“Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon Thee, and we beg Thy blessings upon                                                       us,  our parents, our teachers and our Country.”                                         (prayer required by the New York Board of Regents, 1951-1962)

When I was fourteen the Supreme Court scandalized the Protestant and Catholic community by ruling that required recitation of the above prayer was a a violation of the establishment clause of the First Amendment. (Engel v. Vitale, 1962) I was fifteen, and I remember thinking, Good riddance to that useless prayer.

My parents and their friends moaned about how the government was taking prayer out of the public schools. When the issues of  drugs and racial strife were grabbing headlines, it was because “the government has taken prayer out of the schools.” I was reciting that prayer when I was seven years old, but I am pretty sure I didn’t know what “acknowledge our dependence on thee” meant until I was eleven. I got A’s in English.

I was a regular in Sunday School my whole twelve years of public schooling. I can recite the Regents prayer from memory, but I have never missed reciting it in school. Probably because I recited it every day. Same with “My Country, ‘t is of Thee.” When did I figure out ” ‘t is” , meant “It is” and that the “It is” referred to the words “of thee sing” later in the sentence. I never gave it much thought. 

Obviously I had issues with memorizing things, but I had a reason. Most words, after you say them too many times, lose their importance. For some reason adults thought that memorizing them enhanced their meaning. If you recited something, you had to internalize it.

That version of literacy died out about 160 years ago with the rise of written literacy.  Most words you memorize give you indigestion, unless the words have special meaning, for example the 23rd Psalm or the lyrics of “The Sounds of Silence”.

And yet Christians fondly remember when we started every single school day with the same prayer and the same song.  It kept us grateful when we were eight years old during the 1950’s, the good old days. I was not a very grateful kid, and I was raised in a devout household. Reciting that prayer, singing that song, did nothing for me.

The 1960’s were the beginning of Christian grievance politics. A succession of Supreme Court rulings made Christians feel victimized. They took the Bible out of the schools with

Abington School District v. Schempp, 374 U.S. 203 (1963)
School-sponsored Bible reading before class is unconstitutional. 

Then they took the Ten Commandments out of the public square

Stone v. Graham, 449 U.S. 39 (1980)                                                                                                                                                      The “Ten Commandments are undeniably a sacred text in the Jewish and Christian faiths, and no legislative recitation of a supposed secular purpose can blind us to that fact,”

Then they  ruled against the broadcast of a prayer from the school’s public address system

Santa Fe Independent School District v. Doe, 530 U.S. 290 (2000)
Students may not use a school’s loudspeaker system to offer student-led, student-initiated prayer.

And the same practices were overruled when school boards convened (Coles v. Cleveland Bd. of Educ), and when coaches initiated prayer at football games (Borden v. Sch. Dist. of the Twp. of East Brunswick).

I consider myself a devout Christian. I pray every day, but not in public display. Jesus actually frowned on that ((Matthew 6:5). Observances like loudspeaker prayer, Bible reading before class, and display of religious texts and symbols do not inspire spirituality. They are observances to show whose religion gets public endorsement.

The enforced observance of religious practices is a travesty of prayer or contemplation. It turns spirituality into meaningless rote practice and sets a pathetic example for honoring a religion or its God. It assumes that faith is communicated by repetition ad nauseum, until the recitation breaks down the resistance of the reciter. That would be the premise of television advertising, not for a religion desiring sincere reverence or  conversion.

 When Christians complain that the government is taking religion out of our lives, I wonder what they think religion is, a symbolic or a sincere practice? If it is no more than a symbolic practice, then I wonder if protesting its removal from public spaces is less from religious conviction, than from political grievance.