Pray quietly and wash your hands afterward

1 October 2009 Pray quietly and wash your hands afterward




There was another prayer challenge article in the newspaper this morning. You know the type I mean, one that pits a small town against the 1st amendment. This time it is Gate City VA High School. A host of students have decided that the 1st Amendment does not apply to high school football games.

At a recent football game, a student organized and led a Christian prayer. A parent of another student contacted the ACLU, which investigated and notified the school authorities that such incidents are unconstitutional. The school authorities agreed and pointed to a prayer-free football season last year.

The latest bit of the dust-up is that three students designed, printed, and handed out 700 black T-shirts that sport the school’s initials and a cross with the phrase “I still pray...” written on the front and “in Jesus’ name” on the back.

One of the students who will be garbed as described above is quoted as saying,” “We are also planning to wear the T-shirts at the game. By doing this we are hoping to prove a point ... that no one can stop Christians from praying.”

The shirts reportedly cost $8.00 each. Another 400 shirts are on order.

I don’t know who has paid for the shirts that are being given out. Gate City is not a large or wealthy town. Though it has a small population 2195, it has 13 churches according to one on-line source.

The most recent statistics I could find indicate that the town is not religiously diverse.

Name,
 Southern Baptist Convention,

Adherents 42.5%
Congregations 22.2%

United Methodist Church,
Adherents 29.7%
Congregations 37.5%

National Association of Free Will Baptists,
Adherents 12.0%
Congregations 15.3%

East District Association of Primitive Baptist,
Adherents 8.7%
Congregations 13.9%

Christian Churches and Churches of Christ
Adherents 2.1%
Congregations 1.4%

 Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee),
Adherents, 1.0%,
Congregations, 1.4%,

Presbyterian Church (USA),
Adherents, 1.0%,
Congregations, 1.4%,

Catholic Church,
Adherents,.0.9 %
Congregations, 2.8%

Evangelical Covenant Church,
.Adherents, 0.8%,
Congregations, 1.4%,

Other religions
Adherents, 1.4%
Congregations, 2.8%


Source: Jones, Dale E., et al. 2002. Congregations and Membership in the United States 2000. Nashville, TN: Glenmary Research Center.

Looking at the numbers, most of these people spring from the same bible belt fountain. This cultural homogeneity is good if one is looking for back up in one’s faith. It is not good if one is to be a citizen of the nation as a whole.

From this tightly-knit bunch of faithful and many like them springs the concept that there is a war on Christianity. These folks feel that their faith gives them the right to pray anytime and anywhere they want, without concern for any non-Christians who may happen to be present. Their concept of the 1st amendment is that it provides them freedom to practice their religion. They simply miss the part about no establishment of a state religion. They fail to see how a prayer condoned by or authorized by an element of government – a school in this instance, can possibly be construed as establishment of a state religion.

In many ways, these people are good-hearted and well-meaning. Many of them will give you the shirt off their back if you seriously need help. But they tend to believe that some passages in their scriptures require them to proselytize and to pray publically.

Here’s where the wheel rubs. While most of these people will tell you that they will be tolerant while someone else prays in a different manner, in actuality many of these small towns are so religiously homogenous that there the most exotic faith is the Roman Catholic church and its attendees.

The idea that Islamic prayer would be tolerated has already been disproven at several meat-packing plants in Iowa. Many locals have objected to co-workers being allowed break times that coincide with prayer times during their shifts.

As for tolerating Jewish prayer, they might, but we wouldn’t normally ask it of them.

The odds are that most of the towns like Gate City rarely have much Moslem, Buddhist, or Jewish population. During WWII, my father-in-law was at a training base in TN, preparing to ship overseas to Europe. While there, he was approached by TN natives who wanted him to show them his horns. They had been told by someone, and willingly believed, that all Jews have horns. That gulf in reality rather makes establishing an attitude of real tolerance somewhat difficult.

At one point in the history of the U.S., many small towns had a “Jew Store,” dry goods, variety store owned by one family and serving a market not filled by locals.

www.goodreads.com/book/show/343067.The_Jew_Store

The book is on my list of things I must read. It is, I believe, available in our local library. It deals with TN but Gate City is less than ten miles from TN. My Grandmother lived in the MO boot heel. The small town, about Gate City’s size, had a large Baptist church, a larger Methodist church, and a small Catholic church. The town had two Jewish families. One ran the dry goods store, one ran the pharmacy. They were about 150 miles from a synagogue.

But back to the black t-shirts. Let’s assume 700 people are going to attend a small town Friday night football game. Many of the students are apparently planning to stage a prayer. They fail to realize that they are wrong. And the adults who are implicitly involved in this are very wrong. They are fostering a division among our citizens that need not be there. They are creating a “war on Christians.”

There is no “War on Christians,” no “War against Christians” if one wishes to be more grammatically correct. There is a definite demand by some citizens that the majority faith be prevented from declaring this nation a theocracy.

Let me repeat that.
There is a definite demand by some citizens that the majority faith be prevented from declaring this nation a theocracy. And there is a decided fatigue on the part of many non-Christians with respect to the practice of invoking Christian religion at every possible instance and public event.


I see no need to invoke any deity from any faith to oversee athletic events, political conventions, speeches by public officials, or any of a million events each day which eventually wind up being preceded by someone praying, and too often, doing his or her level best to convert any infidels and condemn all the unconverted to some unpleasant afterlife. I see no harm in athletes praying before a game, but not publically and not involving the public. The same restrictions apply to classrooms, PTA meetings, you name the instance.

The good people practicing tolerance will tell you in all earnestness that the “non-believers’ children are allowed to step outside or away during the prayer. Of course they are. And in a town of 2200 or in any other school in the country, the poor non-believers’ children have just had a huge bulls eye scribed on their back. I’ve been the only Jew in a town of 8000. I’m pretty thick-skinned and good at ignoring things I don’t care to hear. But every population has some bottom feeders just ready to swim up to a target of opportunity. Physical injury isn’t always the most painful source of scars.

I feel sorry for the kid or kids whose parents stuck up for their rights not to be subjected to a “state” religion. The parents were right, the school was wrong, and whoever helped get this t-shirt campaign started was dead wrong. But that’s not going to help the kid(s). Their high school days will likely be more hellish than usual. They won’t ever fit in, won’t hang around after graduation, and won’t ever show up at a class reunion.

Gate City? Well, they’ll all wear their shirts to a few games. They’ll pat each other on the back and tell each other that they’ve made the world safe for democracy and Jesus. But they haven’t. They’ve absolutely flunked their civics exam, blew all the questions about the 1st amendment. They’ve ignored democracy and our democratic republic, for a home town version of mob rule that would have been quite at home during the Reign of Terror or during the French Third Republic and the days of the Dreyfus Affair. And lastly, from what my real Christian friends tell me and show me, prayer is intended to be a private matter, not a public performance. Charity and tolerance for all are traits found in real Christians. They’ll go out of their way to include someone but not to ostracize them. I’m sure the kids in Gate City are proud of their prayer campaign, directly intended to defy the U.S. Constitution. But I don’t think their Jesus would be happy with their actions.



So here’s my proposal. I’ll keep my prayers to myself and hope that you can do the same. If I suddenly find the need to pray when I at a meeting or a concert, I’ll do it silently and not involve you. When I’m through, I wash my hands – although you may need to wash before and after. I’ll only ask the same courtesy of you. Join me, and there will be no need to talk about war on any faith this year.