Hail Mary (News From The Future)

A colleague of mine, whose work on time travel has been reasonably successful, takes delight in sharing religious news from the future with me. Here is an op-ed piece from ten years from now that he brought back, which readers of this blog may find interesting:

Our Lady Of Wisdom (November 6th, 2017)

“History teaches us that history teaches us nothing.” I don’t know who said it, but the events that have been playing out before our eyes over the past few months have proven the truth of the proverb. It was only a month and a half ago (it seems like even less than that) when clergy and religious leaders were celebrating the reintroduction of prayer into schools.

All that changed about two weeks ago, when a Catholic priest, representing the sizable Catholic population here in the state of Indiana, took his turn in the rotation and led the children in one local school in saying the Hail Mary.

Now concerned Protestant parents and clergy are taking to the street and protesting, and there have even been outbreaks of violence between Protestants and Catholics in some neighborhoods where the two reside in close proximity. Some Protestant leaders have allied with Jewish community leaders and clergy as well as some atheists to seek a total ban on all forms of school prayer. “It is about our Constitutional freedom of religion” said one parent. “No one else should be dictating what our children pray or who they pray to. That should be left in the hands of parents.”
A quick search showed that this same parent, just one month earlier, was using similar language to demand the reintroduction of prayer into schools.

Other parents and clergy are asking that further laws be introduced to ensure that all references to God are generic and not in any way sectarian.

The views of Thomas Jefferson and other founding fathers who were Deists would be unacceptable to most Christians today. Ironically, the founding fathers (including Jefferson) enacted laws and amended the Constitution to protect our children from have their views forced upon them.

Perhaps now the true wisdom of the founding fathers will be appreciated. But will we ever be able to make the progress as a nation that they hoped we would, if in every generation we have to recover the same ground and ‘reinvent the wheel’?