The "Power" of Prayer.

Right-wing Christian politicians and their religious supporters in the Christian Coalition and Focus on the Family have exploited recent school shootings as a sign of moral decline in the United States. They blame the 1963 U.S. Supreme Court decision Abingdon v. Schempp for banning school-sponsored prayer and have proclaimed that this moral decline can be reversed only by reinstating prayer in the classrooms.

In doing so, they have rejected Jesus' comments on prayer as private and personal and instead believe that people who pray are magically insured against crime and violence. They have also rejected the body of available evidence that taken as a whole shows there is no correlation between the power of prayer and protection against harm.

Prayer is not magic. Its use doesn't confer any miraculous benefit on a classroom--be it ensuring good grades, winning a football game, or preventing an armed teenager from killing students and teachers. At the 1987 annual convention of the National Catholic Education Association, Peter Benson reported the findings of one of the few scientific studies on the impact of school prayer on crime. His findings indicated that "significantly greater percentages of Catholic school seniors said they used alcohol, cocaine, and marijuana than Catholic public school seniors." Specifically:

* 45 percent of Catholic school seniors said they had been drunk in the two weeks prior to the survey, compared to 39 percent of public school seniors

* 21 percent of Catholic school seniors said they had tried cocaine, compared to 17 percent of public school seniors

* 57 percent of Catholic school seniors said they had used cocaine at least once, compared to 54 percent of public school seniors

* 44 percent of Catholic school seniors said they had smoked marijuana in the six months before the survey, compared to 41 percent of public school seniors

* 28 percent of Catholic school seniors said they had used marijuana in the preceding thirty days, compared to 26 percent of public school seniors

* 40 percent of Catholic school seniors said they had shoplifted during the year prior to the survey, compared to 29 percent of public school seniors.

Conclusion: in Catholic schools, where prayer and religion permeate education, there is more criminal behavior than in secular schools.

There are no reliable U.S. crime statistics prior to 1933. It is known, however, that the homicide rate was higher before the 1963 Schempp decision. The Encyclopedia of American Crime states:

   While statistics are limited there is little doubt that murders were more
   frequent in the 19th century, especially when the great street gangs were
   springing up in the 1820s and in the period from the 1860s to the 1880s.
   Then murders seemed to slack off until the 1920s and 1930s, when they
   increased again.

U.S. Census Bureau statistics add that the homicide rate per 100,000 in the United States was 8.6 in 1928, 8.8 in 1930, 9.7 in 1933, 8.3 in 1935, 6.9 in 1968, and 7.9 in 1970.

History also has disproved the association between prayer and morality in general, as evidenced by the many religious wars over the centuries, including:

* the Crusades in Europe and the Middle East, pitting Christians against Muslims

* the medieval Inquisition, led by Roman Catholic popes against all those considered heretics

* the continuing Anglo-Irish struggle, begun when Pope Adrian IV granted overlordship of Ireland to King Henry II of England

* the wars in the United States pitting Christians against Native Americans

* Italy's war with Ethiopia, begun after Mussolini signed a concordat with the Vatican promising to give only Catholic missionaries access to a conquered Ethiopia

* the Holocaust against Jews, begun by Adolph Hitler, a Roman Catholic, with whom the Vatican signed a concordat

* Argentina's dirty war, authorized by Catholic bishops and the papal legate against suspected communists and their Catholic supporters.

Of course, these wars don't condemn all members of a religion and, in fact, a number of religious groups are notably nonviolent, including the Amish, Brethren, Mennonites, Moravians, and Quakers. But there also is no evidence that atheists, freethinkers, and humanists are more violent or criminal than traditional believers.

Ku Klux Klan meetings open with prayer, television evangelists have defrauded the public, and clergy have been imprisoned for sexual abuse. Surely these aren't the kind of results being advocated by religious right-wing politicians, whose actual goal is to revive public school prayer. They overlook real social factors, including new findings from the Milton S. Eisenhower Foundation that the number of firearms has doubled since 1970 and more than one-quarter of U.S. children live in poverty.

John M. Swomley is professor emeritus of social ethics at St. Paul School of Theology in Kansas City, Missouri, and is president of Americans for Religious Liberty.