Closet prayer
“But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.” Matt. 6:6
There is a popular notion among conservative Christians that this country took a wrong turn when the supreme court ruled against prayer in schools. The thought is that if we could just get prayer back in schools we could recapture a previous golden age.
There are a couple of implied assumptions in that claim. They include the following:
- Things are worse now then when prayer in schools was legal.
- If prayer were legal, it would be a conservative Christian prayer.
- There is no prayer in schools today.
You don’t have to look at much history to see how silly this whole argument is.
Group prayer was effectively outlawed in public schools by the Supreme Court in a series of decisions starting in 1962. What is important to understand, is that these ruling did not outlaw individual prayer, as long as it wasn’t disruptive. They just prohibited mandatory group prayer that was in any way non-secular. In 1962, African Americans were still widely and legally discriminated against. Mob lynching continued until 1968. Jim Crow laws disenfranchised Blacks and segregated schools were the norm. School children routinely practiced nuclear attack duck-and-cover drills. People were building private bomb shelters in their back yards and late that year the United States and Russia came to the brink of nuclear war in the Cuban Missile Crisis. If you were a white middle class family living the suburbs it may have been a golden age, but if you were a poor person of color living in the south, it was still very tough.
As someone who believes in the power of prayer, I don’t have a problem with prayer in public schools, but which prayer? Muslims and Jews have rich prayer traditions. Catholics and Protestants can’t even agree on the Lord’s prayer. Monotheists are going to object to animist and Wiccan prayer. You cans see where this is going. There is no one prayer that is going to satisfy all of the communities willing to pray. So in the public school setting, the most loving choice is to simply set aside time for those who would like to pray and let them exercise that right in whatever way they chose while not disturbing others. That’s pretty much what the Supreme Court has said.
Finally, prayer is already legal and practiced in many private schools and private school enrollment is exploding (up over 10% now). That probably isn’t going to be sufficient, at least in the minds of some conservative Christians, to save the country.
The real problem in schools is not that there isn’t enough prayer. The real problem is that there aren’t enough high school graduates (only 70%) and too few of those are going to college. Prayer can help that situation, but it is the prayer that all of us engage in to know that God is the source of all knowledge and that His creation man reflects that knowledge in wise choices.