Wth the National Day of Prayer approaching, feel free to pray--as long as you do it the way the commandos who hijacked the day say you should

"I call upon every citizen of this great Nation to gather together on that day in homes and places of worship to pray, each after his or her own manner, for unity of the hearts of all mankind."
--President Ronald Reagan, proclaiming 1983's National Day of Prayer

It happens that next Thursday, being May 1 and therefore also the first Thursday in May, is the National Day of Prayer, as set forth by Congress in 1988. The day has existed in some form for much of the nation's history, but has been celebrated annually since the last year of the Truman administration, 1952.

In his 1983 proclamation of the National Day of Prayer, President Ronald Reagan argued that since 1952--

the National Day of Prayer has become a great unifying force for our citizens who come from all the great religions of the world. Prayer unites people. This common expression of reverence heals and brings us together as a Nation and we pray it may one day bring renewed respect for God to all the peoples of the world.

From General Washington's struggle at Valley Forge to the present, this Nation has fervently sought and received divine guidance as it pursued the course of history. This occasion provides our Nation with an opportunity to further recognize the source of our blessings, and to seek His help for the challenges we face today and in the future.

Now, Therefore, I, Ronald Reagan, President of the United States of America, do hereby proclaim Thursday, May 5, 1983, National Day of Prayer. I call upon every citizen of this great Nation to gather together on that day in homes and places of worship to pray, each after his or her own manner, for unity of the hearts of all mankind.

"Each after his or her own manner."

"For unity of the hearts of all mankind."

True, President Reagan wrote as if "all mankind" is religious. But that's a discussion for another day, as is the question of whether we even ought to have a National Day of Prayer in a country whose founders had the wisdom to foresee that both the state and religion would prosper best if the state was kept the hell out of religious affairs and religion was damned well kept out of affairs of state. Foolish people have always tried to break down that ingeniously planned separation, and they win occasional battles, but so far they've never come close to winning their war against the Founders' shrewd idea of separating church and state.

The legality of the National Day of Prayer has withstood all challenges, and I really don't see much reason for the nonreligious among us to worry overmuch. It's a day, after all, for those who do believe, and it's hard to quarrel with the goals outlined by President Reagan.

Somewhere along the line, though, something happened, and it's hard to describe it as anything other than a hijacking of the National Day of Prayer by the most dictatorial and controlling elements of the Evangelical movements. As Bruce Falconer blogged yesterday in his post "Holy Wars: Evangelicals Attempt to Exclude Non-Christians From National Day of Prayer" on Mother Jones' MoJoBlog:

Shirley Dobson, wife of James Dobson, the conservative founder of Focus on the Family, is this year's chairperson of the National Day of Prayer Task Force, a non-governmental organization based in Focus on the Family's offices in Colorado Springs and charged with organizing various events. According to Jay Keller, national field director of the Interfaith Alliance, Dobson has made a point of "excluding Jews, Muslims, Catholics, Buddhists, and even mainline Christians" from the National Day of Prayer.

Thanks to Dobson, this year's task force volunteers are required to sign pledges, stating: "I commit that NDP activities I serve with will be conducted solely by Christians while those of differing beliefs are welcome to attend." Volunteers must also affirm that they "believe that the Holy Bible is the inerrant Word of The Living God" and that "Jesus Christ is the Son of God and the only One by which I can obtain salvation and have an ongoing relationship with God." Such oaths violate the non-sectarian nature of the National Day of Prayer and clearly align "a government-sponsored event with a particular Christian denomination, in violation of the basic provisions of the First Amendment to the Constitution," says Keller.

Now we come to the true horror. "Dr. Ravi Zacharias, the honorary chairman of this year's event, has refused to invoke the name of Jesus Christ in his official prayer, so as not to offend the faithful of other religions."

Pow! No mention of the name of Jesus Christ! You can imagine the effect this has had on the Fake Christians who plaster Jesus' name all over the place despite their obviously total unfamiliarity with any aspect of either Jesus' spirit or his teachings, which directly contradict pretty much everything our Fake Christians work so hard to shove down everyone else's throat.

Christian Newswire issued a fatwa, "Ashamed of Jesus at the National Day of Prayer," going after not just Zacharias but Mrs. Dobson for allowing Jesus' name to be bypassed. Blogger Falconer quotes this excerpt from the press release:

According to the truth of God's Word, the entire counsel of God, we do not pray in "God's Holy Name" to God the Father. We pray to God the Father in the name of His only Son, Jesus Christ, who alone provides us access to the Father. It is appalling that Dr. Zacharias is willing to capitulate to the un-Scriptural, interfaith ecumenism and discard the name of Jesus. NDP Chairwoman, Shirley Dobson, owes a biblical explanation to Christians around the nation as to why the name of Jesus is absent from the official prayer. We are not here as Christians to appease those of other world religions. We cannot come to God except through His Son's righteous merits. To pray as "Christians" in any other way is both a farce and a mockery. While other believers around the world are dying for that name, in America, Dr. Zacharias will not even breathe that name in his official public prayer because it might "offend".

