On May 10, Sophie Prell’s column “Prayer to Personal to Mandate” attacked the “National Day of Prayer” [May 6] on the base of the oft cited First Amendment statute: “Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of a religion.” The actual meaning of this sentence has been debated for 200 years, and I don’t really care to have that discussion here. What I do find instructive is Sophie’s other basis for rejecting the national holiday.

At the end of the column, it says: “Religion and prayer is a very personal matter. I say, let’s keep it that way.” I disagree. I think that religion is a very public matter, and it has always been intended to be. As a matter of fact, the idea of religion being a personal matter can be traced rather neatly to the Enlightenment. Enlightenment thinkers, horrified by the wars spawned by the Protestant Reformation, decided that religion is necessarily irrational, and that irrationality necessarily causes violence. I often wonder what they would think if they saw the wars influenced by their ideas in the 19th and 20th century, but that’s a subject for another time.

Anyway, these thinkers, realizing that they probably could not squash the religion of the masses, drafted a “compromise” which has become imbedded in the unwritten laws of modernity: Religion is allowed, but it can only be practiced in private, so as to not pollute the secular state.

The problem is that this is not a compromise. The only Christian that is tolerated by modernity is one that does not allow what they learn on Sunday to affect them on Mondays through Saturdays. The only Christian that is tolerated by modernity is a bad Christian. Almost all religions reach for a change, a very public change, in the actions of its inherent. A Muslim is expected to change his actions through his submission to Allah, a Jew is expected to change her actions when she follows the Law of the Covenant and a Buddhist is expected to change his actions when he follows the Dharma of Buddha.

As for National Prayer Day, I personally think that it is silly and vague, and I think that it is truly debatable whether it has a place in American society. However, I think the privacy of religion is a poor reason to ban the day, and that using it as a reason can have bad consequences.

Alexander Anderson is a senior in physics.