You know what I really, really hate? I hate when somebody adapts a Jane Austen novel for stage or screen and thinks they can improve on her dialogue. They can't. And furthermore -- oh, strike that. Wrong peeve. Start again.
You know what I really, really hate? Prayer breakfasts, that's what. I don't mean internal Baptist or Catholic or Episcopal (they seem to be mostly Christian) prayer breakfasts. No, I'm talking about the quease-inducing amalgam of politics and religion embodied in the political prayer breakfast. These, starting with the National Prayer Breakfast, have multiplied like you-know-what and now have their own website. Idaho, Hawaii, Texas, Missouri, Washington state, South Carolina, Louisiana, California (et tu???), Delaware, Minnesota, Montana, and Tennessee and their cities and towns and water districts all have them and that's just in the first three pages of the Googlesearch. They've even gone international, from Sydney to Saskatoon.
The first political prayer breakfast stuck its nose under the government tent back in the Cold War.
The National Prayer Breakfast [originally the Presidential Prayer Breakfast] is a yearly event held in Washington, D.C., on the first Thursday of February each year. The founder of this event was Abraham Vereide. The event—which is actually a series of meetings, luncheons, and dinners—has taken place since 1953...
So who was this guy Abraham Vereide? Well, he founded The Family, a/k/a The Fellowship. You know The Family; the super secret Washington outfit. Rachel Maddow has done a lot of stories on them. USA Today
reviewed Jeff Sharlet's expose,
The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at The Heart of American Power in 2008:
Growing out of Vereide's early struggles against the radical labor movement on the West Coast, the group came to consist of religiously minded businessmen and sympathetic politicians who shared Vereide's mildly pro-fascist sentiments. Vereide is most widely known for launching in 1953 what is now a Washington institution, the National Prayer Breakfast, where movers and shakers come together to pray in an uplifting but blandly interfaith way.
Only a year after the first National Prayer Breakfast, in 1954, "under God"
planted itself in the Pledge of Allegiance. It was the Joe McCarthy/Blacklist era, when Communists lurked in every theater and classroom and city hall and the terrible swift sword of religion, specifically Christianity, offered protection and solace.
In 1960 John Kennedy took a stand for a secular political ideal. He had to, because he was running for President and was under attack for being a Catholic, and non-Catholic America was convinced Catholics got their orders straight from the Pope:
I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute, where no Catholic prelate would tell the president (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote; where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference; and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the president who might appoint him or the people who might elect him
(But JFK, like every president from Eisenhower on, attended and spoke at the National Prayer Breakfasts.)
And how far we've come since 1960. Since at least 2004, Catholic bishops have threatened to deny Communion to politicians because of their political positions. In 2011 Rick Santorum, another Catholic politician, said that when he read Kennedy's speech he "almost threw up." And when is the last time any president has ended a speech without saying, "God bless you! And God bless the United States of America!"
Louie Gohmert praises God and America.
Mr. Emmet spent many years as a heroic bureaucrat dispensing federal funds to nonprofit organizations to do good works. He takes a pragmatic view of prayer breakfasts, and explains that officials go to them to suck up to the faith community and get it to use its resources to address the social needs that government should fill but has failed to. His primary objection is to the concept of a prayer
breakfast. A prayer lunch, or even a prayer brunch, would, he says, be so much more inclusive of those who don't want to have to roll out of the sack at 6:30 and listen to a bunch of prayers.
On cross examination, Mr. Emmet opined that such breakfasts should be sponsored by religious organizations, not by government entities, and that government resources should not be spent on them. The Freedom From Religion Foundation agrees. However, Congress hosts the National Prayer Breakfast, which is organized by The Fellowship. And local prayer breakfasts, at least in Southern California, are usually called things like The Mayor's Prayer Breakfast, not "The Ecumenical Council's Prayer Breakfast."
I say government sucks up to the faith community all the time. There's an invocation at every official government function I've ever attended. If your deity of choice is already supervising City Council or Congress or the current war, why does he or she also get breakfast?
But most of all, what self respecting deity, if one exists, could stand to listen to the orgies of hypocrisy and self congratulation of which your average public prayer fest is composed without striking down upon most of those present with great vengeance and furious anger? On the rare occasions when someone ventures into self critical reflection (like, you know, prayer), as when President Obama talked about the Crusades in the most recent National Prayer Breakfast, you'd think he'd shaken the pillars of heaven itself. Or the pillars of America; they get mixed up. The pillars of all that is holy anyway.
And IF a politician is religious and IF he or she is Christian and IF he or she wants to pray, what about Matthew 6:5-6?
And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.
Amen to that!