Competing for God's ear - school prayer - Column

Christian Century, April 19, 1995 by Martin E. Marty

Readers of this column know my views on school prayer legislation. I now favor a school-prayer amendment, because historians like to write about conflict--and if you think there's conflict now when prayer is not officially sanctioned, or when prayer is officially nonsanctioned, just see what happens in classrooms and school boards after we get a school-prayer amendment.

The latest twist in the debate is a partial accommodation to the "let's take turns praying" compromise. It is posed by Richard D. Land in Salt, the newsletter of the Christian Life Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention. The CLC now favors government intervention in religious practice. The Baptist tradition, now long forgotten by SBC leaders, began in an ornery, keep-the-government-out-of-my-religion mood. Land is deft enough to gloss over this. The supporters of the amendment, he says, "do not want a return to the government-mandated scripture reading and prayer overturned by the Supreme Court in 1962 and 1963." They "do want to guarantee by constitutional amendment that the widespread suppression of students' free exercise of religion rights during the last three decades will cease forthwith."

All of us pro-amendment people have learned to put the theme that way. Land spells out a new twist for conservatives:

Some have asked, "Does an open

student forum for prayer mean students

will hear Buddhist and Islamic

prayers?" Yes, an open forum

means a forum open to all. Neither

school officials nor student majorities

may choose which religious expression

to permit or disallow...

Each student will determine the

content of his or her prayer, and no

student may be excluded. This

should not concern Christians. Do

we not believe that a student's

prayer offered up to the one true

God has infinitely more power than

prayers offered in the name of Allah

or Buddha? After all, Elijah did not

shy away from contest with the

prophets of Baal. He welcomed it (1

Kings 18).

"No student may be excluded" means that the classroom praying contests will include the ambitious and ingenious devil worshipers, Satanologists, Wiccans and other "infinitely less powerful" pray-ers. (Note that even infinitely less powerful prayer has some power, in Land's scenario.) Their prayers will join those of Scientologists, Rastafarians, the anti-Semitic Nation of Islam and other less infinitely less powerful pray-ers. They will all be filling the ears of "the one true God," who herself will be busy sorting out the good prayers from the bad in hundreds of thousands of classrooms.

I want to be there when the "my-God-is-oner-and-truer-than-your-God" contests begin. Not only God but the little kids will listen to the prayers. What will children think if the Buddhist and Islamic prayers against earthquakes in California seem effective and, the day after a Christian prays against earthquakes, there is an earthquake? What will that do to the judges, referees and little Christian players of the game?

Land wants us to ask "the nation to speak in unequivocal terms by passing a constitutional amendment which specifies constitutional protection for student-initiated, student-sponsored, student-led prayers in a forum from which no student's convictions excluded."

I just did, and pray that it will.