Lead Us Not Into Temptation : There are theological reasons why school prayer is a bad idea.

Ever since Newt Gingrich announced his plan for a constitutional amendment allowing public-school prayer, the usual gallery of antagonists--the ACLU, People for the American Way, the mainline Protestant groups--have been warning about a First Amendment meltdown. Conservative Christians, they say, want to use the popularity of the prayer issue to blur the constitutional distinction between church and state.

These strict separationists are mostly right about school prayer, but for the wrong reasons. The real arguments against formal prayer in school are not legal but theological. Indeed, some of the strongest criticism is coming from leading evangelical Christians who have deep concerns about the problems that even student-led prayers create in matters of faith, conscience and civility.

“School prayer is a very bad idea from an evangelical point of view,” says Michael McConnell, a University of Chicago law professor who has argued religious-liberty cases before the Supreme Court. McConnell likes to remind his evangelical brethren that prayer is unlike other forms of speech; it is heartfelt communication with the deity. The formalization of what is an act of worship, especially within public education, can only lead to mischief.

The cultural argument for school prayer, that America is, at root, a religious nation, has long been on a collision course with the country’s deepening cultural diversity. There are at least 1,200 organized, distinct religious groups in America, many of them outside the Judeo-Christian tradition; self-proclaimed secularists make up perhaps 10% of the population.

Student prayers amid such diversity invite at least two errors. One is that such prayers, when recited over the intercom or at the start of school activities, threaten to offend the consciences of nonbelieving classmates.

Evangelicals should know better. It was our Protestant forebears who, fleeing the established churches, produced Europe’s most principled defense of religious liberty and freedom of conscience. “The same parents who press for prayer in the South would be outraged by Buddhist meditation in Hawaii or readings from the Book of Mormon in Utah,” says cultural historian and evangelical author Os Guinness. “For them to argue like European Anglicans is an exercise in historical amnesia.”

Another mistake involves secularization: the hollowing out of faith. One of the most compelling features of conservative Christianity is belief in a God who is both personal and purposeful. A gray, soulless generic prayer could not include most of the divine attributes considered basic to Christian believers. Says Mark Noll, evangelical professor of history at Wheaton College: “If you get something that would not offend, then it has to be offensive.”

As Guinness puts it, formal school prayer creates an unpleasant dilemma for evangelicals: We either secularize our faith or we scandalize nonbelievers.

The civic rationale for school prayer--that it could help arrest the moral decay infecting youth--must be put to rest by evangelicals, who understand perhaps better than anyone the cultural roots of the crisis. There are better ways to exert moral influence in the schools than prayer over an intercom. Textbooks, for example, continue to exclude the religious motivations of the nation’s most significant social and political figures. Why, for example, don’t schoolchildren learn that one of the most comprehensive urban outreach efforts--the Salvation Army--was begun by evangelical William Booth? We must help ensure that such facts are part of the curricula, for these examples of faith in action shape world views.

What religious conservatives want in public education is what all parents want: an environment in which their deepest beliefs are respected and their children’s consciences are not coerced. Evangelicals are correct to identify the lack of such an environment as one of the central failures of contemporary education.

But the fixation on school prayer is misplaced. “It’s a diversion of our legal energies, it’s a diversion of our spiritual focus and it anesthetizes the churches,” says Steven McFarland, director of the Christian Legal Society’s Center for Law and Religious Freedom.

Vacuous prayers can hardly undo prejudices against faith or strengthen the already faithful. The result, instead, could well be the corruption and counterfeiting of religious conviction. We serve neither our tradition nor our culture by succumbing to this latest political temptation.