![\"outside](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/166\/2016\/02\/outside-the-circle.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\nThe text reads \u201cPrayer circle forms outside council meeting following vote to switch to moment of silence\u201d and the image shows a large circle of people, some in suits, holding hands. Do you know what I feel when I look at that picture?<\/p>\n
I feel outside<\/em>. I feel excluded.<\/p>\nWhat\u2019s interesting is that the people forming that circle probably see prayer as unitive, and in a group of people who share the same beliefs, it can be. But the public prayers they are defending divide rather than uniting, because not everyone shares the same faith\u2014or any faith at all. I am not religious. My husband is also not religious, and at this point, our children aren\u2019t religious either. In many ways, we\u2019re just like anyone else. Our children go to school, gymnastics, and martial arts. We go to the children\u2019s museum, the park, the Y, and come home to have supper together, read books, and do some gaming\u00a0together as a family. We go to a UU church, which is founded on common values rather than on common religious beliefs. But when I look at the circle in the image above, I become an outsider.<\/p>\n
Don\u2019t get me wrong, I have no problem with people gathering in like-minded religious groups and worshiping together. I have no problem with prayer circles in\u00a0general, and\u00a0I recognize that the people in that picture had a right to form that circle. But in that image, in that moment, those people were coming together in defense of Christian\u2014yes, Christian<\/em>\u2014prayers at the beginning of their city council meetings. That wasn\u2019t just some spontaneous outbreak of religious fervor. The strange\u00a0thing is that they probably saw their act as unitive\u2014the good people of the town coming together in the face of\u2014of what, exactly? And that\u2019s the problem.<\/p>\nIt\u2019s not just the nonreligious who are made to feel like outsiders in the face of the Christian majority working to cement its supremacy through public displays of Christianity such as opening prayers, it\u2019s also those who aren\u2019t Christian who are excluded. It\u2019s also Jews, and Muslims, and Hindus, and Sikhs, and pagans. And this exclusion isn\u2019t new. In the 1800s, amidst concerns about new immigrants, many common\u00a0schools included daily reading from the Protestant Bible, which made the Catholic students feel like outsiders. In the 1950s, at the heart of the Cold War, schools in New York state opened with a\u00a0prayer developed by\u00a0Catholics, Protestants, and Jewish clergy\u2014a prayer that made children who weren\u2019t religious feel excluded.<\/p>\n
Our public displays of what is often called \u201ccivil religion\u201d should unite us, not divide us. We may be a majority-Christian nation, but we aren\u2019t an only-Christian nation, and we are a nation ostensibly founded on religious freedom. When the founding\u00a0founders\u00a0declined to create an established religion, what they did was revolutionary. At the time, most countries had a state church. They chose a different route, because they knew that the young United States was already home to a religious diversity that would make an established church divisive, to say the least. While the United States\u00a0doesn\u2019t have a perfect record vis a vis a state establishment of religion\u2014see the Bible reading and prayers mentioned above\u2014it would behoove us to remember the underlying message\u2014an establishment of religion in a country of diverse religious beliefs is divisive rather than unitive.<\/p>\n
The people who formed that prayer circle in the image above had every right to do so, but it is only natural that their actions would leave\u00a0people like me feeling like outsiders. When we look at\u00a0controversies over public prayers at city councils or school board meetings, we need to ask who we leave standing on the outside looking in.
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