This week, I just want to highlight a single religion story, which happens to be one of my favorite God-related anecdotes in a long while.
For years, religious right activists have complained about prohibitions on school-sponsored prayer at school events, especially football games. If one religion is in the majority, they say, and families want an official prayer read over the loudspeaker for attendees, what’s the problem? As the story goes, non-Christians don’t have to say the prayer if they don’t want to.
Supporters of church-state separation make the point that everyone, regardless of faith, should feel equally welcome at these events. If people want to pray before, during, or after the game, that’s up to them, but the school should stay out of it.
This week, this position picked up an unusual ally: a conservative Christian writing on the far-right Web site WorldNetDaily.
In a letter to the editor, Gary Christenot recalled his time in the Air Force stationed at a base on the Hawaiian island of Oahu. The area was somewhat isolated and dominated by Buddhists and followers of the Shinto faith.
Christenot wrote about attending a high school football game there. The Baptist family was dismayed when a Buddhist priest was called upon to offer the invocation “to god-head figures that our tradition held to be pagan.”
Wrote Chistenot, “We were frozen in shock and incredulity! What to do? To continue to stand and observe this prayer would represent a betrayal of our own faith and imply the honoring of a pagan deity that was anathema to our beliefs. To sit would be an act of extreme rudeness and disrespect in the eyes of our Japanese hosts and neighbors, who value above all other things deference and respect in their social interactions.”
It’s funny how being part of a minority changes your perspective, isn’t it?
Indeed, Christenot soon learned that learned that because the area was dominated by people of Japanese and Chinese descent, the prayers were always either Buddhist or Shinto. If Christians didn’t like it, they weren’t forced to say non-Christian prayers, but the majority ruled.
Christenot suddenly began to understand the broader dynamic a little better.
“We often advocate the practice of Judeo-Christian rituals in America’s public schools by hiding behind the excuse that they are voluntary and any student who doesn’t wish to participate can simply remained seated and silent,” wrote Christenot. “Oh that this were true. But if I, as a mature adult, would be so confounded and uncomfortable when faced with the decision of observing and standing on my own religious principles or run the risk of offending the majority crowd, I can only imagine what thoughts and confusion must run through the head of the typical child or teenager, for whom peer acceptance is one of the highest ideals.”
Well, whaddaya know. There’s hope for some of these guys after all.