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Political Prayer Breakfasts Are Bad Religion
There are only three things wrong with the National Prayer Breakfast: the past, the present, and the future. Last week, President Obama presided at the annual Washington event before what the New York Times called “a bipartisan array’’ of national and international figures. “I assure you,’’ he told them, “I’m praying a lot these days.’’ The president went with the flow of public piety, singing prayer’s praises as a source of calm, strength, and civility. It “can touch our hearts with humility,’’ he said. That had the ring of truth, since the prayer breakfast confronts the president with how little personal freedom he has. He could no more boycott the toe-curling display of religiosity than he could remove that flag pin from his lapel. Religion is not supposed to be coercive in this country, but the prayer breakfast is the ultimate command performance, and that is only part of the problem.
Washington is the Vatican of a larger cult. In municipalities across the country, and on US military bases worldwide, government officials gather to bow their heads and invoke God’s blessing - an exercise that should seem benign. But these official liturgies are fraught with dangerous implications. As often happens, there were complaints last week from First Amendment advocacy groups that the prayer breakfasts veer too closely to “establishment,’’ especially when they take place within the military chain-of-command. The breakfasts are “ecumenical,’’ with Jews and Muslims prominently invited, yet the organizing network, the Fellowship Foundation, aggressively promotes Jesus, who has become a kind of mascot of American military culture. (Last month it was revealed that the manufacturer of Army rifle sights engraves references to New Testament verses beside the cross-hairs.) A non-believing junior officer is not likely to decline a place at his commander’s sacred table. I once observed to an Air Force general that his “voluntary’’ prayer breakfasts had to feel coercive to his juniors, and he squinted at me, “I’ll call off my prayer breakfast when the commander-in-chief calls off his.’’
It all began in 1953, when Dwight D. Eisenhower presided at the first “Presidential Prayer Breakfast,’’ as it was called then. That year Ike was baptized, and Jesus was openly conscripted into the fight against what Secretary of State John Foster Dulles called “the godless atheism’’ of Communism. Billy Graham, with his “Crusades,’’ was installed as the American pope, and “under God’’ was added to the Pledge of Allegiance. The good-versus-evil bi-polarity of the Cold War was enshrined, with its high priest the other Dulles brother, Allen, at the CIA, where divine ends justified demonic means. America’s self-assurance as God’s ally underwrote the toppling of “atheistic’’ regimes in Iran (1953) and Guatemala (1954), with John Foster Dulles warning the world that neutrality was immoral. America had reinvented itself as a Messiah nation, with apocalyptic fervor justifying a nuclear readiness to destroy civilization: Better dead than Red. Under Eisenhower, the US nuclear arsenal grew from a few hundred to nearly 19,000 nukes. Jesus, indeed.
The national prayer breakfast cannot be fully understood without reference to this history. However “ecumenical’’ its trappings, and whatever the small number of non-Christian participants make of it, the tradition amounts to a religious festival of American Christian nationalism. President Obama spoke of humility, but this overtly theological claim on God’s favor goes to the heart of the imperial hubris that has led to one foreign policy disaster after another - up to and including today’s wars that, despite all protestations, can truly be perceived as religious. The sanctimonious Dulles brothers, America’s good-versus-evil twins, set these blocks in place, and their steady falling has amounted to the true domino theory - remembering that the root of the word domino is lord.
The framers of the US Constitution were wary of all such public piety. Not for nothing did they omit the word “God’’ from its clauses. Official government exercises that assume divine license for the nation, whether celebrated with china and linen in Washington or with meals-ready-to-eat at Special Forces camps in Afghanistan, are bad politics. Equally troubling, their presumptuous appropriation of God’s will makes them bad religion. With an ideological past, and a banal present, the national prayer breakfast, given our self-sanctifying wars, bodes ill for the future.
38 Comments so far
Show AllThe overt dichotomy expressed by this "empty" celebration of a "prayer breakfast" is revealed in our country's perverted political practice of "selling our government" to the highest bidders - lobbyists.
My God can kick your Gods ass.
Actually the Old Testament says that many times in almost those words.
