating in a Hindu meditation program has been awarded $150,000 by a federal judge.

As the Chicago Sun-Times reports, U.S. District Judge Matthew Kennelly ruled in favor of Mariyah Green, who graduated from Bogan High School in 2020. Green claims that while at the school she was made to take part in the Quiet Time meditation program. Green’s attorney, John Mauck, called the program a “thinly veiled Hinduistic religious program” that required students to “make obeisance [in] various ways to a member of the Hindu deities.”

“Mariyah Green’s Christian faith and her dedication to Jesus Christ makes worship of others, such as these idols, unthinkable,” said Mauck.

Among the parties named in the suit were the Chicago Board of Education and the David Lynch Foundation, which developed the transcendental meditation program. The foundation is the product of filmmaker David Lynch, an advocate of transcendental meditation who created the nonprofit to bring transcendental meditation to schools. The court is holding both the board and the foundation liable for paying Green $75,000 each.

Green said she felt forced to participate in the program because she was told it would count toward her grade. She was afraid of being kicked off the basketball team for poor grades, as she had transferred to Bogan to play on the basketball team.

The Sun-Times reports:

In the lawsuit, Green alleges the “Transcendental Meditation” program was held during school hours, and students were required to participate in an initiation ceremony called a “Puja” — an “expression of gratitude” to the dead founders of the practice.

During the “Puja,” instructors chanted words in Sanskrit containing “statements recognizing the power possessed by various Hindu deities and invitations to those same Hindu deities to channel their powers” without telling students what they meant, the suit states.

Green learned of the “hidden religious nature” of the program and shared the information with other CPS [Chicago Public Schools] students and teachers at Bogan. When teachers reminded her to meditate, she told them it “was not normal” and asked why students weren’t learning, the suit alleges.

Green, who graduated from Bogan in 2020, felt “alone and angry” when her opinions on the program weren’t respected and she was not given a choice about whether to participate. Mauck said the program “was an egregious abuse of Mariyah’s religious right.”

A spokesperson for Chicago Public Schools said the meditation program was removed in 2020, but declared that the school district “maintains that Quiet Time did not violate any student’s constitutional rights.”

The spokesperson added the judge’s decision was based on a “voluntary resolution between the parties akin to a settlement” and asserted that “The District has always denied, and continues to deny, any liability as a result of Quiet Time, and there has not been any finding of liability in this case by a judge or a jury.”

Mauck said after the decision, “We thank the court for the recognition of the critical Constitutional issues at stake here. Mariyah Green’s concerns have been justified, her voice has been heard, and the offending parties have been held accountable.”

Public schools have long been inculcating children with pagan, satanic, and anti-Christian dogma. The New American’s Alex Newman authored a report detailing the way in which the United Nations is pushing New Age spirituality in schools under the guise of “social-emotional learning” (SEL).

SEL aims to help children develop the “correct” attitudes on controversial issues including sexuality, “racial justice,” migration, abortion, global citizenship, environmentalism, and more. It is being promoted by the Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Education for Peace and Sustainable Development (MGIEP), part of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). But the organization is dominated by pagans, communists, New Agers, and fringe psychiatrists.

Furthermore, as Newman writes:

Another member of UNESCO MGIEP’s governing board is Dr. Richard Davidson, who is affiliated with everything from the fascist Great Reset-promoting World Economic Forum to New Age occultism. Perhaps even more important is that he co-authored a book with Daniel Goleman of CASEL, the premier outfit promoting highly sophisticated psychological manipulation and conditioning of children using social-emotional learning (SEL). CASEL admitted on its website that the whole idea for SEL came from the Fetzer Institute, an occult New Age organization founded by a disciple of Lucifer Publishing’s Alice Bailey.

Even though the Left has repeatedly talked about getting religion out of schools, the reality is they only want Christian religion out of the schools. They are more than happy to have other religions such as Hinduism, Islam, and paganism in classrooms.

In 2021, for example, the California State Board of Education voted unanimously to approve a new “ethnic studies model curriculum” under which elementary-school children are ordered to chant to the demonic Aztec deities Tezkatlipoka and Huitzilopochtli — gods of of human sacrifice, cannibalism, and war — all under the guise of helping students become “warriors for social justice.”

But Mariyah Green’s legal victory against Chicago Public Schools demonstrates that Christians across America are fighting back.