DAVID MARCUS: Forgive me, but I was wrong about school prayer

The battle over prayer in school is raging in Texas right now, with Attorney General Ken Paxton vowing to defend any school district that introduces the controversial practice under a recent state law expanding religious expression in education.

For the entirety of my life, and I’m old, the prohibition on public school-sponsored prayer seemed like settled Constitutional science, owing to a 1962 Supreme Court decision barring what had previously been a widespread and normal practice.

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In the past, I agreed with this form of separation of church and state. For me it was almost a question of better safe than sorry regarding the rights of minority religions, and importantly, I believed that Christian moral values were so ingrained in our culture that 30 seconds a day of praying could be forsaken.

Lord, was I wrong.

In fact, the ban on school prayer was just one piece of a broader effort to remove God from the public square. The clear, and patently wrong, message was that God has nothing to do with public affairs or education.

This is precisely how you wind up with Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., saying in the halls of Congress on Wednesday that it is "extremely troubling" to believe that our rights come from our Creator, even though his fellow Virginian, Thomas Jefferson, made this concept the cornerstone of the entire American experiment.

Ken Paxton, Texas attorney general, during the Republican National Convention (RNC) at the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, US, on Tuesday, July 16, 2024.  (Hannah Beier/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Maybe if Kaine took 30 seconds to pray each morning, or even just paid attention to the daily prayer in Congress, he would remember that it is in God we trust.

In terms of education itself, throughout the history of the West, or dare we call it Christendom, prayer has played a key role. At least up until 63 years ago, that is.

Here, we can appeal to Thomas Aquinas, not as a Catholic saint, but as one of the foremost academicians and teachers of the Middle Ages from his perch at the University of Paris in the mid 13th century.

In his Prayer for the Student, Aquinas asks that the Holy Spirit "pour forth your brilliance upon my dense intellect, dissipate the darkness which covers me, that of sin and of ignorance. Grant me a penetrating mind to understand, a retentive memory, method and ease in learning…"

What Aquinas understood, so long ago, was that the purpose of prayer in school is to recognize, with humility, our own limitations, and to ask that Creator from whom our rights emanate to guide us.

Fast-forward to 2025 and our public schools are by design atheistic, but atheism is not a neutral religious philosophy, nor a mere absence of religion. It implies a purely physical understanding of the world, an assertion that is no more provable than religion itself.

Today, we are embarking on education by artificial intelligence. There is no reason for kids to read books, because, we're told, AI will make their imaginations come to life.

Boy clasping hands, saying prayers in first grade class. (Steve Liss/Getty Images)

While Aquinas insisted that we must struggle to overcome our intellectual shortcomings and ignorance, AI is just immediate gratification on a plate.

Part of the reason that the founders did not specify that America is a Christian nation is that it seemed to go without saying. In their day, the English-speaking people had been Christian for a thousand years.

The framers of the Constitution wanted to avoid the intra-Christian fighting that had plagued the motherland, not to bar Christianity from public life, a concept that would have seemed absurd to them.

Saying the Lord’s Prayer each morning at school, asking forgiveness from God, promising forgiveness for others, to be protected from temptations like laziness and delivered from evil, such as drug use or hatred, prepares a student not just to learn, but to be an American citizen.

In the absence of God and prayer, Kaine is absolutely correct: Our rights are nothing more than a piece of paper, subject to the swaying whims of powerful mortals. That may be fine in England, where they arrest people over mean tweets, but never in America.

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It is by no means an imposition on an American Jewish, Muslim, or atheist student to be exposed to the Lord’s Prayer, they live in a nation founded on a Christian understanding of morality.

This Christian morality is ingrained in the DNA of America. Why can’t you have seven wives? Because Christianity prohibits it. How did the nuclear family become the model of Western democratic government? It was fostered by the church.

In my lifetime, the efforts to banish religion from official and public proceedings have gone too far, and we can feel the loss. This is very much part of why we see a religious revival happening, especially in regard to young Americans becoming Catholics.

It is not too late to fix this lack. Sixty-five years is a blip in the history of the West. Wrong turns have been made before, and now, with Texas leading the way, we can navigate a return to what Western education has always been, and what it must always be, an act of service, not just to ourselves, not just to our society, but to God Himself.

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