Sarah Palin is all for it. She told her followers that unlesss this nation returns to seeking divine guidance it and even the conservative movement itself might fail. Sarah is sure that God hears her prayers with special interest and that she can recieve divine guidance with a clarity and directness which elude most of us. All this is not new. it's been happening in our culture from the time of the Old Testament. Priests telling the population to stop their wicked ways and follow God's commandments--as interpreted by them. Prophets who foretell doom unless they turn to God's ways--as interpreted by them. And now it extends to the Christian right-- ready to tell the rest of us that we'd better listen--to them, and follow their instructions about the divine destiny of this country. Because they have heard the Divine whispering in their ears, have seen the Divine in miriaculous interventions of their own lives. No doubt some of them really have. About 1% but possibly an even higher percentage among evangelicals is Shizophrenic. Hearing voices is relatively common as are the claims that God is speaking through them to the rest of wicked secular society. Add to that cacophony are the ones who are just faking it. Maybe there is a God and maybe there is even a prophetic voice speaking Divine Truth but how would we, the unelightened know which voice it is.
George W. , if you recall, said that God wanted him to be president and also that america would prevail in Iraq if we invaded. No u.s. casualties.
American exceptionalism - it is all the same.
As a psychologist, i have become well aware that organized religion is absolutely connected to many forms of imbalance. Delusion and schizoid ideation is almost always traceable to religious obsession and mythology. Particularly 'original sin' beliefs.
Sioux Rose
READY: I wish more professionals in your field would make these connections known. The direction of our nation is off track, and it's going to take a "meeting with Jesus" of a very different sort to right its trajectory. Original sin makes the FEMALE and her body into an evil, and I think it's one of the reasons why pornography is accepted. It is SO degrading to women. The sacred potentials of sensual union have been lost on the West and its Christian programming. Rajneesh was truly inspiring in his depiction and satire of this tragic thing. So wedded into cultural thought after centuries of passive belief, most no longer question its basis in false witness!
Sioux Rose
TAMMONS: Your post is quite sound, but does it go far enough? Don't forget all this heavy Jesus stuff is also being used not only to beef up the military and recruit soldiers, but to wage unbelievably efficient--for the sweeping technological scope of their mass carnage--wars! Jesus and war are like oil and water... the two should NEVER mix. This is a very serious form of blasphemy. And while I recognize that armies have fought for Jesus back to the time of the Crusades, the 2 key differences now are: 1. We have the benefit of history from which to learn from our mistakes and 2. This nation was FOUNDED on a very purposeful separation of church and state as the founders understood the numerous ways that absolute power would absolutely corrupt all over again. They understood human nature enough to set up governing ideals that would help protect us from our (lesser) selves.
Barak Obama stated quite early on (five years ago), that he believes in American exceptionalism.
This is nothing more than evangelism with the flag draped over the cross. We are the 'missionary nation'.
Sioux Rose
READY: You said a lot in a few words! Well done!
Prayer must be the most abuses practiced by xtains. It is almost always for a selfish result. Occassionly they pray for peace or the like, but often with no real conviction of it occurring, and seldom any active work for it.
Religion when it is organized almost always loses its true meaning. Jesus and His teaching is almost always given second place to the teaching of taboos and ancient tribal prejudices.
Personally I pray. But in a meditative manner.
Gary
“When the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers.”
-- Oscar Wilde
Prayer is usually an immature, if not infantile practice.
Imagine being in god's presence and rattling off a list of wants as if he were santa claus. If one was truly in God's presence there would be just humility, awe, and infinite bliss.
Prayer is telling god what to do, whereas meditation is being still and quite in body and mind to here the eternal machinations of god that exists throughout every atom and every being in both the gross and subtle realms.
The infinite has a billion symphonies all in hyper 3D to the millionth power and where telling him we want his help to kill someone because he calls god by a different name then we do.
Remember the true is often surrounded by the false to keep the insincere away.
If every shell had a pearl then pearls would be worth no more then shells.
The true gem is rare and can be intentionally darkened for security reasons.
I can't read the words "prayer breakfast" without Frank Zappa's "St Alphonzo's Pancake Breakfast" starting to play in my head.
Evil is as evil does. No amount of praying will drown out their braying asses.
Rebel Jesus Jackson Browne
All the streets are filled with laughter and light
And the music of the season
And the merchants’ windows are all bright
With the faces of the children
And the families hurrying to their homes
As the sky darkens and freezes
They’ll be gathering around the hearths and tales
Giving thanks for all God’s graces
And the birth of the rebel Jesus
.
