Prayer Circles on the Playground
[Quote:]
Imagine yourself back in the third grade. It is recess, and you are with your classmates on the playground. There is a teacher in the vicinity, but the supervision is fairly minimal. Suddenly, a group of 6 or more children approach you and say something along the lines of, “Have you been saved?” You are not sure what to make of the question, so other questions about your religious beliefs and experiences follow. Without understanding the consequences, you tell them that you and your family are atheists, Jews, Catholics, Buddhists, non-fundamentalist Protestants, etc.
The children start calling you names and hurling insults at you. If you happen to be Jewish, you will hear things that would make neo-Nazi’s proud. You are a sinner. You are going to burn in a lake of fire. You will rot in hell. They form a circle around you, holding hands to make sure you can’t easily escape. They tell you that the only way you can save yourself is to accept Jee-zuhs. They begin praying around you loudly to “save your soul.”
The teacher, if he/she even notices what is happening shrugs it off. Maybe he or she cannot see that you are crying by now. It does not look like the children are touching you, so there seems little cause to disrupt the activity. Maybe the teacher even approves of what the children are doing. After all, he or she may have been raised in this culture of intolerance.This, dear reader, is a prayer circle.
July 8th, 2008 at 23:27
Hm, reminds me of a time my freshman year of high school, on the band trip, where various band kids decided to join hands in a prayer circle. I was thinking about it recently, actually. I didn’t really know any of the people in my band were religious at all, so I figured this was just something they were used to doing in their religious schools? It didn’t seem particularly hurtful to anyone else, though. One of the more popular Jewish kids decided to make a Jewish prayer circle, and I think I joined that one, but it’s too long ago to remember now (April of 1999).
I don’t think there’s really anything wrong with prayer circles, so long as they aren’t explicitly offensive to anyone like in the case you mentioned. Sure, it may alienate some students, but that’s no different from celebrating any other distinction, like “people who have seen this movie” or “people who play this popular game” or, like last weekend, being in a picture at a wedding consisting of all of the people who were members or alums of a particular club, which necessarily left out several of the attendees.