School Prayer and Roberts

Documents released yesterday revealed that Jon Roberts supported school prayer - a moment of silence before the school day begins to be exact. I'm almost certain that this will be blown out of proportion by the media and those that would like to make Roberts into a religious zealot. The case being discussed - as far as I can tell - revolved around a moment of silence that would allow Christian students to pray if they wanted to and those of other religions to pray as well -again if they wanted to. It's not as big a deal as some would - or will - make it out to be.

This brings up an interesting issue for me. I am after all what most would consider an evangelical Christian, so I've heard lots of grief stirred up over the ban on prayer in school. There seems to be this idea in some areas of evangelicalism that says if we re-instituted school prayer then all of the problems we have in public schools would suddenly up and disappear. The problem with this logic is that the people that promote it are assuming that all the prayers uttered would be nice evangelical protestant prayers - or even if we were to standardize it the Lords Prayer. While there is no actual provision in the constitution for a separation of church and state, there is a provision to prevent state run religion. Essentially what those evangelicals who are so in favor of school prayer are hoping for is state run protestant prayers, which would be unconstitutional. This then leads to another problem, since the prayers couldn't be standardized then the prayers would be of whatever religion the teacher of that particular class is a follower of, thus we would have Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist and even Satanist prayers being offered up in our public schools - yeah, that'll fix our problems. So in essence I am opposed to school prayer as something that is regulated by the government. If it were something like what Judge Roberts was suggesting back in the '80s I would have no problem with it. Again, just my two cents.