Should Prayer be Allowed in Schools?

Prayer happens—there’s no way to stop it.

One can no more control prayer than one can control thought. For the believer, it is a way of life; a believer can no more not pray than s/he could not think or breathe. Even asleep, one thinks one’s dreams until one ceases to live at all. The unbeliever, too may find him/herself in prayer without realizing it, talking internally—and sometimes aloud!—with One s/he may consciously deny exists at all. It cannot be otherwise. To imagine prayer could be prevented is foolish and naïve, at least if one understands the nature of prayer.

Prayer is conversation with God

Prayer is simply nothing other than conversation, a continuing conversation with God. It is inevitable, because God is all around us. We may deny God’s existence, yet God is still there, demanding our attention and claiming our minds and hearts. To be sure, the unbeliever will often give what believers call God another name more consistent with disbelief in any formal divinities. Sometimes one will claim to be “communing with nature,” or “listening to the voices of history” or considering what one has learned, or simply meditating. These things happen also to believers who do not always pray consciously, either; but these, too, are forms of prayer, whether or not to a recognized god. When the Bible admonishes believers to “pray continually,” it is not suggesting we shave our heads and enter a contemplative monastery so we have little option but to talk with God as consciously and directly as possible. Rather, it calls believers to enter into the continuing conversation with some awareness, to realize that God is with and within us, and to act and think accordingly. Such continuing conversation shows itself in everything from pangs of conscience to promptings of generosity or gratitude. It is much harder to fail to act as one believes one ought when one is aware of being in God’s presence.

Prayer is not necessarily either spoken aloud or even verbal in nature. St. Paul writes that when the believer does not know how to pray, the Spirit of God Himself “prays with us in sighs too deep for words.” Hindu and Christian meditative forms, Buddhist prayer wheels, incense or candles lit and sacrifices made by people of many traditions—all are forms of prayer. When a believer reaches out to comfort another in grief, s/he may not be thinking at the moment of that ongoing conversation; but because prayer is so much a part of the believer’s life, that act itself is a prayer to God to heal the friend’s grief, to make the friend whole.

The problem of imposing one’s faith system on others

When applied to schools and other public functions, there is concern that prayer is an imposition of the religious life of one upon those of other faiths, or of no religion at all. Forbidding it is still impossible. What student, facing a frightening examination, could possibly be prevented from making prayer for assistance? That is a nonsensical notion. All that could possibly be forbidden is the student’s making a public issue of his or her prayer. So the social question cannot sensibly be posed as, “should there be prayer in schools,” but rather “should there be public prayer in schools;” and that is another matter.

We have all sat through public prayers in one place or another. They take place not merely in school functions, but at city council meetings and sessions of Congress and in many places other than churches. For the most part, such are not true “prayers” at all, for many if not most of the people present. Even believers may find their minds not only fail to be engaged with the prayers being spoken, but are miles away. Far too often such verbal, public prayers are both boring and irrelevant to the people’s own conversations with God; they simply don’t connect. Sometimes the speaker says things so badly (including both bad delivery and weak content) that some of the people s/he is “leading in prayer” are annoyed or infuriated. Furthermore, we have so trained those who make such prayers to say nothing at all in them that could possibly offend anyone who thinks differently, that such prayers are empty of real content, prayers to a generic god who cannot possibly be the true God of anyone’s faith. Can such be considered prayer? Yes, some are praying. Yes, God has been addressed; but too often for too many people, I believe such prayer is nearer a violation of the commandment not to take the Lord’s Name in vain than it is an act of devotion!

All of us also know that the ways others pray often do not meet our own standards of what prayer is or should be. Religion matters enough even to unbelievers that they do not want members of other groups teaching their children what religious faith is. Prayer itself is so intimately tied up with the core of any religious person's faith, however, that it is questionable whether any deeply religious person would actually want a member of another faith to teach our children anything about faith, from what prayer should be like to what is the nature of the God to Whom one prays. Would a Christian want a Buddhist to teach the Christian's children to use prayer wheels? Or would a Buddhist want his children to hear that prayer wheels are useless because of a teacher’s insistence on verbal prayer? Does a Jew or a Muslim or a Jehovah’s Witness or a Unitarian appreciate a prayer to the Triune God by a faithful Christian who in conscience believes one cannot pray to any other God? Furthermore the attempt places children themselves in highly uncomfortable positions, having to resist the leader's religious attitudes when they don't understand their own family faith very well yet themselves. This is true both for minority students being led by faith-majority teachers, and the majority of students if their teacher happens to belong to a religous minority. No, frankly I do not want just anybody teaching my children how to pray. That is my job as a parent, and my church’s responsibility as a worshiping community. It is emphatically NOT a school’s job nor is it within our schools’ competence to teach.

Schools are in any case incompetent to teach acts of faith

True prayer is not necessarily verbal in any event, nor even necessarily conscious. As such, it cannot be prevented, in schools or anywhere else. The believer prays; that is his nature. But while such prayer must be acknowledged to exist, it is not the province of schools to teach it. The schools can honor its students’ religious lives; but it is a poor model of religious life for most of its children. A believer’s faith cannot help but be shown; it shows in whatever one says and does, whether one is teacher, student, or janitor. If one is aware of one’s own faith, such witness may be coherent and persuasive. If not, then it will be a poor, even negative witness; but witness it will be. Even those who believe nothing bear witness to their unbelief. We cannot help but be who we are. What we can do is to allow the students’ families and faith communities do the religious training, and restrict our schools to secular learning so that children are not torn between models of faith—or unfaith—that are inconsistent and inappropriate. That would hardly be serving our children well.

Do I believe in prayer in schools? Yes; it is inevitable and any attempt to strangle it is rightfully doomed to ignominious failure. Do I believe schools should teach how and to Whom to pray by modeling it? No. It is neither appropriate for them to try, nor are they competent to do so.