Let Us Pray

By Richard Brookhiser

When speaker-to-be Newt Gingrich announced that one of the priorities of the emerged Republican majority would be school prayer, wise men shook their heads; the G.O.P. was making the same mistake Bill Clinton had when he began his transition by pushing for gays in the military.

Bill Clinton should have been so lucky. Allowing prayer in schools is as popular as allowing gays in the military was not. Hardly a semester passes without some school principal or state legislature trying to smuggle it back in, past the baleful eye of the A.C.L.U. and its postulants on the bench. The 1962 Supreme Court decision that banished prayer from public school classrooms is one of the most unpopular the court has handed down, and surely the only one that unites Newt Gingrich and D.C. mayor-elect Marion Barry.

It is also one of the court's most whimsical decisions -- a policy preference of mid-20th century liberals disguised as constitutional fundamentalism. It's a good thing the Justices who endorsed it were not around in 1789, or they would have ruled that the day of "public thanksgiving and prayer" that had been proclaimed that October was an establishment of religion too. The House of Representatives of the First Congress called for the day of thanksgiving the day after it passed the First Amendment, which prohibited any establishment of religion.

But something may be popular and legal without being desirable. An atheist desires public prayer no more than he enjoys the currency and the national anthem, with their affirmations of trust in God. Though some of the original suits against school prayer were supported by atheists, the big numbers against it have always come from religious Americans suspicious of another religion's power plays: Jews fearful of a Christian nation, and liberal Christians fearful of the same thing.

There are also conservative arguments against public school prayer. The practical counterargument is that it would buy time for the public school system. One of the great engines of disenchantment with the way bureaucrats instruct children is the religious right, for which Johnny's inability to pray and to read are linked. Returning prayer to public schools might deflect conservative evangelicals from the campaign against the education establishment. Evangelists for school choice don't want the public school system to get better; they want it to get worse, as a prelude to getting out of it and into private schools. To them the push for prayer is like asking the band of the Titanic to strike up Nearer, My God, to Thee.

How meaningful would the prayers be, anyway? Religious opponents of school prayer fear petitions that would be content-free. As Christian libertarian Doug Bandow puts it, "Formalistic rituals teach an empty spirituality devoid of meaning." Is there any reason to think the pedagogues who once gave kids George Washington and the cherry tree and who now give them Crispus Attucks and other patriots of color would do any better at framing appeals to the Almighty?

These arguments melt before the case for school prayer, which is historical and political. The Founders knew that religion should be left to believers. They invoked God not to instruct Americans about theology, but to remind them about the nature of liberty.

The first Thanksgiving Proclamation, issued by President Washington, asserts that "it is the duty of all Nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God." The U.S., however, had special reasons to be thankful: "for the signal and manifold mercies . . . in the course and conclusion of the late war"; "for the peaceable and rational manner in which we have been enabled to establish constitutions"; and "for the civil and religious liberty with which we are blessed." Men fight and plan for liberty, but they do not decree it. God does that. The Thanksgiving Proclamation echoed, in workaday language, the assertion of the Declaration of Independence that rights are the Creator's endowment.

Men have imagined other sources for their rights besides the Almighty. The Declaration mentions "the Laws of Nature." But it immediately adds, ". . . and of Nature's God." Wisely so. The past 200 years have shown that nature is a distressingly malleable concept. It is a philosopher's parlor trick to collapse it into history (nature in time) or will (nature in us). When such philosophies seeped into politics, they spawned communism and Nazism. It is also true that God -- and various gods -- has covered a multitude of political sins over the millenni. But in the modern world, rights fare best when they are derived from a Source men fear to tamper with.

Will it do little hellions any good to be exposed to such sentiments in homeroom? Maybe not. Congress begins each day with a prayer, and look how it behaves. But a society should know where the things it holds dear come from, and why there are limits to its own actions. School is one place to learn such things, and one way of learning is to repeat the lesson daily.