By DONALD DeMARCO
The National Day of Prayer, observed each year on the first Thursday of May as designated by the United States Congress, is an occasion when people are asked “to turn to God in prayer and meditation at churches, in groups, and as individuals.” Each president is required by law to sign a proclamation on this special day to encourage all Americans to pray.
The modern law formalizing this day was enacted in 1952 during the time of the Korean War by Harry S. Truman. The enacting of the National Day of Prayer was inspired by Rev. Billy Graham when he said: “What a thrilling, glorious thing it would be to see leaders of our country today kneeling before Almighty God in prayer. What a thrill would sweep this country. What renewed hope and courage would grip the Americans at this hour of peril.”
This day of prayer has not been devoid of controversy. In 2003, the American Humanist Association established a National Day of Reason which was scheduled for the first Thursday in May in order to conflict with the National Day of Prayer. In 2012 the Freedom from Religion Foundation unsuccessfully challenged its constitutionality in court. A panel of a federal appellate court unanimously dismissed the case. The court ruled that the foundation’s “feeling of alienation” was not sufficient grounds to file suit, adding: “Hurt feelings differ from legal injury.”
The year 2021 has brought into play a new controversy. The President Biden version of the prayer is unique and unprecedented. It omits any reference to God! Is this a political compromise, celebrating the Day of Prayer to please most Americans but omitting any reference to God in order to please the atheist contingent that has a significant influence in White House politics?
But a compromise should offer each party something positive. To remove God from prayer is to render prayer meaningless and thereby make a mockery of the National Day of Prayer.
President Biden has made his refusal to “impose” his Catholic values on people well known. He has no reluctance, however, to “impose” secular and even atheistic values on his citizenry. The logical consequence of this refusal to impose Catholic values would be the refusal to “impose” values of justice, truth, goodness, and charity, all of which are affirmed by the Catholic Church. Biden has traded his fear of imposing Catholic values, however, for his zeal in imposing atheistic values.
If prayer is not directed to God, to whom or to what is it directed? Atheists have lauded the value of reason and ridiculed people of faith. Nonetheless, as Pope St. John Paul II has taken great pains to explain in his longest encyclical, Faith and Reason, faith and reason complement each other. The Enlightenment Period was a divinization of Reason. But reason alone is insufficient for a full and balanced life.
“Why is it,” asked Nobel Prize Laureate Albert Camus, “that the Enlightenment led to the Blackout?”
“There is no worse delusion,” Jacques Maritain wrote in The Dream of Descartes, than to believe that “reason alone was capable of making men act reasonably and securing the good of peoples!”
“The madman,” G.K. Chesterton writes in Orthodoxy, “is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except reason.”
Prayer without God is akin to dancing without music. There is a scene in the motion picture Amadeus, in which a certain puritanical attitude obliges dancers to dance without music. What becomes noticeable is the creaking floor and the huffing and puffing of the dancers. Whatever they are doing becomes both ridiculous and incomprehensible. Soon common sense prevails and the dancers bring visible life to Mozart’s music.
Praying to a God who is not there should provoke the question, “What are you doing?” Would a person telephone another person knowing he is not at home to receive the call?
Prayer without God is an automobile without gas, a kite without wind, a man without a purpose. It has no place to go! Atheists do not pray, though they may hope. But their hope is never airborne.
Perhaps the most celebrated atheist of the twentieth century was Bertrand Russell, a man of exceptional rational acumen. He, together with Alfred North Whitehead, produced Principia Mathematica, a nearly 2,000-page monumental work on the foundations of mathematics.
And yet, despite his intellectual prowess, he exhibited an exceptionally irrational attitude toward religion. In his book, Why I Am Not Christian, he makes the following rather myopic statement: “I cannot, however, deny that it [religion] has made some contributions to civilization. It helped in early days to fix the calendar, and it caused Egyptian priests to chronicle eclipses with such care that in time they became able to predict them. These two services I am prepared to acknowledge, but I do not know of any others.”
He summarizes religion as “a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race” (p. 24).
The intolerance and unfairness that many atheists have shown to believers is puzzling. Nonbelievers may have had a determinate influence on Biden’s Godless prayer, but what they may have brought to the attention of Americans is how much America needs a real National Day of Prayer.
In his proclamation, Biden noted that “today, we remember and celebrate that the healing balm of prayer can play in our lives and in the life of our Nation.” The president should understand that it is not prayer that heals, but God through prayer. If one purchases a bromide, it is not the money that provides the cure, but the bromide. Prayer without God is a mere quivering of the airwaves.
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