Should prayers be said in public meetings?
The Church Mouse has the skinny on a campaign by the National Secular Society against local councils saying prayers before council sessions begin. They have pressed the point by using the human rights legislation, and have asked for a judicial review of Bideford Council.
Mouse notes his surprise that the NSS is wasting its time given that
council members can end the practice themselves if they want to, simply by a vote of the council…
but also wonders why they picked on the tiny Bideford Council:
Perhaps that was the point – to pick on a small council which cannot fund a proper defence first, in order to establish the precedent.
Go here for the story
and here for the Mayor of Bideford’s letter to the Guardian
I am of the view that councils should not be forced to pray, and neither should they be forced NOT to pray. They are grown ups. They should be allowed to pray if they want to. What do you think?
6 Responses to “Should prayers be said in public meetings?”
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Maggi has kept a blog since September 2003, writing about theology and faith, the arts and literature, and a little about life and random nonsense...
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I think that choice is important. But the history of such prayers in the same way as those each day in Parliament are part of the history and fabric of our country – which is all to soon being dispersed.
The decision is one which should be decided locally by consensus and not by using the strong arm of the law, just because you believe that you hold the monopoly on belief as the NSS appears to do.
My understanding is that if you do not wish to attend prayers, you can just wait outside the meeting room until they are concluded – so where is the issue?
The NSS and Athiests are very much like big brother government, they claim to know what is good for us – their increasing militancy is a cause for concern, but their threat is more the insidious drip, drip of their poison into peoples mind through their publicity seeking antics.
Perhaps I should tell you that the NSS is not trying to stop people praying, it is just saying that prayers should not form part of the Council meeting.
Prayers have no more relevance to council meetings than they have to board meetings or any other meeting to discuss secular business. But they are an imposition on those who do not wish to take part – forcing them to either sit silent and angry or make a protest which might be embarrassing.
Why cannot council members who want to pray do so before the business begins – preferably about fifteen minutes beforehand so that those who do not wish to be involved can still be part of pre-council chats.
The National Secular Society’s remit is to separate religion from politics. Council prayers are a fusion of religion and politics, and a quite unnecessary and irrelevant one.
Christian prayers in public meeting act to exclude diversity
Thanks for the comment, Terry. Wouldn’t it be better, and more respectful of individual councils, to allow each council to decide what they want to do? Legislating for where people may or may not pray seems heavy handed to me.
I was quite taken with the words of the (agnostic) Mayor of Bideford Council:
“… the council has debated the subject of prayers twice and each time we have voted to continue with them and therefore it is my duty to uphold the wishes of council.
… If I could bring reason to the religious question it would be to ask why can we not all pray or reflect, or meditate, or simply sit in silence for a minute or two when prayers are called for? After all, the Bible tells us it is acceptable to pray in silence (Matthew 6:6) and everyone, including atheists, observe silence for two minutes every 11 November, so they can surely be silent when others wish to pray the 12 days or so of the year our council and many others like us meet.
…To end this blog, I’d like to quote my most favoured words on the subject, and to do so I turn to the immortal comedian Dave Allen; a man much chastised for his religious parodies yet who every week without fail ended his shows with the words “May your god go with you”. “
Terry Sanderson is, so far as I can see, quite wrong in saying that prayers have no relevance to meetings that discuss secular business. There is all sorts of illogic here. (1) Either there is no God or there is a God who rules all aspects of life. One thing there cannot be is a compartmentalised God, owing to the definition of the word ‘God’.(2) ‘Secular’ means to do with the issues of this age or present world, so how that can be in some way opposed to (or mutually exclusive re) God beats me. By definition, the God in question is the ruler of that world and indeed created it. (3) The business will only be regarded as ’secular’ in the stronger sense (’secular’/'this-worldly’ as opposed to ‘allowing room for any larger dimensions than that’) by those who are themselves secularists. But that is a clear minority of Bideford Council and of most other councils.
The main problem is the pervasive employment of the highly vague category ‘religion’ which is not a concept held dear by many of those who actually are worshipping people. What by you secularists is misperceived as a ‘religion’ (whatever a ‘religion’ might be) is to us a worldview, and like other worldviews is all-embracing.