Why do we pray in public? When and where is public prayer inappropriate? Are there too many restrictions on public prayer? Too few?

I, like any follower of Christ, grieve over the increasing secularism of our society and its public institutions; however, prayer, for the Christian, is only properly offered to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ and, therefore, 1) non-Christians could not sincerely join us in our prayers and 2) we could not sincerely join non-Christians in their prayers (presumably to a different deity). Because of the overwhelming Christian majority (and cooperative religious minority) in our first two centuries as a nation, this conundrum was easily avoided, but the religious diversity and religious mentality of our day seems to suggest that we should dismantle our efforts to create a “civil religion” with politically correct prayers to a politically acceptable deity and simply return to our families and churches to pray to the living God for our nation and the world.