Well they call him by the prince of peace
And they call him by the savior
And they pray to him upon the seas
And in every bold endeavor
As they fill his churches with their pride and gold
And their faith in him increases
But they’ve turned the nature that I worshipped in
From a temple to a robber’s den
In the words of the rebel Jesus
.
We guard our world with locks and guns
And we guard our fine possessions
And once a year when Christmas comes
We give to our relations
And perhaps we give a little to the poor
If the generosity should seize us
But if any one of us should interfere
In the business of why they are poor
They get the same as the rebel Jesus
.
But please forgive me if I seem
To take the tone of judgment
For I’ve no wish to come between
This day and your enjoyment
In this life of hardship and of earthly toil
We have need for anything that frees us
So I bid you pleasure
And I bid you cheer
From a heathen and a pagan
On the side of the rebel Jesus.
President Obama presided at the annual Washington event before what the New York Times called “a bipartisan array’’ of national and international figures. “I assure you,’’ he told them, “I’m praying a lot these days.’’
As the newest convert to the gospel of prosperity, I wonder how much money Obama is praying for. Almighty God, come, fill my coffers.
The Pointing Finger of Uncle Sam hovers above us and on His Shoulder sits the Predator Eagle.
Reminds me of "prayers of the mind" vs "prayers of the heart" in Mark Twain's "Letters From The Earth".
Our Xtian Taliban would execute women who choose abortions. What's the difference?
Religion is a crutch for the weak minded.
More people have died in the name of Religion than in all wars combined.
Sioux Rose
EZE: With torture on TV framed as entertainment (to lower the bar or taboo around the SHOCK factor that such repulsive behaviors SHOULD elicit), added to those "reality" shows where people get humilitiated in a number of ways, compounded with the hellbent assertion that there are terrorists everywhere, how long will it be before they start burning women again as witches? You think some would not be amenable with that option right now? I am not so sure...
Sioux: Check out the PBS documentary on Bhutan.
I must disagree that "Religion is a crutch for the weak minded." I am a Christian who actually believes in Christ's messages about peace and love of everyone including those who hate you. My religion is based on faith as I was not around at the time he was alive. But, everyone has faith in something or someone. We have faith that the bills and coins in our pocket will suffice to trade for the faith that food that we require will be available in the store. The bills and coins themselves have no intrinsic value, yet we have faith that somewhere there is something that guarantees that they are valuable.
The problem come when some person or persons take a believe or faith and uses it for their personal economic or political gain. Such are the people of the "Brotherhood" better known as "The Family" as described in Jeff Sharlet's book of the same name. If you look back for the past 70 years, you can see the development of today's Republican Agenda. They have used the name of Christ, which is sacred to so many people around the world to justify incorrectly their vision of Christian World Domination and political obedience being combined with what they consider to be the right of powerful people to become wealthy off of the labors of the poor.
This is pretty much a group that would like to bring back a monarchy in which we, the lower and low middle class would be controlled as serfs by supreme rulers (President and Congress and Supreme Court) and lords (corporations) would control the wealth under the guise of a common religion (the Family's religion which certainly is not Christian)
People did not die in the name of Religion, they died in the name of power our wealth. The ruler used their belief system or religion are a means of recruiting, much like today's courting of under informed people by the Family and other Conservative "Christian" power brokers who also have become multimillionaires.
Most, if not all of the major religions are not about power and wealth. They have become adulterated by those who seek power, money and authority. Many of us in the religious community are outraged by corruption, greed, hypocrisy and deception that we see in groups like the Family as well as Pat Robertson, Focus on the Family, Family Research Console and so on.
Please do not ever say that because I believe in something that I can not physically see or prove that I use my faith as a crutch. If there is a God and Christ out there and I believe and have faith that I will be saved in their name and I am right, how grateful do you think I'll be. However if I am wrong than I have lost nothing and the world, I believe, will be better off that I have lived.
Sioux Rose
AZA: I respect your post and agree with your points for the most part. I wish there were more TRUE believers like yourself, who understood the IDEAL behind the High teachings of a Master like Christ. The vast majority does not, and you're quite right that religious faith (or the faithful flocks) has been used to create support for many vile agendas.
Reason can point to a creative force but not to all the superstitious and dangerous dogma in organized religion.
