Dear Readers: 

I'm sharing this opinion piece from the Washington Post that brings up an interesting point of view about religion and prayer under the U.S. Constitution. I'm not saying I agree or disagree with the author. Only, it makes me think about our Founders intent when forming our country. And anything that makes us think is always a good thing!  ~Susan 

NATIONAL DAY OF PRAYER

A National Day of Prayer? James Madison would be horrified. 

When the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom passed in 1786, James Madison, its champion, wrote to Thomas Jefferson, its author, “I flatter myself we have in this country extinguished forever the ambitious hope of making laws for the human mind.”

Not so fast, Jim.

Today, the United States will celebrate an official National Day of Prayer, as it has every year since 1952.

The National Day of Prayer kicked off a profusion of official endorsements of religion: the National Prayer Breakfast (1953); “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance (1954); a Congressional Prayer Room in the U.S. Capitol (1955); “In God We Trust” as the U.S. motto (1956), on our money (1957) and inscribed on the rostrum of the speaker of the House (1962).

Of those, it is the most benign. It’s less ubiquitous than the cash we handle, less coercive than a pledge that schoolchildren recite every day, less freighted with significance than a permanent fixture in the People’s House. A person might absolutely ignore the National Day of Prayer as she ignores other holidays that grant neither time off nor an excuse to drink green beer.

But we shouldn’t ignore it. We should get rid of it.

The courts have argued that these assertions of religiosity are essentially meaningless — declaring them “ceremonial” or “civic” in order to find them constitutional. Supposedly nonsectarian, they presume belief in a monotheistic God, and they lean distinctly Christian, with some “Judeo” thrown in. The National Day of Prayer, which was suggested by the Rev. Billy Graham on the steps of the Capitol during a huge evangelical revival, was promoted as an idea that “all creeds can join in whether they be Catholic, Protestant or Jew.”

So “all” is approximate, I guess.

But the problem isn’t that our religious laws fail to include everyone. The problem is that we have religious laws.

Perhaps you believe, as I once did, that government displays of religious piety are no big deal. An unflattering feature of American culture — like shopping malls — not one of its fatal flaws, like gun violence. After all, there’s no penalty for not praying on the National Day of Prayer...read more