The Inauguration and Public Prayer

An article in the Wall Street Journal on Saturday complained that in an increasingly pluralistic America public prayer at the inauguration of the President have become increasingly “inclusivistic”. The author suggests that public prayer should either become generic so that it includes all Americans or it should be eliminated from the schedule of events. A similar situation has hovered over chaplains in the armed forces for at least the last 25 years (the period I was on active duty). It came to a head when Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld directed that prayer should be generic or eliminated from public events such as changes of command. How should we think of public prayer in America?

A place to start is be asking the question: “What is prayer?” A reasonable definition is the lifting up of one’s heart to God. This is true whether the prayer is private or public. When an individual prays publically he or she is still lifting up the heart to God and in this case verbalizing the thoughts of the heart.

Prayer is addressed TO SOMEONE! When a person prays publicly the prayer is addressed: to “Someone.” I mean here that God has a Name of some sort for all human persons who Address God. For the Moslem his heart is lifted up to the God of Allah. For the Jew the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is addressed presumably. For the Wiccan I suppose it would be Mother Earth or some such concept. The point is that prayer by its very nature is addressed to the deity not to the people listening to or overhearing the prayer that is said publicly. It is in the nature of the prayer that it is a direct address to a Person / God. To force the content of prayer to meet the pressures of political correctness is to lose entirely the idea of prayer: i.e. the lifting up of the heart to God. It is furthermore to create a new religion and a new God: “the religion and the God that is approved for public utterance in the U.S.”

There may be some people who believe in “the God of the religion approved for public utterance in the United States” but I haven’t met any. Real people’s religious beliefs are very specific. What I mean here is what an individual really believes about God and religion is very specific.

To say that public prayer has become non- inclusive or intolerant is to totally miss the point about prayer. Prayer is from one heart (the prayer) to another (God). Pluralism in America should be about encouraging each individual to live out his or her belief in God. Jews need to be Jews; Moslems need to be Moslems; and Christians Christians; etc. It is no good trying to reduce different beliefs for public relationship. We all share the fact that we are Americans. As long as each can pray for the good of all then each should pray to God as he or she believe in God. Then and only then will the one leading public prayer actually be leading real Americans in prayer.

By the way persons in America are free not to believe in God. To put that another way no one is forced to believe in God in any way in America. That is good because it is also common sense. That freedom does not constitute a right though to inhibit the public expression in America in any way… in my humble point of view.

J.R.R.Tolkien, C.S. Lewis and some simple thoughts on the nature of evil

29 March 2007

A place to start in the Christian life is with an understanding of the nature of evil. There are two basic views concerning the nature of evil. Tolkien and Lewis help clarify these views. The Bible gives necessary background. Here are the two views:

1. Manichean dualism. In this view evil and good war continuously with neither seeming ever to win the day.

2. Christianity. The view of Biblical Christianity as expressed in Scripture and in the view of Boethius, a 6th century Roman philosopher and Christian, is that evil is an absence of the goodness that begins in God. This absence allows the influence of demonic forces in human persons and an apparent battle between good and evil in which neither side seems to win the day. A day will come, however, when with the return of Christ to the world there will be no place in the universe that absents the goodness of God. In that day there will be no evil.

The most famous philosophical statement of the orthodox Christian view of evil is that of Boethius, a Roman senator in the early 6the century AD. De Consolatione Philosophe, “Of the Consolation of Philosophy,” was written while Boethius, a Christian, was in prison waiting to die on charges of plotting to restore Imperial rule. Boethius was tortured to death in 524/525 AD. His reflection was not idle mental meandering. He was struggling with the thing itself... with evil. “The Boethian view is that evil is not something in itself. What people identify as evil is actually the absence of good.” [1]

Tolkien struggled with the nature of evil. He spent time in the British Army and served in the Battle of the Somme, one of the most famous apparently useless expenditures of human life in the history of warfare. Tom Shippey notes that Tolkien was one of many authors in the 20th century who had served in the century’s "great wars" and struggled to understand the nature of their experience of evil.

Tolkien’s view is expressed throughout The Lord of The Rings. Frodo comments to Sam in the Tower of Cirith Ungal that evil cannot create ... “not real new things of its own.” This illustrates the Boethian view or the orthodox Christian view of the nature of evil. C.S. Lewis adds in Mere Christianity, “… furthermore evil was not created; it arose when human beings exercised their own free will in withdrawing their service and their intentions from God; in the end when the divine plan has been fulfilled all evils may be annulled, cancelled, brought to good, as the Fall of Man was by the Incarnation and the Death of Christ.”[2]

Some evidence for and against the Boethian view is as follows. All who do evil excuse themselves in terms of what is good. Therefore evil is an absence of good. Evil is a parasite not an original thing. An illustration are the Orcs in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Though the Orcs are understood to be "forces of evil" they admire and condemn based on their own moral judgments of the good.

One may add that Bible suggests that human persons are greatly influenced by spiritual forces. Spiritual forces are ultimately either of God and the light (angels, e.g.) or they are forces of the darkness and followers of the angels who rebelled against God, that is Satan and his followers (demons). A person not influenced by benevolent spiritual forces, one who is empty so to speak of spiritual influences for good, is capable of being influenced by demonic forces.

Though evil is not something in and of itself - but rather the absence of something else (the good of God) - evil does express itself in the world human persons inhabit. Whenever evil does express itself good is in opposition to it. It is in the nature of Reality that in the spirit world the forces of darkness are in every instance opposed to the forces of light.

Though on the spiritual plane these two forces are always clearly delineated on the human plane there is often considerable shadow. An example is the allied opposition to Hitler's war machine in World War II. Though the allies were not uniformly expressions of the forces of light and Hitler's war machine was not uniformly an expression of the forces of darkness the allies were clearly forces of good in their opposition to the Nazi forces of darkness and evil.


[1] JRR Tolkien: Author of the Century. Shippey, Tom. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002.
[2] Ibid, 131