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When 17-year-old Marian Ward stepped to the microphone last September to lead her fellow high-school, football fans in a pre-game prayer, she quickly became the newest centerpiece in a well-worn national debate. With political passions brewing on both sides, the Supreme Court must again wrestle with the constitutionality of school prayer... forty years after first excising it from our educational system. A verdict is expected by next month, but the debate itself may never end. For my part, I will make two observations and let the chips fall where they may. Number one, both sides of the debate seem to be largely exaggerating the overall effect which school sanctioned prayer would have. And number two, both parties are guilty of missing the true point of this mysterious institution.
Those supporting school prayer often sell it as a type of social super glue which can hold together a crumbling educational system. Those who oppose school prayer see it as a ghastly throwback to a time of discrimination and “intolerance”. Pro-prayer advocates believe that school prayer will provide a “positive message” for hordes of disillusioned students. No-prayer advocates label it as overly “proselytory” or “bigoted”. While each side argues how prayer will affect a listening student body, it is all but assumed that prayer is nothing more than natural oratory with a “spiritual” bent. Whether the impact be positive or negative, few are suggesting that prayer is anything but a mere expression of “faith”. Such thinking totally misses the point. The impact of prayer lies not in the people who hear it, but in the God who hears it because prayer is not primarily designed for our consumption but for God’s. Prayer is nothing so commonplace as an attempt to influence the thinking of men. Rather, it is the almost unfathomable attempt to influence the very thinking God, and an all-mighty, sovereign God at that! How’s that for impact?!
Kids are killing each other not because they didn’t hear a prayer before their football game or (in another debate) because they didn’t have the ten commandments posted by the pencil sharpener. They are killing each other because the whole foundation of right and wrong has been systematically destroyed by the very schools which now must reap the violent harvest of their own educational philosophy. Prayer means nothing when it is faithlessly presented to a generic and powerless deity. The ten commandments are stagnant in isolation, useless when unaccompanied by the principles which drive them. Context is everything, and the external outpourings of “spirituality” accomplish nothing so long as they are viewed as being detached from the real. How tragic that we have created a culture where science and religion don’t mix. We tell kids to have hope in a greater good while we do everything in our power to convince them that there is no creator, there are no absolutes and we are nothing more than accidents of time. Why should students behave non-violently when they’re told that we’re merely the chance product of some primordial soup? Students are smarter than we think, and if we tell them there are no absolutes, then we are further telling them that there is absolutely no reason not to kill. In this age of tolerance, we have destroyed the only truths which can ever prompt personal accountability, as we sit around and argue over something so comparatively insignificant as school sanctioned prayer.
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