Beware priests who quote Scripture only selectively, especially when they are also dishonestly selective in quoting the Constitution.
And when the priest is saying a football coach should not be allowed to pray in public, it’s time to throw a penalty flag at the misleading minister.
Writing in the April 27 Los Angeles Times, liberal Episcopal priest and author Randall Balmer argued that the Supreme Court, in a case for which it heard oral arguments this week, should rule against football coach Joe Kennedy, who was fired because he refused to stop praying on the field after games.
This is not the place to rehash the particulars of the case, other than to say that numerous experts, including six former U.S. attorneys general, find the legal and constitutional case to be compelling in Kennedy’s favor. They obliterate the extreme claim, embraced by Balmer, that the Constitution establishes such a high “wall of separation” between church and state that a state employee (the coach) can’t even pray in public.
What’s particularly galling about Balmer’s column, though, is what it leaves out — both on the secular front and the Biblical one. On the former, only in passing does he cite the second clause of the First Amendment’s religious liberty protection, namely that Congress shall make no law “prohibiting the free exercise” of religion. Balmer instead lingers on a very strained interpretation of the first clause, forbidding any “law respecting an establishment of religion,” but virtually ignores the amendment’s whole point, which is to encourage rather than deter free exercise.
Yes, he makes one quick mention of “a free marketplace for religion,” but it’s virtually lost amid his many paragraphs of blather assuming that a silent prayer is somehow “coercive,” even if everybody else is free not to join it.
Yet that’s not this priest’s worst sin (ahem) of omission. Balmer cites Jesus as an avid opponent of public prayers — all public prayers. He wrote that Jesus “castigated the religious authorities of his day for their public prayers” and “instructed his followers instead to ‘enter thy closet and … shut thy door’ to pray. … Pray in a closet, not at the 50-yard line.” But then, he makes no mention of the fact that Jesus literally did pray in public on some occasions — in front of large crowds, in some cases.
In order to misconstrue Jesus’s message, Balmer leaves out crucial context — and as a priest, he knows darn well that he is doing so. Nowhere does Balmer mention that it is the very same Jesus who, in another context, in the chapter of Matthew immediately before the one Balmer cites, tells those same disciples that together they “are the light of the world” and that they should “let [their] light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.”
Kennedy says that is exactly what he is doing because if he says his prayers only in a closet, he is not glorifying his heavenly Lord.
The point here is not to engage in theological debate about what part of Scripture should take precedence in what circumstances. What’s at issue is Balmer’s failure even to acknowledge that there is another take on this expressed in the Scripture at all. He thus misrepresents the debate on purpose. It is not unlike the manner in which he relies on just one clause of a constitutional sentence (and a strained interpretation of it at that) when the very next clause offers so much in favor of the opposing viewpoint.
On both fronts, Balmer is bearing false witness. And yes, that’s another practice about which the Bible has something to say.
