This excerpt from a recent essay by Roger Ebert so beautifully draws the line on government-sanctioned prayer.
This is really an argument between two kinds of prayer--vertical and horizontal. I don't have the slightest problem with vertical prayer. It is horizontal prayer that frightens me. Vertical prayer is private, directed upward toward heaven. It need not be spoken aloud, because God is a spirit and has no ears. Horizontal prayer must always be audible, because its purpose is not to be heard by God, but to be heard by fellow men standing within earshot.
To choose an example from football, when my team needs a field goal to win and I think, "Please, dear God, let them make it!"--that is vertical prayer. When, before the game, a group of fans joins hands and "voluntarily" recites the Lord's Prayer--that is horizontal prayer. It serves one of two purposes: to encourage me to join them, or to make me feel excluded.
I'm still surprised when I'm reminded that Roger is a newspaperman first, and a movie critic second.
Um
pudge on 2003-03-16T01:14:50
When, before the game, a group of fans joins hands and "voluntarily" recites the Lord's Prayer--that is horizontal prayer. It serves one of two purposes: to encourage me to join them, or to make me feel excluded. How big an ego does he have to think that it in any way has to do with him?
I agree with him on many of the points, but the primary purpose of group prayer is merely the shared experience of the members of the group. That he happens to be passing by or in the general vicinity of the prayer isn't the point, and it is disingenous or blind of him to make it the point.
He violates his oath of office daily by getting down on his knees in his government office every morning and welcoming federal employees to join him in ''voluntary'' prayer on carpets paid for by the taxpayers. And that statement is, quite simply, entirely false. There is absolutely no prohibition in law, principle, or precedent from praying in your office or welcoming others to participate with you. None.
Because our enemies are for the most part more enthusiastic about horizontal prayer than we are, and see absolutely no difference between church and state--indeed, want to make them the same--it is alarming to reflect that they may be having more success bringing us around to their point of view than we are at sticking to our own traditional American beliefs about freedom of religion. And that statement is just alarmist FUD. First, "their point of view" is at best only tangentially related to the general principle of church and state; it is a very specific church, one that is nearly polar opposite to Bush's. In fact, their point of view can flourish more in the US under a secularist government than it could under one ruled by Bush's religion.
Second, the legal concept of separation of church and state is entirely unrelated to Bush's invocation of the name of God at public events, praying in public, attending religious events, befriending religious leaders, etc.
The piece is muddled and confused. The issue of public prayer just has nothing to do with church and state, and the issue of Islamic extremism and their church and state has no real parallel, except in very abstract ways, to the issue of church and state in America.
He has some very valid points to make about coercion through public prayer and the Pledge of Allegiance, but he ruins it by trying to use those issues to attack the existence of overtly religious men in government.
