Saturday, August 26, 1995
SAN JOSE MERCURY NEWS
School Prayer, the 12 Steps and a Divided Family
A conversation with William Murray
In 1963, atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair went before the U.S. Supreme Court on behalf of her 14-year-old son, William, seeking an end to prayer in the Baltimore public schools. She succeeded.
Today, William Murray is a born-again Christian, “the No. 1 spokesman for prayer in the schools,” in the words of U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms. He is also the author of five books, the most recent being “Let Us Pray” (William Morrow & Co.).
The chairman of Government Is Not God, a political action committee that works to reduce the size of the federal government, Murray appears on national TV and radio shows, and is a popular speaker at college graduations and religious revivals. Murray was interviewed by phone recently at his Dallas office. Here is an edited transcript of the conversation.
Q I was taught that one of the most important of the Ten Commandments was to “honor thy mother and thy father.” Yet you subject your mother to public ridicule throughout your book. I wonder how you rationalize that with your religious beliefs.
A Well, I am not Jewish, so … the New Testament says our real father is God in heaven. That is, the one who must have the ultimate honor. There are even some stronger admonishments: Jesus says that “following me will cause brother to hate brother and separate mother from son.” In the case of my family, that is an absolute truth. Most people who study that passage see it abstractly, but in the case of my family … it has been split in a variety of ways because of my desire to follow Jesus. My brother, my oldest daughter, and my mother.…
Q Your daughter?
A My daughter was raised as an atheist, so there is a split between us.… She won’t speak to me. It’s one of those things in life that you have to live with. There’s nothing I can do other than forsake Christ, in order to repair that relationship.
Q Tell me about your conversion.
A It was in January ’80 that I became a Christian. I had been disillusioned for many years by the atheist and Marxist background with which I had been raised.…
It was the result of living 30 years of a lifestyle where nothing mattered, nothing meant anything, except getting what I could.… I smoked dope, two packs of cigarettes a day, drank alcohol. Nothing was important to me except the pleasure of the moment. I went to a 12-step program and found that there was some kind of unknown God who could reach out and help me, but I didn’t know the name or the nature of that God. And after years of being in and out of those programs I happened to read a fictional account of the life of Luke, and the book struck me particularly.
There was a line at the end of the book, that if you want to read the end of this story, turn to the Gospel of Luke. And there I discovered the truth of that Gospel.
Q That’s a powerful story.
A Yes, I know, but it won’t sell my new book. It’s in the old one.
Q So let’s talk about this new book. Do you expect a 30-second prayer to reverse the moral decay in this country?
A Absolutely not. Our schools didn’t turn into moral cesspools the day after prayer was taken out. The removal of prayer was systemically used as a precedent to take all moral teaching out of the schools. Over and over again, when schools have tried to teach abstinence as a way of preventing venereal disease, the federal courts have said that you can’t teach it because it’s a religious value.
Q Some argue that the prayer amendment strikes at the very nature of religious commitment because faith has to be free, and how can it be free if prayer is required?
A My book is not about mandated prayer. I’m not working on that, and I don’t know anyone who is. The amendment would permit voluntary prayer in the schools, but the schools could not designate who would pray and what they would pray. The amendment would simply take the federal government out of the issue and make time available for individuals who want it.
Q Does it make sense to insist upon prayer in a pluralistic society such as ours?
A There were probably more religious denominations in 1776 than there are today. But yes, I think it is important for the nation to have some sort of moral ballast. I think it is impossible for a purely secular nation to exist, and, in reality, Christianity is the safety net of our democracy.… I do believe the Judeo-Christian faith is the absolute bottom safety net, and when nothing else works, it will be the church that will meet the country on its way down and put it back up on its feet.
Copyright 1995 San Jose Mercury News
