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I am a Christian and I am radically committed to the power of prayer. Nevertheless it should be no surprise that state organized prayer can have almost no impact. Prayer has never been bound up in political permission. Those who are committed to pray will pray... whether their school recognizes it or not. Prayer by it’s very nature can never be stopped by legislation, since it is entirely possible to pray without anyone else ever knowing, and more significantly, anyone who ceases to pray for mere legislative mandate has no business praying in the first place. He who prays to the Lord Jesus Christ recognizes the hierarchy of allegiance, and should be willing to die long before he would ever deny. I’ve read somewhere that we should fear Him who can kill body and soul, rather than he who can kill only the body. When Daniel was forbidden from praying to the true God, he continued in prayer thrice a day at the cost of his very life. Though God saved him from the den of lions, Daniel viewed death as far too small an obstacle to prevent his devotion. Governments may forbid the act of prayer but they are powerless to stop it. They may kill the pray-er, but they can never kill the prayer.
America is fat on “religion”, and the gospel stalls not because there is no formal prayer in school, but because the prayers being offered are shallow and generic, and the more involvement the state has in the nature and structure of prayer, the more benign prayer will become. For Christian parents who complain that prayer is not a significant part of their school’s curriculum I simply ask, “is prayer significant in your home?” For those parents who lament the fact that the ten commandments are not posted in their child’s homeroom, I simply ask, “do the ten commandments hang from your walls?” The Bible never expects secular government to be the catalyst for spiritual life, except in the sense that it provides the battleground in which we live out our spiritual life. The enemy’s stranglehold on contemporary culture (and education) is plenty reason to pray, we shouldn’t need that it be officially mandated. Sadly prayer is misunderstood and misappropriated. As John Piper notes, “we have taken a wartime walkie-talkie and tried to turn it into a civilian intercom”. Radical prayer is our most powerful weapon in the war against school violence, but school mandated prayer will never be a formidable force in combating the selfishness and immorality which permeates our schools.
For those who believe school prayer will somehow solve all of education’s ills, it won’t. For those who believe school prayer will destroy our very system of government and education: it won’t (“tolerance” is a far greater threat!). What will make a real difference is for Christians to invest more energy into their personal prayer lives than into trying to get our government to provide a forum for prayer. What is needed is for more men and women to stand up with a defense against the culture of relativism and self-autonomy. Forcing someone to pray is nothing, but prayerfully leading someone to a relationship where they can’t help but pray...well, that really does change things.
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