"AZAFVET"
Your focus seems good, but I want to point a few things out to you. You use the word "Christ" as if it was a person's name. The "Christ" is a jewish concept which many people believe was manifest in Jesus. The word can be traced back to the Greek word for "the annointed" - otherwise known as the Messiah. So, from the beginning, Christianity has always been about Following.
This is the core corruption of all the major religions.
I believe that you want peace and that you want people to love each other. I do not believe that this is what most religions want. Most of the religions want dominion - domination - dominos. They demand that we fall in line with their dogmas.
It is no mere coincidence that all the major religions worship a supreme being who is MALE. It is especially sad to me that so many women worship their own non-existence.
Until we outgrow these ancient forms of self-destruction (for indeed, every time we worship maleness as the highest of the highest, we are cutting off half of our existence) we will be doomed. This is also why we are destroying our environment - nature is seen as female and, as such, is dismissed as less than us. This is pathological suicide.
Yes, "the Family" is a perversion, but it is NOT that much different than most churches.
Sioux Rose
Brilliant article by Mr. Carroll, and one that uses words to sound the clarion call that (in the U.S.) Mars rules.
On Sunday, January 31, under the Pierre Tristam thread (Tebow's Mom), Kay Johnson and I related the many ways where Christian theocracy is moving into mainstream American policy-making.
Mr. Carroll relates, "The breakfasts are "ecumenical," with Jews and Muslims prominently invited, yet the organizing network, The Fellowship Foundation, aggressively promotes Jesus, who has become a kind of mascot of American military culture."
Instead of using Jesus' teachings of peace and turning the other cheek as opposed to striking back, the military uses Jesus' name but maintains the old war-oriented ways of Rome, in the phase where Mars did rule. That time cycle was known as the Age of Aries, followed by the Age of Pisces where Jesus, the FISHER of men came to introduce more compassion-based teachings.
He continues, "America had reinvented itself as a messiah nation, with apocalyptic fervor justifying a nuclear readiness to destroy civilization."
Sounds like Mars rules to me. The highest ethos championed being that of ultimate destruction.
And, "The national prayer breakfast... the tradition amounts to a religious festival of American Christian nationalism. The president speaks about humility, but this overtly theological claim to God's favor goes to the heart of the imperial hubris that has led to one foreign policy disorder after another."
Mars is like the driver (usually a mad man) who is obviously lost, but continues arrogantly on his way lacking the humility to ask for directions.
Too bad that driver represents 95% of the powerbrokers responsible for devising foreign and domestic policy, and they are driving US over a cliff. Mars is blinded by his own power, and has not one iota of empathy for anyone. How else to function as a killing machine? Any time you see a nation spend more on armaments than human uplift (thank you, Dr. King) it means that it has elected the spiritual death that comes from worship of the god of armies, war, and destruction.
Our nation IS there... and it is the MOST dangerous posture to assume. I will NOT tire of pointing out the Satanic co-optation of Jesus' name for endorsement of policies that run diametrically opposed to what he advocated for, and taught! It's been said that during this final phase the dark side would use its best weapon, which is deception. Imagine that the vast majority who think they are worshiping Jesus in their churches, are being taught to war against others, as if Jesus (*or God) is on their side. They were warned about the sheep in wolves' clothes... not realizing the deception would be found where they placed their greatest faith and trust... in their own churches! Thus the nation has gone mad and too many policy-makers are Courting Armageddon.
Amen, sister!
it is called inclusion liberals. Obama is reaching out. Or do you want Obama to be exclusive?
Sioux Rose
OWL: Inclusion? Let's all worship Jesus together before we send out those bombs. Yeah, that should satisfy atheists, mystics, Jews, Wiccans, and Muslims. It's like serving ONE food in a restaurant and telling guests they can have anything on the menu. Your mind is so closed it's a wonder you're still able to breathe, eat, pee, and defecate.
I would prefer if politicians behaved in an ethical way and kept their piety to themselves. Instead of the opposite we now see.
Joe
Communal prayer as practised at the so called prayer breakfasts in nothing more than the prayer of the Pharisees which Jesus condemned. It has no meaning and it is entirely useless. Those who "pray" have their reward. The reward is that everybody says of everybody else "see what good pious people they are" and they all go home satisfied with their goodness, but in total ignorance of their spiritual deadness. Jesus only commends secret, closeted, heart-searching prayer. We need not worry, God has the measure of the prayer breakfasts. I am sure He ignores them, but listens to the pleas of the victims of such hypocrites with a view to justice and karma working their effects in the lives of the violent and the greedy.
