When is a prayer not a prayer?

Atheist dollar bill.
(image by DrkBlueXG)

The Cranston Herald also wanted to publish my letter on the Cranston West prayer mural, but because it had already been published in the Providence Journal, I had to write them a new one. Which worked out well, because in the meantime, I'd also been in contact with the attorneys for the case and had some additional points to make. Since my previous items on the subject here on Progressive Charlestown have generated some lively discussion, I thought I'd post this latest letter here as well.

By Linda Felaco


When I heard that my high school's school prayer was being challenged in court on constitutional grounds, my first thought was, We had a school prayer? And it slid right off my radar screen.

Then I saw a headline on ProJo.com on Thursday that said "Update: Judge sees Cranston school prayer for himself." Wow, I thought. That's impressive that the judge would actually go to the school. So I read the story, which included a readable image of the prayer mural.

As an atheist, I always find it very troubling when I hear about school districts trying to rewrite textbooks to inject creationism or its more modern incarnation, intelligent design, into the school curriculum. But I was hard-pressed to find anything objectionable about the prayer. Without the "Our Heavenly Father" at the beginning and the "Amen" at the end, you could read the prayer as a 12-step type call to a higher power. If you were writing a school prayer for atheists, this would be it.

So I wrote a blog item about it and posted it on my Facebook page for my classmates to see, and several of them responded positively and wanted me to take it further. So I wrote to the ACLU attorneys who are trying the case and got into a lengthy exchange with one of them.

Don't get me wrong: If someone were trying to post a prayer in a public school today, I would be the first person to object on constitutional grounds. But this prayer has been there on the auditorium wall since it was first built almost 50 years ago, and only in the very early years of the school were students required to recite it. No one is forced to read it now; it's just there, off in your peripheral vision while you're watching whoever's on stage.

I think the Cranston School Committee missed an opportunity for a teachable moment when the issue of the prayer was first raised. They could have explained the history and how, when the school first opened, all students—Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish—recited the Lord's Prayer during homeroom and how the school prayer was written as a nondenominational replacement for it. They could have set up a mock court and let the students "try" the case themselves. Or they could have asked students to write new prayers in their own religious traditions or lack thereof to be posted alongside the current one.

But unfortunately, the case landed in court, where it seems likely that the mural will be found unconstitutional. I find this sad. Because in our adversarial system of justice, there has to be a winner and a loser, and in all likelihood the loser's punishment will be that the mural will have to come down.

And constitutional law will win, but what will be lost along with the mural? A piece of history. A connection between the modern-day school and its early days. And a lovely message that students could do much worse than to take to heart.