The Supreme Court Got It Wrong
It’s too bad that the Supreme Court doesn’t understand prayer. This week the court ruled that it’s OK to have prayer at government functions. Never mind the Constitution and the Establishment Clause. We Anglicans have known for nearly 500 years that the way we worship forms the way that we believe. (From the Latin: “Lex orandi, lex credendi”, “the law of worship is the law of belief” or “as we worship, we believe.”) We are formed by our prayers. That is the central purpose of The Book of Common Prayer.
I learned this at an early age when the public schools in this country served as the Protestant parochial schools with daily prayer and Bible class after school. In the 1950’s, when I was in elementary school, we had a daily prayer offered by a fundamentalist. It wasn’t usually a prayer as much as it was a lecture to us students. I figured out fairly quickly that this was not in keeping with my Episcopal teaching. But day after day repetition caused a great deal of confusion for me as a young student.
Prayer is not benign. It is not trivial. It is not an exercise in multiculturalism or interfaith dialogue. It is a conversation with God that comes out of a particular understanding of God shaped by one’s religious perspectives and understanding. So one person’s heartfelt prayer may be anathema to another’s prayer. And deeply offensive. Too bad that the Court doesn’t understand this. Too bad that the Court trivializes prayer.
Christ Church Blog 
I offer this excerpt from James Carroll’s Boston Globe column on the Supreme Court ruling:
“Ever since the Roman emperor Constantine, rulers have wanted religion close — to stifle it. In the US House of Representatives, the guidelines for guest chaplains invoking the deity explicitly require that ceremonial prayers refrain “from any intimations pertaining to foreign or domestic policy.” But what religious faith has nothing to say about foreign or domestic policy? Chaplains must bless only the status quo.
“Would Justices Kennedy, Scalia, Thomas, Roberts, and Alito be so happy with prayers at government policy sessions if they invoked not the safely resurrected Jesus in heaven, but the down-to-earth Isaiah-citing prophet who demands justice for the poor, liberty for prisoners, and proper care for the sick? Would the prayers in Greece, N.Y., have been upheld if routinely offered by the trouble-makingDesmond Tutu, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Dorothy Day, or even (note his radical challenge on desperate migrants) Pope Francis?
“Authentic prayer is a risky business. It has a way of forcing open realms in which answers are far from certain, set attitudes are questioned, and consciences are made uneasy. To pray, after all, is to acknowledge that no power on earth is supreme — not money, not weapons, not fame, not social standing, not romantic love, not even the US Constitution. All of these can be turned into idols, and often are. To pray is to look elsewhere for ultimate meaning, whose possible “intimations” pertain to everything — decidedly including foreign and domestic policy.”