In the series "A Brief History of Disbelief" it was revealed that George Washington used to go to Church on Sunday, but would regularly leave after the sermon.
The minister approached him and requested that Washington stop leaving before the service was over.
Washington stopped going to church.
Seems patriotic to me.
The Dulles brothers scared us into bad politics and bad religion in the '50s, by dulling all our senses with their dull minds, and since then we've devolved to demonstrably evil politics propelled by retarded religion. Poor Eisenhower never knew what an insidiously stupid and thunderingly belligerent legacy he was leaving, his too little too late warnings about the military-industrial-congressional complex notwithstanding. Obama's as historically and politically untrainable as Bush, unless the secret design for this country since WWII has been to slowly and methodically destroy it and the whole world with it, perhaps to roll out the Armageddon carpet for the Four Horsemen of nuclear apocalypse to ride in on. Those prayer breakfasts must have a purpose after all.
James Carroll speaks pretty well despite being employed by an MSM organ.
I'd like some specifics. How many federal tax dollars are devoted to the NPB? Does it take place in federally supported facilities? How do we know, and who decides, that the NPB is "ecumenical"? Does describing it as "ecumenical" make it acceptable for Shiite and Sunni Muslims to attend and participate in prayers? Do the Jews who attend pray "in Jesus' name"? Or are the prayers watered down to suit those who attend? Who runs the Fellowship Foundation? Are people who, like me, don't accept the idea that a supernatural entity will intervene to change natural occurrences as a result of verbal and mental encomiums and supplications, disinvited?
I wouldn't have a problem accepting an invitation from Christians, Jews, Muslims, etc., to eat and share some time with them as long as the ones extending the invitation wouldn't expect or demand that I publicly renounce my own religious or non-religious beliefs. Voluntary and free discussion is a different matter. I wouldn't invite people to eat with me just so I could try to force upon them my views about their religion. I do attend church services occasionally (usually funerals), and respectfully tolerate prayers, which I refrain on those occasions from describing as a waste of time. I just don't think the NPB is a proper function of government, and I hope the answers to my questions show that it isn't. The same goes for sectarian funerals, such as the recent one for Edward Kennedy. Sectarian ceremonies of any kind aren't a proper function of government. As Carrol says, "The framers of the US Constitution were wary of all such public piety. Not for nothing did they omit the word 'God' from its clauses."
The NPB makes me uneasy. It seems to be cut from the same cloth as "Under God," "In God We Trust," and the mother of all religious intrusions, "God bless America," which must be uttered at the end of every public speech by every politician in this country. I cringe every time I hear it.
This breakfast crap doesn't matter because Obama hasn't a prayer.
All religion and astrology are scam. Their only purpose is to make people think irrationely and to control. Get it out of government.
When is the Atheist blessed silence brunch?
How about the Paganist Prayer Pig Roast?
The Budhist Reincarantion Smorgasboard? (come back for seconds!)
The Hindu BBQ Beef-on-a-Bun Luncheon?
Not every american is a christian (or stupid)..just most of them
mujeriego, I am shocked and outraged by your comment. By the way, you forgot the Baptist Beerfest.
What did you have for breakfast to trigger this outburst? A bowl of nails?
On second thoughts, given your title, it is better if I don't ask.
where was general boykin? he of the "my god is better than their god (think ken-l-ration)" school of thought (so to speak.
all of this is so irritating and so totally and completely american. exceptionalism, religious fervor, prosperity gospels, anti-gay, onward christian soldiers, shock and awe, and so on and so on and so on ad nauseum. any of that sound vaguely familiar? like what radiates from the wahhabis or radical muslims or any other radical religionist?
one is so tired of this nonsense.
one posted elsewhere that obama is being exposed as an empty suit. capable of nice rhetoric and little else. he wastes time with bi-partisanship as though the reps will play nice because he is nice. they simply smell blood in the water. he wastes time with ridiculous drivel like a national pryaer breakfast saying he prays a lot. sfw? so phucquing what? one doesn't care whether or not he prays. that is his personal business and none of the business of the country. but no. he says this thinking it will make the reps think better of him and cause them to reconsider their stubborness.
he is worse than wrong. he is a fool.