National Day of Prayer Needs To Go

At first blush the annual National Day of Prayer presidential proclamation every first Thursday in May seems innocuous. US Code Title 36, Section 119 states: The President shall issue each year a proclamation designating the first Thursday in May as a National Day of Prayer on which the people of the United States may turn to God in prayer and meditation at churches, in groups, and as individuals. The original bill, which didn’t include a fixed date, was passed in 1952 at the direct suggestion of Rev. Billy Graham. As Graham explained, its purpose was to help bring “the Lord Jesus Christ” to the nation. At the urging of evangelical Christian groups the law was amended to set a fixed date in 1988 so they could organize around it.

Doesn’t it seem at least a little insulting that government should ask the faithful to pray? I mean, if folks are going to pray aren’t they going to pray without the federal government asking them to?

The National Day of Prayer Task Force, chaired for 25 years by Shirley Dobson, wife of Focus on the Family founder James Dobson, organizes 30,000-40,000 events annually. Their events are so exclusively Christian that in 2005 when the Hindu American Foundation sought to join in they were refused. They're Americans so if an organization with the tacit support of the federal government is going to hold events shouldn’t Hindus be welcome just as should Jews, Muslims, Sikhs, and those of other faiths?

All this gets us to what’s really disturbing about the whole National Day of Pray business in the first place. Government in this country has no business endorsing any religion as it is expressly prohibited in the United States constitution in which the First Amendment states: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. Equally significant in understanding the founders’ views on the importance of maintaining distance between religion and government is Article IV which specifies that “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.”

It’s important for us to understand the circumstances of the time in which the constitution was written. In England, from the 1660s until the 1820s, the Test Acts were used to “establish” the Church of England as an official national church. The Test Acts required all government officials to take an oath disclaiming the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation and affirming the Church of England’s teachings about receiving the sacrament. The point was to exclude Catholics, Lutherans, and members of other dissenting Protestant sects from exercising political power. In other words, you couldn’t just be a Christian, you had to be the right kind of Christian to even hold the lowliest government office.

Even after the Revolutionary War while the constitution was being adopted, many states included religious qualifications in order to hold public office. Delaware’s constitution required government officials to “profess faith in God the Father, and in Jesus Christ His only Son, and in the Holy Ghost.” North Carolina prohibited men “who shall deny the being of God or the truth of the Protestant religion” from government posts. Those states were a little more open minded in that at least their religious tests Protestants of all varieties to serve in government. Their religious tests were still designed to exclude certain people, often Catholics or Jews, from holding office because they were of the “wrong” faith.

It’s time for this country to fulfill the promise of the constitution and get out of the religion business entirely.

Published in the Seguin Gazette - May 12, 2021