Jesus Opposed Prayer in School

Posted on June 23, 2003 in Morals & Ethics

Rob at ConNiPtioN posted this quote from the New Testament:

And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward. But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly. – Matthew 6:5-6

Rob invokes this against teens who participate in preaching contests. I take it a step further and apply it to every sanctimonious hypocrite who attempts to shame his fellow classmates with public demonstrations of prayer at unholy events such as pep rallies and football games.

Jesus separated Church and State: “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and Render Unto God What is God’s”. Conjoined with this passage, we get a clear invocation against school prayer, in which the participants can only be moved to hypocrisy, murmuring things that they do not believe or practice just to get along with the crowd.

You cannot serve two masters, Jesus warned us, but the prayer in school advocates pretend that God and Caesar are the same, which is clearly counter-Christian.

Prayerful show-offs and braggarts are not real Christians.

There is no such thing as Christian totalitarianism: there are people who print the name of Christ on their business cards and then attempt to promote a nationalist religion of their own which they use to attempt to shame others into not criticizing them for their oh so very public faults. These are agents of a religion which is not Christianity, a reformulation of the ancient Roman religion which forced its citizens to perform sacrifices and make prayers to the gods, not for their spiritual betterment, but for purposes of mind control and the advancement of the prosperity of a limited class living in luxury on the Italian penninsula. It seeks to breed conformity, hatred, hypocrisy, and lack of individual accountability. It is the religion of Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, George W. Bush — but not of Jesus Christ.

The moral here is that true Christians enter the closet to pray and they stay there until that matter of business is done. Then, when they come out, it is by their works — not their public prayers — that you shall know them.

What we know of the jingoists who support the war and American empire building, hate gays and Muslims, etc. is their works. And those works are certainly not those which Christ would have performed.

Get thee behind us Satan! And someone shut the door behind the hypocrites — who think that by calling Satan Jesus they can get away with living against Christ — as they follow him.