Palin prayer on the campaign trail

Sarah Palin said this week that the campaign trail was short of acceptable prayer partners, and former staff members feel cut. You can see why:

"So I'm looking around for somebody to pray with, I just need maybe a little help, maybe a little extra," she said. "And the McCain campaign, love 'em, you know, they're a lot of people around me, but nobody I could find that I wanted to hold hands with and pray." As the crowd laughed, Palin grinned and said she meant no disrespect to the McCain campaign. She said she ultimately prayed with her daughter Piper.

Sen. John McCain didn't clarify things when in answer to a question at the Heritage Foundation this week he said:

Over 50 million people voted for me and Sarah Palin—mostly for Sarah Palin.

Ok.

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."

More prayer on the right, and less politicking

Pulpits which thundered on the right, now turning away from the culture wars?

Sandhya Bathija, writing at the Americans United for Separation of Church and State blog, says::

William Graham Tullian Tchividjian, the grandson of famous evangelist Billy Graham and the new pastor of Ft. Lauderdale’s Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church, surprisingly says he has no interest talking politics. It’s quite a change from his grandfather, and even more so from his predecessor, TV preacher D. James Kennedy.

Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church’s former pastor was a religious right leader who pursued the culture wars from his pulpit and on his radio and television broadcasts, books, pamphlets, tapes and DVDs.

That left an impression. One Tchividjian is correcting.

On Tuesday he told the Miami Herald:

''Dr. Kennedy came from a completely different generation, and my leadership by that fact alone will be different,'' Tchividjian said.

While the late Kennedy kept a hand in all aspects of the church organization, including its radio, television and print media arm, and Westminster Academy and Knox Theological Seminary in Fort Lauderdale, Tchividjian will oversee only the main church.

''Those ministries have gone their own separate ways. They have their own presidents,'' said Coral Ridge executive minister Ronald Siegenthaler. ``The church will be more focused on the local community, as opposed to more national and international outreach.''

We feel Bathija is right when she argues that Tchividjian is in step with the Pew Forum's August 2008, survey which found that 52 percent of Americans agreed that houses of worship should keep out of politics.

If a harbinger, Tchividjian is certainly a notable one. He will, however, not be lonely. The demographics are, for many, irresistible.