DAVID MARCUS: Forgive me, but I was wrong about school prayer

The battle over prayer in school is raging in Texas right now with Attorney General Ken Paxton vowing to defend any school district that introduces the controversial practice under a contemporary state law expanding religious expression in coaching For the entirety of my life and I m old the prohibition on society school-sponsored prayer seemed like settled Constitutional science owing to a Supreme Court decision barring what had previously been a widespread and normal practice FEDERAL JUDGE BLOCKS TEXAS INHABITANTS SCHOOLS FROM DISPLAYING TEN COMMANDMENTS IN CLASSROOMSIn the past I agreed with this form of separation of church and state For me it was almost a question of better safe than sorry regarding the rights of minority religions and importantly I held that Christian moral values were so ingrained in our heritage that seconds a day of praying could be forsaken Lord was I wrong In fact the ban on school prayer was just one piece of a broader effort to remove God from the general square The clear and patently wrong message was that God has nothing to do with inhabitants affairs or coaching This is precisely how you wind up with Sen Tim Kaine D-Va saying in the halls of Congress on Wednesday that it is extremely troubling to believe that our rights come from our Creator even though his fellow Virginian Thomas Jefferson made this concept the cornerstone of the entire American experiment Maybe if Kaine took seconds to pray each morning or even just paid attention to the daily prayer in Congress he would remember that it is in God we trust In terms of instruction itself throughout the history of the West or dare we call it Christendom prayer has played a key role At least up until years ago that is Here we can appeal to Thomas Aquinas not as a Catholic saint but as one of the foremost academicians and teachers of the Middle Ages from his perch at the University of Paris in the mid th century In his Prayer for the Participant Aquinas asks that the Holy Spirit pour forth your brilliance upon my dense intellect dissipate the darkness which covers me that of sin and of ignorance Grant me a penetrating mind to understand a retentive memory method and ease in learning What Aquinas understood so long ago was that the purpose of prayer in school is to recognize with humility our own limitations and to ask that Creator from whom our rights emanate to guide us Fast-forward to and our citizens schools are by design atheistic but atheism is not a neutral religious philosophy nor a mere absence of religion It implies a purely physical understanding of the world an assertion that is no more provable than religion itself Currently we are embarking on coaching by artificial intelligence There is no reason for kids to read books because we're informed AI will make their imaginations come to life While Aquinas insisted that we must struggle to overcome our intellectual shortcomings and ignorance AI is just immediate gratification on a plate Part of the reason that the founders did not specify that America is a Christian nation is that it seemed to go without saying In their day the English-speaking people had been Christian for a thousand years The framers of the Constitution desired to avoid the intra-Christian fighting that had plagued the motherland not to bar Christianity from population life a concept that would have seemed absurd to them Saying the Lord s Prayer each morning at school asking forgiveness from God promising forgiveness for others to be protected from temptations like laziness and delivered from evil such as drug use or hatred prepares a pupil not just to learn but to be an American citizen In the absence of God and prayer Kaine is absolutely correct Our rights are nothing more than a piece of paper subject to the swaying whims of powerful mortals That may be fine in England where they arrest people over mean tweets but never in America CLICK HERE FOR MORE FOX NEWS OPINIONIt is by no means an imposition on an American Jewish Muslim or atheist aspirant to be exposed to the Lord s Prayer they live in a nation founded on a Christian understanding of morality This Christian morality is ingrained in the DNA of America Why can t you have seven wives Because Christianity prohibits it How did the nuclear family become the model of Western democratic executive It was fostered by the church In my lifetime the efforts to banish religion from official and populace proceedings have gone too far and we can feel the loss This is very much part of why we see a religious revival happening especially in regard to young Americans becoming Catholics It is not too late to fix this lack Sixty-five years is a blip in the history of the West Wrong turns have been made before and now with Texas leading the way we can address a return to what Western training has invariably been and what it must consistently be an act of arrangement not just to ourselves not just to our society but to God Himself CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM DAVID MARCUS