James White: The National Day of Prayer

James WhiteMay 6, 2010 at 6:18am Subject: The National Day of Prayer In 1952, the United Stated States Congress, by majority vote, enacted the National Day of prayer and President Harry Truman signed the bill into law. The National Day of Prayer observance is an affirmation of two major points. First, prayer, and in general faith, has played a significant role in the American experience. When the first Pilgrims arrived at Plymouth Rock in 1620, they did not mark their landing with an administrative report to a bureaucracy back in England. Instead, they celebrated their disembarkation with reverent prayer to the Almighty. From this point forward, the annals of American history have repeated instances of our leaders, in peace and war, featuring prayer as an essential part of American life. Moreover, prayer confirms those divine fundamental rights that only a government can protect. Our First Amendment guarantees an individual right to practice religion and prevents government from imposing a religion. This amendment also protects the right of speech, peaceable assembly, and petition. Prayer encapsulates all of these rights. Prayer is an expression of our individual and voluntary right of worship. Our God, the Supreme Governor, desires voluntary association and when we engage in prayer, we confirm our free will in speech, our right to engage in voluntarily assembly, and our inalienable right to ask and question those, civil or ecclesiastical, mortal or immortal. A few days ago, one federal judge, in a matter inconsistent with man’s divine spirit of free will and the popular expression of the people, attempted to rule that the National Day of Prayer was unconstitutional. We face international existential threats to our way of life daily, but it is those ceaseless internal attacks against the principles and values of our nation that sap our will to deal with any crisis. Now is not the time for Americans of faith to cower in despair. Let a movement begin in every state in the Union to establish a State Day of Prayer and dare the secularist in black robes to overturn fifty state declarations of prayer and faith. In the late 18th century, the United States and France began an experiment with self-government. Though still working out imperfections, the American experiment flourished, but the French experiment failed. A Frenchman, Alexis de Tocqueville, visited the United States in the 1830s to find out why and this was his summation questioned: “Liberty cannot be established without morality, nor morality without faith.”  God bless America.