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One-sided prayers hide melting pot traditions
© St. Petersburg Times, published November 26, 2000 Ihaven't even met Carol Snyder, and already I like her. I like her so much I am willing to take on part of the load of anger and sometimes outright religious bigotry that has come her way since she made the simple suggestion that the Citrus County School Board stop using strictly Christian prayers at its meetings. And she managed to create this ruckus at her very first School Board meeting. A furious flurry of mail and telephone calls inundated Snyder who, new or not, is sticking to her guns. Please note that Snyder, a Catholic, didn't recommend outlawing prayer altogether, she just wanted the prayer at meetings to be inclusive rather than exclusive. I agree. The typical response to her suggestion, sometimes in extremely vitriolic terms for persons who profess a religion based on love and acceptance, runs something like this: America is a Christian nation, anybody who isn't Christian is here only because Christians tolerate their wrong-minded views and can go home (wherever that is) if they don't like it, and if every single prayer at every governmental function doesn't invoke Jesus Christ then Life As We Know It will end immediately and it will all be Carol Snyder's fault. I beg to offer an opposing view. First, the people that founded the current Eurocentric government of America had the supreme good sense to place the disestablishment clause in the First (note FIRST) Amendment to the Constitution, prohibiting the establishment of a state religion. I think the "believe-as-I-do-or-drop-dead" people lambasting Snyder are exactly what the founding fathers had in mind when they outlawed the establishment of a state religion. The Asians that most archaeologists believe were the first inhabitants of the continent after crossing what is now the Bering Straits were not Christians, neither were the Scandinavians who almost certainly beat Columbus here. And Columbus and the Spaniards who first settled here had nothing remotely like religious freedom in mind when they did everything they could to destroy "Indian" religion and culture. It was a group of English Puritans who, we are told in elementary school and every Thanksgiving, came here "looking for religious freedom," although their subsequent actions make it fairly clear that they also came to persecute anyone who believed differently than they did. Either that, or they hanged 12 "witches" and crushed one to death just for sport. I think Christians and all of the rest of us have a right to pray for ourselves all we want. At a government function where the prayer is for a joint and secular (like it or not) enterprise, the prayer can easily be made non-sectarian, or the invocation can be rotated through to members of the clergy representative of the community, even giving the atheists and agnostics a chance to wonder aloud about the existence of the Deity that Mrs. Snyder's critics are so sure they have the only handle on. "Are we not an English Speaking Christian Nation?" asks one writer. Not the last time I was in Miami, and not necessarily in a nation that has Jews, Buddhists, Muslims, Hindus and persons of other faiths who are full-fledged citizens. The poem on the bottom of the Statue of Liberty doesn't speak only to the English speaking and Christian huddled masses. We are and always have been a melting pot, and limiting prayers at official functions to one religion flies in the face of that tradition. There are those who say prayer has no part in any government function and the type of rigidity displayed by the people chastising Snyder is one reason things wound up that way. Demanding all or nothing is frequently a good way to wind up with nothing. One thing we should all have in common, regardless of our faiths, is gratitude for politicians like Carol Snyder. Give 'em Sheol, Gehenna and a little Hades, Carol. Let's get together some time and compare mailbags.
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