prayer in American life

The great irony in the United States today is that while prayer has long played a central role in the life of America, it too often has become a subject best publicly avoided. Even though prayer has pervaded American life consciously and unconsciously throughout history, many people have difficulty discussing it. To paraphrase Nathan Pusey, the late president of Harvard University, we will know that we have become a mature nation when we can speak freely about the importance of prayer in American life without fear of adolescent embarrassment. It is reckless to view prayer solely as an appendage of religion, to see it as divisive, polarizing force in American society. For it is prayer that has infused Americans with a sense of their spiritual identity in a world too often rocked by a lack of moral grounding.

To reduce America to pure vanilla, signifying both everything and nothing, ignores the true intentions of the Founding Fathers and flies in the face of recorded history, particularly when it comes to the subject of prayer. The argument that religious diversity should prevent the public recitation of prayer given the differences between, say, Jews and Christians becomes a fool’s errand. After all, the followers of Jesus Christ have been divided among the Orthodox, Catholics, and Protestants. The children of Israel are defined as Hasidic, Orthodox, Conservative, and Reformed. The heirs to Muhammad identify themselves as Shia, Sunni, and Sufi. Even long-established faiths cannot agree on the proper road to salvation. They do agree, however, on the need and utility of prayer both spiritually and temporally in the world today. Much in the way that America’s motto “E Pluribus Unum” (one out of many) symbolizes unity out of diversity, prayer affords an opportunity to recognize how Americans, despite their diversity, are unified in their spirituality with one another and with a higher being.



One Nation Under God: The History of Prayer in America by James P. Moore, Jr. Doubleday, 2005. p.466, 467