When They Made Me Pray in School

When I was in second grade, my teacher made us pray that the law would change so that a day at school could once again begin with a prayer. I was 7, but even at that age, I knew there was something nonsensical about praying to be allowed to pray.

This was at a public school outside Philadelphia in the 1960s, not that long after the Supreme Court ruled that prayer in public schools violated the Constitution. In our predominantly Catholic neighborhood, my family, with its three kids, seemed to me to be abnormally small. There were 30 students or more in that class, and I was probably the only Jewish kid. I bowed my head to my desk and mouthed the words the teacher asked us to recite.

She also asked us to bring Bibles to class. I don’t know why—maybe to ascertain who among us had one at home. We didn’t have anything at home we called a Bible. My family attended a Reform synagogue, and we were not particularly observant. But I would have known by then that I was different from my classmates, because we did not celebrate Christmas.

I felt singled out as different, Bible-less and unholy, and it caused me to shut down.  That year, I came home with C’s and D’s on my report cards.

[Elizabeth Bruenig: Who counts as Christian?]

When my parents asked what was wrong, I would say “nothing.” I was a middle child, and my role in the family was to never be too much trouble. But my silence ran deeper than that. I knew that if I told my parents about my teacher, they would go to my school and raise objections. That would shine an even brighter spotlight on me, which was the last thing I wanted. I must have figured that it was better for my parents to think I was kind of dumb.

I’ve thought about that long-ago experience a lot recently, now that religion, and specifically Christianity, is ascending in public life.

A couple weeks ago, Pete Hegseth, the nation’s top military leader, led what was called the “Secretary of Defense Christian Prayer & Worship Service” at the Pentagon. As described in a New York Times story, it sounded like a revival meeting. “This is precisely where I need to be, and I think exactly where we need to be as a nation, at this moment,” Hegseth said: “in prayer, on bended knee, recognizing the providence of our Lord and savior Jesus Christ.” He continued, “King Jesus, we come humbly before you, seeking your face, seeking your grace, in humble obedience to your law and to your word.”

In Texas, Governor Greg Abbott is expected to sign legislation requiring classrooms in the state’s roughly 9,000 public schools to be postered with copies of the Ten Commandments. This school year, for the first time, teachers in Oklahoma were ordered to keep a Bible in their classroom: “Every teacher, every classroom in the state, will have a Bible in the classroom, and will be teaching from the Bible in the classroom,” said the state superintendent. He stressed the historical importance of the text for America’s Founding Fathers and suggested that it could be brought into science classes as part of discussions about how it inspired investigations into “God’s creation.” He expected “immediate and strict compliance” with the mandate.

To make the case for more religious content in schools and elsewhere in public life, proponents often argue that the Fathers were men of faith who believed that the nation and even the Constitution itself were divinely inspired. History suggests this is an exaggeration at best. The Founders were men of the Enlightenment, and some, including Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Ben Franklin, were attracted to Deism—a belief system that stresses rationality over superstition and rejects the notion of a supreme being who intervenes in the universe. That’s a long way from the Christian nationalism of Hegseth and others who are now seeking to bring their faith into the public square.

[Molly Worthen: What the fastest-growing Christian group reveals about America]

But we are of course a Christian nation and probably will always remain so. No one knows that better than non-Christians. It is a fact of life, and not an unhappy one, or at least not for me. I am married to a woman who grew up attending a Presbyterian church. We raised our children in both of our traditions. There is a big difference, however, between the choices we make and the ones forced on us.

The aggressive push to flood the nation with religious faith—a specific faith, and a particular strain of that faith—undermines any notion of American plurality. It comes at a cost not just to the nation, but to individual Americans. You want to advance in Hegseth’s Pentagon? You would do well to attend one of his prayer services—they are going to be held monthly—to pray, and to do so conspicuously and in full voice.

Thirty-one million people live in Texas—67 percent of whom identify as Christian. The rest, about 10 million Texans, are Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, or a mix that a Pew Research Center study identified as atheists, agnostics, and “nothing in particular.” Some children from those families will now have to sit in school while a faith other than their own is pressed on them.

They’ll feel, as I did, like an interloper—unwelcome in their own classroom.