Town Council Prayer

On Monday, May 5, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a sectarian prayer opening a town council meeting in Greece, New York is permissible, and is not a violation of the First Amendment's Establishment Clause.

The conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court has once again played into the hands of the misguided zealots that would have their brand of Christianity be established as the governing authority in the United States. The five-judge majority looked at a patently religious observance conducted at the beginning of a town council meeting, nearly always by Protestant Christian clergy, and somehow concluded that this doesn't constitute an "establishment of religion" that is prohibited by the First Amendment.

Ironically, these types of decisions will almost certainly bring about the downfall of right-wing Christianity in the long run, precisely because they tend to create a State Church, and state churches always fail. Madison and Jefferson understood that religion can only exercise real moral authority if it is outside of and separate from the mechanics of governing. It is only when the church stands apart from the state that it can make itself heard as a moral force. During the Bus Boycott, the African-American churches in 1955 Montgomery didn't waste their time counting votes. They identified a clear-cut moral wrong being carried out by the power structure, and they acted forcefully and effectively to rectify it. If they had been part of the power structure, they could not have had anything like the influence they ultimately did.

Any list that I have seen of rapidly-growing U.S religions includes Islam at or near the top. As surely as the sun rises in the east, there will one day be a town council somewhere in our country that has a working majority made up of members of Islam. Do we really expect them to be any more tolerant or responsible than conservative Protestants about availing themselves of Justice Kennedy's opinion? My prediction is that Jimmy Madison's "wall of separation" is going to look a lot more attractive at that point.

Thomas R. Borden
Waugh, Alabama
May 9, 2014