Thoughts on School Prayer
    My email mailbox continues to fill up with warnings of dire consequences if we continue to "keep God out of the schools" by not allowing prayer.   I don't know where these people making the warnings  went to school, but when I attended schools in three of these United States (Oregon, Ohio and Minnesota) nobody ever told us we couldn't pray.   The only expectation was that the prayer would be between ourselves and God, in other words private, and we were not allowed to coerce someone else to pray with us.   
    My experience is that most advocates of school prayer favor the type of prayer where one person offers up a speech to God while everyone else either listens respectfully or nods agreeably.   Curiously, despite the warning of Jesus for his followers NOT to pray this way (Matthew, chapter 6), this manner of prayer seems to be very popular with many pious Americans.  How odd that a nation that regards freedom so highly should favor a form of prayer that is essentially involuntary or coercive -- as opposed to the more personal voluntary prayer, usually done when one is alone.  Public prayer has to be regarded as involuntary, because there is almost universally a punishment for non-participants, ranging from actual violence or social ostracism to a really angry look from a mom.  The Jesus of the book of Matthew taught his followers to pray in their "inner rooms" and warned them pointedly against any such public demonstrations of piety.
    From the political standpoint, our founding fathers, who received a great deal more education in history than us modern folks, knew that battles over religious opinions had kept the fields of Europe bloody for centuries.   If we thought that battles over religion were a thing of the past, the events of September 11th should have changed our minds on that point.   People can, and will, shed blood if they feel God (their version, of course) will approve, and many a scripture (Christian and non-Christian) has been sited to show that this is acceptable behavior.  
    The question of public prayer in the schools also forces us to ask some other difficult questions.  Who is going to do the praying?  And to what version of a deity?  And what will we do if the prayer leader suddenly breaks into a "Hymn to the Forces of Darkness", as he or she has every right to do?   Which leads to the unsolvable question of who has the right to lead a prayer, and who doesn't.    Some Christian theology would hold that no one has the right to lead anyone else in their prayers, while other Christians are of the opinion that a book of prayers helps people to find the words for their own thoughts and yearnings.  Still others  don't believe a prayer has any true effect unless the person praying can speak in a special "prayer language" or reach an almost trance-like state of unconsciousness.  For them, all other prayers are something like sending God a greeting card with a stock message -- nice, but not as important.  Private prayer leads to no such problems as these; public prayer cannot avoid them.
    Even if there is no deliberate manipulation by one of our modern Christian "mullahs," there is more than a little superstition involved in the school prayer argument.  The argument I have read is that God won't come into the schools unless we invite Him, via prayer, to enter.  Without a godly invitation from the entire student body, there just might be a Columbine High School shooting, or worse!  Doesn't this argument sound just a bit like a conjuring trick?  We do this, so God must do that.  Or stated differently:  if we don't do this, perhaps God will allow that.  While this is a statement from the earliest beliefs of mankind ("Sacrifice a virgin, or God won't let the rains come!"), this is not the way Christ taught us to think, or pray, about a compassionate Father in heaven.    
    I hope this column doesn't give the impression that I am against school prayer, because I am not.  It is simply my feeling that no decree can prevent a true prayer, nor can it make one happen.  My personal hope is that schools and houses,  grocery stores and governmental offices, all are filled with prayers.  However, I hope these prayers can be made without coercion of any type.   I hope they will be prayers of love and acceptance, not fear and antagonism.  And I hope the prayers will come from the hearts of each individual and not from a loud-speaker on the wall.