Civil prayer on the North Carolina docket

Squared off since 2006 over civil prayer's wording in Forsyth County, N.C., are the Americal Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF).

The issue: Forsyth County local government meetings are often opened with prayers which are sectarian. They may, for example, enjoin Jesus Christ.

The Rev. Charlie Davis, pastor of the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Winston-Salem. is one of the plaintiffs. He explains "that sectarian prayer excludes people, which isn't good. The government guarantees religious freedom and that applies to non-believers as well."

It didn't have to go to court. The county commissioners ignored the advice of their own attorney by refusing to ensure that invocations were non-sectarian.

A judge could rule on the lawsuit next month. Legally, the smart money is with the ACLU on this:

In 1983, the United States Supreme Court ruled in Marsh v. Chambers that if a legislative body chooses to open its meetings with a prayer, such prayer must not be "exploited to proselytize or advance any one, or to disparage any other, faith or belief." The prayers before the legislature that were upheld in the Marsh case were nonsectarian - in other words, the prayers were not specific to any particular religion. In addition, the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, whose jurisdiction includes North Carolina, has repeatedly and recently upheld this principle of government neutrality in religious matters by insisting that legislative invocations be nonsectarian in nature.

More important is the message of pluralism in America sent by pursuit of this lawsuit others like it.

Protestant prayer of the sort being defended by the ADF was the standard, especially in the South, until late in the last century. No more. Objections to the informal establishment of this Protestant civil religion, where it persists, are being adjudicated.

Bill Leonard, the dean of the School of Divinity at Wake Forest University told the Winston-Salem Journal:

This is the death rattle of implicit religious establishment in America that has been in existence since the Colonial period.

Is it constructive to adjudicate a cultural transition? As the Rev. Laura Spangler, the pastor of Winston-Salem's historic Lloyd Presbyterian Church, put it, ". . . prayer, the main way we communicate with God, is becoming a tool for conflict. And I don't feel good about that."