If evangelical leaders want God's help in the midst of America's deepening national crisis, we must come to Him on His stated terms, not ours. Either God's Word is truth, or it is not. There is no middle ground. There are no special interfaith prayer models in Scripture for evangelical activists hoping to maintain conservative political coalitions. Such tacit denial of Jesus Christ will court God's righteous wrath, not His blessing. Dr. Zacharias owes an apology to those throughout history who have paid the ultimate price for their fealty to King Jesus. May God grant repentance to those pragmatic evangelicals who place cultural concerns before Scriptural truth.

Now of course these people are entitled to pray however they wish, and they are entitled to believe that they are the only ones who know how to pray correctly. There is, at the same time, not the slightest possibility that Jesus would be anything but horrified by their authoritarian and impositional beliefs, which are wholly unrelated to anything he believed or preached. He wouldn't have turned his back on them, of course. I imagine he would have tried to explain the errors of their ways, and prayed for them. But it seems impossible to believe that he would have been anything but appalled by their belief that they own this day of prayer.

Note that no one is telling, suggesting, or even in the teeny-tiniest way hinting to them how they should pray. In accordance with the religious freedom that we as Americans cherish, they have absolute, uncontested freedom to make their trashy mockery of the teachings of Jesus in any way they wish.

But of course this has nothing to do with their freedom of worship--or, really, with their worship in any sense. It has nothing to do with their free exercise of their religious beliefs, which remain totally unimpinged upon. They are totally free, as President Reagan put it, to gather in their places of worship to pray after their own manner, "for unity of the hearts of all mankind."

No, what the people who hijacked the National Day of Prayer are about is just about power, and coercion--their ability to bully everyone else, to make them cower, tremble, and cringe before the imagined majesty of their imagined piety.

A key thing to notice here is that the Fake Christians aren't just excluding non-Christians from the right to participate in the day of prayer--though it shouldn't be forgotten that they are unequivocally and forcefully doing that. No, they seem if anything more outraged by other Christians who deviate in any particular from their Jesus-trashing dogma.

As I always have to say when religion is up for discussion, I'm not categorically against it. There are lots of religious people whose faith inspires them to lead lives of admirable, even enviable humanity, purpose, and fulfillment. Jesus would have no trouble "getting" them, whatever the terms of their specific faith.

As regular readers know, my go-to guy in religious matters is Pastor Dan of the religion-and-politics blog Street Prophets, one of the clearest-headed and most humane thinkers I know. When the subject of the Evangelicals' gleeful exclusion of non-Christians from the National Day of Prayer was raised, he observed:

It's not just non-Christians. It's gotten so bad that Catholics and mainline Protestants feel quite alienated as well. I haven't had anything to do with it for years, and won't support my congregations' involvement.

Which, come to think of it, is probably just the way the Fake Christians who hijacked the prayer day want it. When there's "official" praying to be done, folks can just pray their way or the highway.

Pastor Dan comments more fully in a Street Prophets post:

It used to be that the NDP was an excuse for the church ladies to get together with their cronies from other denominations. In recent years, it's been getting more and more conservative. I personally won't have anything to do with it, nor will I support my churches' involvement in it. There's plenty of ways to work across faith lines that don't involve empowering the narrow-minded.

Pastor Dan quotes Randall Balmer quoting Barack Obama addressing the subject of religious absolutism at Messiah College in Grantham, Pennsylvania:

Obama suggested that the danger in the political realm is a kind of religious absolutism, and the danger to the faith is self-righteousness. “And it is important for us not to try to kill the debate by saying, ‘Well, God tells me I’m right, and so I’m not going to listen to you.’ Rather, we’ve got to translate whatever it is that we believe into a language that allows for argument, allows for debate, and also allows that we may be wrong.’”

"We have got to get serious about this stuff," Pastor Dan concludes.

The National Day of Prayer might sound like an irrelevant observance of no importance. But if people like Shirley Dobson have their way, their religion will choke out all others, leaving us with a weakened monoculture. It's not good for faith, and it's certainly not good for our politics. Obama may be pathologically addicted to dialogue, but in this case, he's got a point. Politics can't work without some difference of opinion, and faith . . . well, unless you're not telling me something, ain't nobody hearing the voice of God these days.

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