It’s a Loss Of Faith : Prayer in school distracts us from what the Puritans taught: Trust the “I.” It is no substitute for civic cohesiveness.

This Thanksgiving weekend, when the refrigerator is full of leftover turkey, while the TV drones through the house with redundant football games, who remembers the Puritans? Our politicians are preaching to us about prayer in public schools, but who remembers the early Protestants?

Puritans are remembered today mainly for inviting Indians over for dinner. But the Puritans exerted a more lasting influence. They planted on American soil the first-person singular pronoun. Puritans taught Americans to trust the “I,” to respect and protect individuals against the tyranny of the group.

It was odd, therefore, to hear an evangelical minister last week complain that U.S. courts pay too much heed to the rights of religious minorities. “What about the rights of the majority to pray?” he asked, apparently forgetting the genius of his own low-church tradition.

Adults lately voted in California to penalize the children of illegal immigrants. Adults propose packing children off to orphanages. Adults want to arrest children and try them as adults. Isn’t it odd that at a time when adults barely tolerate children, they are so concerned with prayer in public schools?

Nothing odd about it, a friend of mine cynically observes. “We want children to pray in school so we will be able to beat them.”

I am reminded of my own Roman Catholic school years. In the 1950s, nuns and priests were notorious for spanking and pulling ears. Catholic education was often corporal education. But nuns and priests took children seriously as moral creatures. We spoke, in those years, of the “age of reason.” Catholics assumed that a child, by around age 7, was adult enough to be held morally responsible.

If we were punished because we were morally responsible, we were also welcomed into the church’s formal prayer life. Home and church were linked to school by ancient rhythms, formulas of prayer. “Our Father, who art in heaven . . . “

It was never embarrassing for us to pray together. It was routine. We lived in a medieval village--there was a single Episcopalian among us who discreetly bowed his head during our prayers. The day began with a “Morning Offering.” At noon time, “The Angelus.” As a group, we sang at funerals. We went to confession on Fridays. We chanted the Stations of the Cross during Lent. We sang hymns at Christmas. We said the rosary in school and at church, just as our parents prayed it at home.

What I learned as a Catholic schoolboy is that prayer is deeply communal, the link holding a congregation together. It was also our great advantage as Catholics. If low-church Protestantism gave Christianity an understanding of the “I,” our great pronoun as Catholics was the “we.”

America is so secular now, we forget the importance of theology to our civic life. During all the recent argument over Proposition 187, for example, who remembered that the 19th-Century dispute over immigration was theological? Then, nativists didn’t argue race or skin color but religion. Could a Catholic become a good American? Could a Jew?

As the immigrants arrived, 19th-Century America could not resist them. A Protestant generosity prevailed. Ultimately, native-born Americans even came to romanticize the immigrant, saw themselves in the figure of the immigrant, stateless, willing to recreate himself, alone. (“We are all immigrants,” Americans ended the century saying.)

Today, America is filling with Russian Jews and Moroccan Muslims and Thai Buddhists precisely because English Protestants planted the first-person singular pronoun in American soil.

It is deeply ironic that low-church Protestants are among the loudest today insisting that “America is a Christian country.” They forget themselves: The reason America is not a Christian country is that we are a Protestant country.

You will say, perhaps, that I romanticize Puritans too much. After all, Puritans had witch hunts. And Puritans, though refugees from religious intolerance, ended up persecuting other religious communities, like the Quakers.

It is also true that the Puritans, though famous for their faith in the “I,” ended up desperate for community. Puritans exchanged diaries of their singular lives. They would gather together to speak of the burden of standing alone before God. They resembled the parade of Americans today baring their souls on the “Oprah Winfrey Show.”

If, as I believe, America is a culture defined by the Puritans, we, too, suffer contradictions from our individualism. Though we say we respect the rights of the individual, we go on witch hunts. Some days, we protect the rights of the village atheist; other days, we turn against the village atheist. America trumpets the “I” to the rest of the world, but at home we become a nation of abolitionists. Today, we keep the village atheist from smoking in restaurants.

Similarly today, despite our celebration of individualism, there is a nostalgia for “family values” that can turn dangerous as we look for people to blame for our lack of civic cohesiveness. Our politicians encourage us to forget that the extraordinary thing distinguishing America is the individualism we inculcate in our children.

Now, we say, we are appalled. We talk about the need for schools to teach our children values. But American children learn our adult values all too well. They learn our values watching pro-football and from bratty Homer Simpson. They learn our values watching the way we handle traffic on the Santa Monica Freeway.

The problem is we don’t know how to moderate our own individualism. We don’t know how to understand our own lives. We talk, instead, about reforming school. School prayer becomes the hope for a country where parent and child barely speak, much less pray together.

If the politicians were so interested in the prayer life of American youth, why don’t they make it easier for parents, through tax breaks, to afford religious education for their children?

Oh, but look at them each morning, our legislators at prayer. There they are, moral paragons, heads bowed, as the congressional chaplain intones a prayer that is barely more than feel-good jargon.

Prayer is not the business of Washington, nothing for politicians to allow or disallow. Prayer is not an activity comparable to flag-waving, a tool for forming good citizens. Prayer is a soul’s life, routine, urgent. Prayer is private--any student can pray, anytime in the day. (Who can prevent a child from starting her day with this prayer: “Dear God, this day is yours.”)

Prayer can be said on the bus. It can be said in a crowd. It also belongs in a church.

And at home. But isn’t this really the problem? The American home--the silence between parent and child.

Prayer in school has become for the cultural right what bilingual education is for the cultural left. Bilingualists urge schools to give students “self-esteem” by allowing students to speak their “family language.” Bilingualists forget that the point of public education is to teach children to think of themselves simply as that--public people. School is not where one learns self-esteem; school rather is where one learns public esteem. It is the business of grandmothers to teach children that they are private people.

Now, advocates for prayer in schools say that students need to pray, silently or not. After all, a school has no right to keep a student removed from his faith. After all, doesn’t the majority have a right to pray together--regardless of the village atheist?

It is a reasonable argument, but it is not an American argument. America was constructed on a remarkable faith in the individual. America was constructed on a stunning Puritan faith. That faith gave Irish Catholics and Orthodox Jews a home a century ago.

That early Puritan faith is what we should remember now when, for political advantage, politicians rise up and assume the parental role of moral guardians of the young.