It seems odd to post this on Christmas eve, but it just came up elsewhere, so I thought I’d post it here. There seems to be a group of people convinced that the government has banned praying in school, and that’s outraged that displaying the Ten Commandments in courthouses isn’t legal.

The first point I’d like to make is that praying in school isn’t illegal. In fact, outlawing praying in school would be unconstitutional, if you read the First Amendment. The courts have upheld the right of student prayer. What they’ve struck down is school-led prayer, where a public school forces students to pray or participate in religion programs.

The display of Ten Commandments has been upheld and struck down for various reasons; the basic question comes down to whether they’re part of a historical display of various things (permissible), or whether they exist to promote Christianity (flagrant violation of the Constitution).

I’m a Christian, and most people I know are, too. And yet I’m pleased the courts have ruled this way. Why?

Imagine that we were still Christians, but the government was ruled by Muslims. And suddenly, the courthouses displayed the Five Pillars, and our children were being forced to recite Muslim prayers every morning. There’s nothing wrong with Islam (aside from the 0.01% of Muslims who interpret what’s practically a different version of the Bible to somehow advocate the destruction of most of the world), but wouldn’t it be outrageous? Even if our nation was “founded on Judeo-Christian principles” (a claim which I’d contest, but which is really irrelevant to this), our nation was founded on the concept of freedom of religion, too. Not because religion is bad, but because we learned the hard way that, even when it had the best of intentions, government doing anything with religion had always turned out disastrous. While some Christians seem to feel threatened by freedom of religion, we should really feel liberated. It’s because of freedom of religion that we’re free to practice our religion.

Related posts:

1. Late Night Political Rant
2. Freedom of Speech
3. Freedom of Speech
4. A Little on the Religious Right
5. On Religion