Public Prayer Always Gets Hijacked by the Left

The incidents L. Gordon Crovitz offers to contrast the A.C.L.U.'s concerns with those of the real world -- government-sponsored prayers and shootouts in public schools -- are manifestations of a single trend: governments and private citizens flouting the law. America's undercurrent of lawlessness is in one of its more flagrant phases. Police express eagerness to violate the Fourth Amendment if the courts will let them get away with it, while judges and scholars explain that even our most basic laws do not mean what they say: e.g., that "establishment of religion" is fine as long as it's non-denominational. If everyone from the mayor of Providence to the Los Angeles police chief is proud to be above the law, what legal grounds do we have for telling teenagers that random slaughter is improper?

Personally, as a Christian who takes Matthew 6:5-8 seriously, I am always uncomfortable around people who pray audibly in public, but I seethe when, as usual, they purport to be speaking my thoughts and those of everyone present. In recent decades their fashion is to avoid religion, and turn the prayer into a sermon designed not to communicate with God, but to praise diversity, pacifism, ecology, or some other issue on which ministers are not especially qualified to pontificate on behalf of a non-existent consensus. In America, you would think people could pray for themselves. Anyhow, these people have a right to tell their value-neutral God what they think I should believe, as long as I remain free to walk out, to interrupt them with clarifications of my position, and to refuse to give them money.

There's the catch. The City of Providence coerces me to pay taxes to fund ceremonies where rabbis conduct "prayers" invoking God to enliven their spineless political platitudes. The federal government coerces me to pay it to print things about God on money and compose prayers to put justices to sleep. None of this appears to have helped schools or courts do their jobs. In my native Virginia, our Statute for Religious Freedom calls such coercion "sinful and tyrannical," tending "only to beget habits of hypocrisy," and blasphemously rebelling against God's decision to create individuals with free will. That law's author, Thomas Jefferson, recognized that when you are forced to profess, or pay for, a particular opinion, your freedom of speech is not worth much.

Blatant violations of the Bill of Rights, from the founders' time to our own, do not excuse America from its duty "to live out the true meaning of its creed" - to keep everyone under the protection of the constitution, without diluting it for the sake of temporary convenience or convention.

As for the pledge of allegiance, I suppose anyone can pledge allegiance to anything in any words they please. This is a free country, and I personally don't go around venerating inanimate objects. Moses, you may recall, had strong opinions about such customs. As for Dr. King, he was one of thousands of preachers who have exercised their First Amendment right to speak at the Lincoln Memorial and every other public place. As Jefferson would put it, the preachers do not pick my pocket, but governments do. I am sad to see Mr. Crovitz joining the vast, lost tribe of nominal Americans whose minds are so pickled in socialism that they cannot distinguish governments from other social institutions, and believe tax money falls like manna from heaven.