 |
Read an excerpt from Senator John Danforth's book FAITH AND POLITICS (Viking, 2006):
Prayers at public events, political or not, are designed to be inoffensive and bland. They do acknowledge God, but in a de minimis way. If we heard such prayers in church, we would feel that we, as well as God, had been shortchanged. I have heard people say about such prayers, "What harm do they do?" Probably little, if any. The reverse of the question is equally apt. What good do they do? Same answer.
While the standard for public prayer is that it be innocuous, that is not the standard most religious people would apply to their own spiritual lives. Going through the formality of religion for the sake of appearances is exactly what Jesus criticized the Pharisees for doing. Christians who customarily pray in the name of Jesus and through Jesus would not consider the conscious omission of any reference to their Lord as doing justice to the demands of their faith.
So it is surprising that all-purpose public religion has generated such fervent support, especially from conservative Christians. Recent controversies about the display of the Ten Commandments in courthouses in Alabama and Kentucky and on the state capitol grounds in Texas have inspired organized prayer meetings on courthouse steps, with the assembled faithful asking divine help and judicial wisdom that God not be taken out of our nation's life.
But the public display of religion is not God. We do not put God in our nation's life by placing the Ten Commandments in courthouses, nor do we evict God by removing the Ten Commandments from public property. God is not portable. Bland prayers, offered as noncontroversial formalities after the National Anthem and the Pledge of Allegiance do little to honor God.
I have heard people assert that public religion has a positive influence on behavior. For example, they think that prayer in school might improve the deportment of children. At best, that is conjecture, and I question whether it is true. I doubt that high school football players who kneel for locker room prayer before a game play any differently than those who do not pray, unless they gain intensity by the belief that God will take sides in the game. For all the effort to keep a granite monument of the Ten Commandments in the lobby of an Alabama courthouse, I doubt that its presence changed the behavior of any litigant or lawyer who walked by it.
If public religion is, in truth, a show of religiosity more than an act of faith, and if its influence on behavior is doubtful, then I wonder why so many people feel so strongly about the importance of religion in the public square. Why would anyone care enough about nonsectarian prayers in schools or granite-inscribed versions of the Ten Commandments in courthouses to hold vigils to promote his cause? Indeed, why is public religion significant enough to amount to a cause?
 |
|
|
|
I think the reason behind this fervor is an understandable concern about the state of values in our society. When the divorce rate is 50 percent and unwed teen pregnancies are 34 percent, when it seems that family entertainment is impossible to find among the obscene, when children have access to drugs, then there is little wonder that many Americans are desperate to restore some measure of decency to our common life, to return to a world which, at least in our memories, was better than what we have today -- a world in which religions seemed to have more force in influencing how people live their lives.
So it seems that we live in a godless age, and we feel deeply that we must reverse this; we must restore God, and we seize upon public religion as a way to do this. School prayer, the Ten Commandments, the teaching of creationism or intelligent design and crËches in front of public buildings all become parts of an effort to reverse our moral course and return our country to a time of public decency.
It is a worthy objective. The problem is that public religion is not up to the task. An innocuous prayer has no power to make us more godly. A display of the Ten Commandments will not make us obey the commandments. What public religion can do is create an appearance that faith is a formality contrived to impress people more than God. It can give us something to argue about among ourselves, in political campaigns and in courts. And when it is not merely vacuous, when it slips into the expression of one religious tradition or another, it tells us that even in our common life we are not one people, but people on one side or another of a sectarian divide.
The practice of religion is an effective antidote to the disease so apparent in our society. People who practice their beliefs will live according to moral and ethical standards their religion teaches them. They will be witnesses against the tawdriness of the culture around them. They will be examples of the people God expects us to be. They will be that because they understand and live by the tenets of their traditions. That is the practice of religion. It is different altogether from the display of public religion.
|
|
