The National Prayer Breakfast Does Not Threaten American Democracy
In times as troubled as our own, one would think that praying for the country ought to be entirely uncontroversial. The “Congressional Free Thought Caucus,” however, begs to differ. In a letter they sent to House Speaker Mike Johnson last week, its members expressed their outrage at the National Prayer Breakfast recently hosted in the United States Capitol. According to these “free thinkers,” the event violated “the constitutional principles of religious freedom and church-state separation.” They even hysterically describe it as a “human rights issue.”
For these members of Congress, any kind of prayer in a government building infringes on their sense of a neutral public square. But as Punchbowl News’s Jake Sherman pointed out, the National Prayer Breakfast has been going on for decades and includes both Republicans and Democrats among its patrons. All the same, the members of the caucus insist that the event is an affront to the liberalism at the heart of the American project, and demand that the Speaker discontinue the event.
Ineffective as this aggressive push for total secularization will doubtless prove to be, it nonetheless illustrates the dangers of liberal ideology. The American Founders highly valued religious liberty, but most would have been aghast at these members of Congress. They believed strongly that religion played an essential role in the life of our republic by providing a moral framework for our politics. Although that view still holds sway in American life, the very existence of this radically liberal “Free Thought Caucus” demonstrates how much more secular society has become.
George Washington was among the Founders who most forcefully insisted on a religious framework for the American public square. “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity,” he mused in his Farewell Address, “religion and morality are indispensable supports.” He firmly believed that good citizenship requires “a sense of religious obligation” because “virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government.” Religious faith calls forth a spirit of self-sacrifice that is essential for a republican experiment.
Read more in Providence Magazine.
