South Carolina: Battle over Prayers

Council meetings in Great Falls, South Carolina, can only open in prayer if Jesus is not invoked. That's what a federal judge ruled in 2003 and a 3-judge panel of the 4th Circuit Court agreed. The city has been fighting and now the state will help them.

WIS 10 reports:

South Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster announced on Tuesday his office last week filed an Amicus brief to the full US Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in support of Great Falls. In a release McMaster explained the ruling “will inevitably plunge headlong into the thorny thicket of prayer content review. Such content-based review raises serious Free Speech and Free Exercise problems under the First Amendment.”

McMaster is correct to note that there are serious problems when a government entity decides that prayers with a certain type of content are preferable over prayers with a different type of content. What seems to have escaped this cracker-jack lawyer from the South is that this is precisely what Great Falls is doing when it insists on invoking Jesus in prayers instead of Mohammed or Buddha.

Maybe that’s why government entities shouldn’t be holding prayer services in the first place?

He said, “It is illogical and unhistorical to conclude that while a prayer for Divine guidance is constitutionally acceptable, prayer to a Divine Being is not.”

McMaster also seems to be missing the fact that Jesus’ identification as a “Divine Being” doesn’t happen to be shared by everyone. Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, atheists, Wiccans... none of them will agree that Jesus is divine which, of course, is the point raised by those who originally filed suit against Great Falls. When McMaster admits that Jesus is being invoked as a Divine Being, he also admits that the city is taking sides about which is religion is a “true” religion. If Jesus is “divine” as Christians claim, then the other religions can’t be true and Christianity must be true.

Is this really something that McMaster thinks the government has the authority to do? If so, I don’t think he’s fit to hold public office because he doesn’t understand what the real duties of his office are. If he doesn’t think that the government has such authority, then he has no business helping Great Falls do exactly that — which would also suggest that perhaps he is unfit for his office.

Some local government leaders in South Carolina are continuing to pray to a specific god at meetings, despite the ruling. Charleston County Councilman Tim Scott described the ruling as part of a continuing attack on Christianity, and he said he hopes his council will fight back by including Jesus in its prayers.

Government officials like Tim Scott are abusing their power and authority when they promote particular religions like that. Not only should he be removed from office, he should be barred from holding public office ever again — people like this simply can’t be trusted to have any sort of power or authority over other human beings.

Read More:

• Separation of Church and State 101
• Church and State News
• Secularism 101