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

By “prayer” one should mean an open and ongoing conversation with God. The conversation involves formal veneration of and supplication to God, but in Paul’s words prayer is “without ceasing” (1 Thess. 5:17) which gets at the everydayness of it. As such prayer will become for its practitioners almost second nature whether or not it is demonstrative. (Understand a “practitioner” to be someone who has worked and worked at it — prayer requires work.) Some people believe one should pray only in a church service or building. But that’s like believing one can eat only seated at a table. The venue is not the function nor is the function limited to a venue.

Because Christians believe prayer is also a means of helping or serving others (2 Cor. 1:8-11), petitionary public prayer gatherings are often organized in response to crises or threats (real or perceived), such as the nation going to war or healing from a tragedy, though regrettably this gives the impression that prayer is essentially an emergency flare or group therapy. Still, it is a privilege of American citizenship that these gatherings don’t have to be confined to church properties only. And yet, when Christians pray in public it should be prayer not protest or other forms of insistent statement-making. Nor should it obtrusively draw attention to itself even if noticeable (Jesus spoke to this memorably in Matthew 6).

So the family holding each other’s hands and bowing heads together for a few seconds of grace at the restaurant table, as they do at home, is noticeable. Should that same family stand on their chairs making loud pronouncements to God for everyone to hear, that’s obtrusive. The church that wants to gather on the courthouse steps at midday to pray for civic leaders is noticeable. The church that does this with accompanying placards and a bullhorn is obtrusive. Most Christians aren’t seeking to be obtrusive with noticeable public prayer.

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.

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

Praying in public is one of many human responses to God’s Grace. As with most all forms of faith ministry, it can be very inspiring, but is also subject to human mistakes. Somehow regulating it is in my opinion a path fraught with pitfalls in the larger context of freedom. Preventing the imposing of a specific prayer or way of praying on others is not to me a threat to our freedom.

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

Public praying was much simpler when I grew up in Knoxville in the 1940’s. There were no public atheists and most people seemed to be Christians. Today such prayer is much more complex. Atheists have garnered the public ear. Memphis has sizeable communities of Jews, Muslims and people of other faiths. Christians seem to agree more than we used to about doctrinal matters but less about how society should be organized. Regardless, lack of public prayer is a major loss. Faith in God is a crucial component of human nature, perhaps the most important of all. How can we ignore that reality in our common life?

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

I understand restrictions on public prayer animated by sensitivities that arise out of religious diversity. If I were called upon to pray before an inter-faith gathering, I would certainly keep my prayer denominationally neutral.

That said, I worry about the 1962 High Court’s ruling that restrains the use of official school prayer, even if it were denominationally neutral with no pressure brought to bear upon students who choose not to participate.

My discomfort with such a restriction is for its own potential to imbue students with a partisan point of view with unintended consequences. Doesn’t the imposed absence of official school prayer in the formation of students’ lives infer the absence of God? And is it not in the seeming absence of a Sovereign God that people with power are more inclined to play God? And isn’t the landscape of history strewn with human wreckage for mere mortals acting like they’re immortal?

Why do we pray in public? In my view, we need to because to so pray distinguishes the Creator from the creature before the body politic. And such a distinction, when it’s pronounced, keeps at bay the ruinous human inclination to play God.