The Supreme Court and Public Prayer, by Charles E. Rice. Fordham, $5.00 We all know there is a formidable, if small, bloc of anti-religious opinion in the United States: the atheists, the dogmatic agnostics, the secularist ideologues of various cults; and none of us wonders that this vocal minority has received the Supreme Court’s war against a public God joyously. There is a much larger body of non-religious sentiment in the country, and the insensibility of these lazy-dead souls to the Lord’s embarrassments has been no surprise either. But most Americans profess pro-religious commitments, and when spokesmen for that majority group, in considerable numbers and with impressive hierarchical credentials, solemnly counsel acceptance of the Court’s decrees and in many cases rush forward to applaud them, it is an occasion not only of wonderment but of scandal.
The decent assumption of course is that religionists who have thrown in with the Court have done so, not out of funk or apostasy, but from ignorance—not because they are content to see religion demeaned, but because they either misunderstand the nature and dimensions of the
Comments