Presidential Prayers

            Fifty-six years ago, the Herald Tribune ran a headline that got E. B. White’s attention: PRESIDENT SAYS PRAYER IS PART OF DEMOCRACY. Although he was not a religious man, this New Yorker columnist could well understand why Presidents might need divine assistance from time to time. “But I don’t think a President should advertise prayer,” he wrote. “That is a different thing. Democracy, if I understand it at all, is a society in which the unbeliever feels undisturbed and at home.” Writing from his “private sick bed,” White worried about this tendency of the American President to “pray electronically.”

            When Eisenhower delivered his Presidential prayer during his 1953 Inaugural Address, the response was overwhelmingly positive. Sharing the podium with two bishops (one Protestant, one Catholic) and a rabbi, the General-turned-President surprised the reporters waiting in the press box, who had copies of his prepared address. "I have a little prayer of my own,” Eisenhower said, “and I want you all to bow your heads." He had composed it that morning in his hotel suite, in the hour between church and the day’s events. "Give us, we pray," the Chief Executive intoned, "the power to discern clearly right from wrong, and allow all our works and actions to be governed thereby and by the laws of this land."  The concourse was silent, the sun shone brightly, and then the President spoke his address. Later, during the parade, he was lassoed by a California cowboy. A reporter from the Washington Post noted that the President was in a “gay mood.”

            Three years into his term, Eisenhower might have thought about that festive day with some nostalgia. There were no California cowboys playing with their ropes and the concourse was rarely reverent. Having pushed for civil rights for African Americans as a matter of national security, Eisenhower now had a white electorate unwilling to be governed by the laws of the land. A governor from Arkansas would refuse to enforce the Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education and eventually Eisenhower would bring in the troops. No wonder he was advertising prayer. Maybe cultivating piety would bring stubborn white Americans to a higher ground.

            But as far as White was concerned, the President’s promotion of religiosity created its own invidious social divisions. Sure, Eisenhower might have received many positive responses to his inaugural prayer, but what about “the persons who felt fidgety or disquieted about the matter,” wondered White. Those people “were not likely to write in about it, lest they appear irreverent, irreligious, unfaithful, or even un-American.” A piece in Harpers, penned by Adlai Stevenson, had also gotten E. B. White’s attention. Stevenson quoted Justice Louis Brandeis: “The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.” It was a slippery slope from Eisenhower’s little prayer, thought White, to accusations of being a communist.

            White’s concerns about well-meaning but misplaced religiosity appear to have come true. In 2001, George W. Bush’s inaugural prayer was neither little nor non-denominational. The only religion represented on the podium was Protestant and the only divine power had the initials J.C. Kirbyjon Caldwell prayed in "the name that's above all other names, Jesus the Christ." Rev. Franklin Graham asked the American people to "acknowledge You alone as our Lord, our Savior and our Redeemer. We pray this in the name of the Father, and of the Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, and of the Holy Spirit." The positive responses Bush received would have come from a particular type of American voter. Catholics, Jews, Greek Orthodox, Mormons, Muslims, pagans, agnostics and humanists might worry that their criticisms would make them seem irreverent or irreligious or unfaithful or un-American.

            From the vantage point of current American politicking, Eisenhower’s little prayer seems downright secular and White’s criticisms those of a hypochondriac. The General was only asking for divine assistance for our ethical judgments and strength to follow the law. Surely, we can go back to that level of religious discourse, can’t we?

            And yet White’s concern wasn’t with prayer, per se, but with “praying electronically,” a political reality that most of us have come to expect. Praying electronically is what leaders do when they want to silence their critics and reinforce their proximity to the divine. Even that little prayer put the well-meaning President in the position of speaking for Americans to God. “I distrust the slightest hint of a standard for political rectitude,” wrote White, “knowing that it will open the way for persons in authority to set arbitrary standards for human behavior.”

            For my own part, prayer has gotten me through times of agony and uncertainty and has helped me discern the difference between right and wrong. But just because I reach out for spiritual assistance doesn’t mean I would bring a cadre of spiritual advisors with me to start a new semester. Nor would I begin a new class by speaking to God on behalf of my students. Indeed, the thought of it makes me quite fidgety. My job is to provoke thinking, to provide evidence for claims and to consider alternate arguments. To do my job well, I need an energized group, eager to take on challenges and to question my assumptions.

            Too often, religion is used to pacify the electorate. Presidents invoke it at their inaugurations as a way of quieting down the concourse. In Eisenhower’s time, the method was subtle and, to my mind, innocuous. Nowadays, the technique is extreme and the content designed to exclude. But as the concourse fills up and the demand for jobs gets louder, praying electronically may not be quite so effective. The people already have, as Rumi says, “a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the ground.” What they need from their leader is more attention to matters of state.