OK: State Issued Prayer And True Threats To The Church

Oklahoma continues it unsubtle slide into theocracy, with this memo from State Superintendent Ryan Walters issues this week:

It recommends a moment for students this week, and offers a "sample prayer" for them to pray during that moment. Some educators are pretty cranked up about this, as well they might be. There are many reasons to be bothered by this memo. I'm going to focus on just one.

Walters also issues a warning to districts this week that he'd damned well better not hear about any school that folds to pressure (in this case, from some unnamed "secular organization" in Wisconsin. The group, he charges, is opposed to the Constitution and is pushing "state-sponsored atheism." also, Walter says, "I feel pity for these woke, elitist lawyers who have decided that there is no greater calling in life than to make sure teachers aren't practicing their Faith." 

I have to observe, once again, that this guy once taught history. You'd think he would know better. 

I would also think that he's smart enough to know that "this school will not promote a single religious view" is not remotely the same as "this school suggests you become an atheist."

The implication here (and many other Walters pronouncements) is that instead of state-sponsored atheism, we should have state-sponsored Christianity. 

Which is a terrible idea.

For Christianity.

Seriously. At least the voters of Oklahoma elected Walters as chief education honcho. But nobody at all elected him a religious authority. Nobody gave him the authority to craft prayers for all the children in Oklahoma. 

The folks who crafted a wall between church and state did so not just to protect the state from the church, but to protect the church from the state, at least back to Henry VIII declaring, "I'm now the head of the church and I'll be telling you what God wants you to do." When you mix religion and politics, you get politics. When you make politicians the voice of the church, you get political pronouncements cloaked in religious garments.

We get led back to this time and again by Worshippers of the Tiny God. Their conception of God is of something small and weak. If God is not being explicitly promoted by humans in particular settings, their reasoning goes, then human beings will become atheists or humanists or maybe even something worse. If institutions leave an empty space where religion can go, so that folks may fill that space in according to their own faith, Worshippers of the Tiny God see atheism, because their conception of God is so small and weak it can not overcome silence. 

It is a special kind of theocratic hubris-- "God is great and powerful, but God cannot work in this world without Me to do the heavy lifting. God needs my protection, because otherwise these other humans would somehow chain God into silence and ineffectualness. Good thing I'm here to make this part of the world safe for God."

Walters, and other like him, who claim to be preserving some sort of American tradition, are doing the opposite. 

Imagine it's Sunday morning. You're in church, and during the service a local politician, an official with political authority, gets up and announces, "I have written the prayer for you to use today, and every Sunday." 

Imagine it's a Wednesday morning, and your child is called into a school assembly, where an elected official announces, "I have brought an official prayer for all of you students to recite today."

Does that feel like religious liberty? Does that feel like citizens being allowed the freedom to worship as they choose? 

You cannot put the weight of the state behind religious worship without also giving the state some say over what form that religious worship will take. People who want to put prayer into public school are advocating a choice that is not just bad for schools, but bad for the church as well. They should be among the loudest voices telling Ryan Walters to knock it off. God does not need nor benefit from Walters self-aggrandizing "help."