School Prayer and Other Ostentatious Displays of Religious Hegemony

 

 

I always shake my dewlap in wonder at those well-meaning Christians who insist on their right to foist their personal religious convictions on the rest of you long-suffering Americans through such actions as public prayer in schools, before sports events, and the like. Please don't misunderstand me; no iguana is an atheist. I firmly believe in the Great Lizard, She Whose Scales Shine in the Night Sky as Stars, and I also believe in the power of prayer. But leaving aside the valid issue of church-state separation for a moment, let us ponder the question that is so popular among many these days (as well as among the purveyors of schlocky merchandise geared to milk the latest fad): What would Jesus do? Well, according to Matthew 6:5-6, he made the following statement regarding public displays of religious devotion:

And when you pray, you should not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the temples and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward.

But you, when you pray, enter into your closet, and when you have shut the door, pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret shall reward you openly.

Those who favor prayer in public schools always give the impression of knowing the Bible backward, forward, and sideways, so one would think that they might take the unequivocal ruling expressed in this verse to heart. Yet they never, ever mention it . . . probably because they would then have to apologize for being such arrogant, fly-blown idiots. However, in the spirit of Christian charity, I must allow for the possibility that certain verses of the Bible have been printed in a mystical ink that causes them to disappear from the view of the born-agains--because 99 percent of the time they are quoted by us heathens, and it surely does seem as though only we can read them.

 

© 2000 Gregor Everitt