Is Prayer the Answer?

Paul Chance

Prayer is certainly, for some people, the answer to some questions. Prayer provides comfort to people grieving over the loss of a loved one and to those faced with a terrible crisis. Prayer lowers blood pressure and heart rate and may improve our ability to recover from illness. And when couples or families pray together, the shared activity may serve as a kind of social glue that binds them together.

But prayer is also offered as the solution to complex social problems. The recent calls for school prayer as the solution to the problem of school violence is merely the latest example. The argument runs like this: “We didn’t have all these school shootings when we had prayer in the schools, so putting prayer back in the schools will prevent school violence.”

There are serious problems with this logic. One is that there is a puzzling delay between prayer removal and school shootings. School prayers were declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1964. Millions of children have attended schools without prayer for 35 years, yet mass shootings such as those in Littleton, Colorado and Conyers, Georgia began to increase in frequency only recently. If the removal of prayer from schools were the cause of violence by school children, the shootings should have begun decades ago.

Another problem with the school prayer solution is that prayer outside the school doesn’t seem to prevent violence. We have repeatedly seen that extremist organizations often make prayer a cornerstone of their organizations, yet such groups are often violent. And the Georgia boy who recently took a revolver and rifle to school and shot six of his classmates had prayed in church with his family the night before. If praying in church does not prevent school violence, what reason is there to suppose that praying in school will?

There is, in fact, no evidence that requiring students to pray in school will reduce the frequency of school shootings. If school prayer is not the answer, then what is? Finding solutions to a complex behavioral problem means understanding the variables that account for it. Undoubtedly many variables are involved in school violence, but four seem particularly important.

Many children live in single parent homes, and even when there are two adults in the household it often happens that they work a total of three and sometimes four jobs. Can such busy and tired parents provide adequate levels of supervision and moral guidance?

Modeled violence, in the form of television, films, and video games, may be another factor. Although the discussion of violent entertainment usually focuses on fictional “shoot ‘em ups,” one of the most violent shows on TV today has to be America’s Funniest Home Videos. From what I have seen of this program, virtually every segment displays some injury, often to a baby or an elderly person, yet this is one of the most popular shows on the air. Can we really expect that children who grow up watching us laugh at human suffering will turn into sensitive young adults who respect the rights of others?

School size seems to be a factor in violence. School shootings have tended to occur at large suburban schools. The Conyers high school, for example, has a student body of nearly 2000. Some years ago a study comparing large and small high schools found that students at large schools were far more likely to be alienated than those at small ones. (At least some of the students involved in mass shootings have been described as alienated.) True, mass shootings have not been a problem at large city schools, but city schools tend to take extraordinary security efforts not found in most suburban schools.

Then of course there is the availability of guns. The gun lobby talks about the absence of school prayer in order to direct our attention away from the presence of guns. It is certainly true, as the gun lobby maintains, that a baseball bat can be used to kill people. But the teen who takes a baseball bat to school and attempts to create mayhem will soon find himself overpowered by superior forces. Baseball bats are not much of a threat; firearms are. The ready availability of such weapons is certainly a factor in today’s school violence.

Each of these factors – overworked parents, violent models, large schools, and the abundance of firearms – suggests steps that might be taken to reduce school violence: provide tax incentives for parents to spend less time working and more time with their children; hold parents accountable for their children’s misconduct; restrict the level of violence depicted on television; limit high school size to 500 students; and make possession of semi-automatic firearms illegal for most citizens, to name a few.

Some people argue that school prayer should be tried even though there is no evidence that it will work. “After all,” they say, “what harm can it do?” A case can be made for the idea that great harm is done whenever one religious group is given leave to indoctrinate the children of another religious group. But an even greater danger is that if we look to school prayer as a solution, we will fail to take steps that might actually work: The physician who is satisfied that bloodletting will cure pneumonia does not bother to prescribe antibiotics.

Prayer may well be the answer to some problems. But if we rely on school prayer to prevent mass shootings, we will fail to take effective steps, and we will do the children of this nation a great disservice. Complex social problems are not so easy to solve as the authors of billboard slogans would have us believe.

Paul Chance is a writer who specializes in behavior science.

Return Home