COMMEMTARY: Prayer and Faith Have a Legitimate Role in People's Lives ...
... but that role does not extend to our government bodies -- bodies committed to the common good.
By Martin Davis
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
Being uncomfortable is part of a journalist’s job. To understand how other people see the world, think about their communities, and organize their lives, one must enter into their environs and experience it first-hand.
This means entering into spaces with people who fundamentally represent and fight for things that may be totally antithetical to your own worldview. It also demands that one go a step further, and actually understand the arguments they use to defend the positions they hold.
Entering spaces with those you disagree with is the easy part. Understanding their arguments takes considerably more work.
Which brings us to the newest struggle in King George County — the move to introduce 15 minutes of prayer at the beginning of each School Board meeting.
For Board Chair David Bush, what mattered was instituting the policy in a way that would be “legal.”
The proposal is to push School Board meetings to 6:15 so that “a group of people … including School Board members if they wish, and any members of the community, [can gather] for a period of prayer before the meeting starts,” Bush said at the November 18 meeting.
Establishing the prayer meeting before the official start of the public meeting, Bush contends, “makes it legal.”
That may well prove to be the case, and don’t be surprised if the courts uphold the move should someone challenge it.
The question Bush doesn’t answer, however, is why he feels compelled to institute a prayer meeting before a School Board meeting. The way Bush wants to do this may pass legal muster, but it violates the spirit of church-state separation that has been a defining characteristic of the American body politic from the founding of the nation.
Only Bush knows the answer to that question for sure, but looked at in the context of what has been happening nationally for the past 50 years, we can make an educated guess as to his motivations.
Evangelical Absolutism
There’s a longstanding argument as to whether or not America is a “religious” nation. That is, are we a nation founded on faith? In a strict sense, the answer is no. The founding documents all owe far more to the Enlightenment than to any particular theology.
But in a broader sense, there’s a case to be made that America has an unusually high affinity for religion among Western nations. Britain, France, Germany, and most other nations of the European Union have seen the role of religion in public life dwindle to levels that hardly register.
As the Pew Research Center has Shown, “U.S. adults – both Christian and unaffiliated – are considerably more religious than their European counterparts by a variety of other measures, according to an analysis of data from Pew Research Center’s 2014 U.S. Religious Landscape Study in the U.S. and a 2017 survey of Western Europeans.”
Why is religion in the U.S. so much at the center of our public discussions? To answer that question, one must first understand what type of religion is being discussed.
Though America is home to all the world’s religious traditions, most often when people talk about religion in America, they’re talking about “Christianity.” Christianity, however, is not easily defined. So it’s unfortunate that people tend to equate American Christianity with evangelism — a strain of Protestantism that focuses almost exclusively on the personal salvation experience.
It is this evangelical tradition, most likely, that Bush is coming from.
Evangelicalism has not always been so extreme. In fact, it comes from a rich intellection tradition. Jonathan Edwards is often credited with founding evangelicalism in America. But over the past half century, evangelicalism has become a religious tradition with little intellectual integrity.
As historian of religion and self-described evangelical Mark Noll wrote in his classic 1995 book, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind:
“The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind.”
The tradition’s focus on personal salvation has stripped evangelicalism of its intellectual threads and led it to adopt some worrying connections to national identity that sometimes are branded as “Christian Nationalism.”
In this brand of Christianity, tolerance of other religious traditions is not accepted — non-evangelicals are to be saved. Those who aren’t are going to Hell. It’s not an approach to others that breeds respect.
Their reading of the bible is as painfully literal as it is blinded by the selectivity of texts it wishes to exegete. There are few evangelical sermons, for example, on the “works” of faith — works are dismissed; all that matters is conversion.
It should come as no surprise, then, that it’s this particular brand of Christianity that is trying to force itself onto all Americans using the levers of the state.
The takeover of the Spotsylvania School Board three years ago, the Moms for Liberty movement, and the effort to ban books are at least in part fueled by evangelicalism.
What Bush is attempting in King George, therefore, is not new or original. It’s in line with what evangelicals have been working to accomplish since the founding of the Moral Majority in the 1970s — actively turn America into a nation that prioritizes the evangelical understanding of Christianity. Indeed, it would demand that all Americans follow the evangelical understanding of faith and its role in public life.
Bush’s demand errs not because it’s ground in evangelicalism, however. There is nothing inherently wrong with Board members choosing to exercise their religious beliefs in private.
Rather, Bush errs by equating the common good — the work of our government boards and elected leaders — with his understanding of the highest good.
The vast majority of Americans simply do not accept his belief in that particular highest good.
Since 2000, the number of Americans practicing religion of any stripe has crashed. Younger people in particular are fleeing religious practice. It’s been particularly sharp in the evangelical world.
People are fleeing the evangelical church both because it has become too tightly wound to politics, and because of what Mark Noll observed 25 years ago. Today’s evangelicalism is intellectually and — in the words of several evangelical leaders — spiritually, shallow.
School Boards don’t need prayer or faith to be successful. They need people committed to educating young minds.
One’s faith tradition can certainly inform how any individual approaches this work. Let Bush’s faith tradition shape the way he approaches his work. But institutionalizing one faith tradition over all others cannot be allowed.
Evangelicals who wish to impose their prayer practices on others might ask how they would react were a Muslim, or a Buddhist, or a Hindu to insist that everyone engage in public prayers in their tradition before a meeting begins.
If that isn’t persuasive, then perhaps those advocating for Christian prayer before meetings should consider the words of their very own leader on the topic.
“And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.
—Matthew 6:5-6
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Interesting. The author begins the article by highlighting the importance of a journalist entering spaces with those he disagrees and working to understand their arguments. Then he proceeds to demonstrate throughout the rest of the article that in this case, he has neither entered the space of those he chastises nor sought to understand their arguments. As an evangelical pastor in the community, there are a lot of things that trouble me about contemporary evangelicalism in America. Some of those things would be things that the author and I could agree about. But the kind of broad sweeping generalizations about evangelicals found in this article are unhelpful and based on the author's own biases and ignorance. He should have spent more time with some evangelicals, working to understand their arguments, before hitting send on this one.
Regarding the prayer time that the school board member wants to have prior to the school board meetings, that's his right. Elected officials do not have to check their freedom of religion at the door before taking office. However, I'm not sure I understand why they don't have the prayer meeting at 5:45 and keep the school board meeting as it is rather than move the school board meeting back for the prayer time.
Excellent piece. Congrats on the clincher--the Matthean citation and for being willing to put it out there, for that is indeed part of the motivation as it was for that football coach who insisted on praying on the 50-yd line under the bright lights for all the world to see.