Opinion: Not quite in Jesus’ name
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Am I the only one to notice what was missing in the invocation when Gerald Ford’s body was returned to the U.S. Capitol? The chaplain of the U.S. House of Representatives, the Rev. Daniel Coughlin, said: “Lord, we humbly ask you to grant peace and reconciliation, healing and gentle civility to this nation, as this man so nobly tried to do in life’s singular moments, by his effort to close chapter upon chapter on America’s sadness.”
Eloquent indeed, but note that Coughlin said “Lord” (and, at another point, “Lord God”), not “Lord Jesus.” The Senate chaplain, Dr. Barry Black, a former Navy chaplain, also eschewed the J word, but Black did pray “in the name of him who is the resurrection and the life,” an allusion to John 11:25, in which Jesus says: “I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in me, yet shall he live.”
Coughlin’s delicacy in particular was an interesting footnote to one of the oddest controversies to consume Congress in 2006: whether a defense authorization bill should include language sought by evangelical Christians that would allow military chaplains to pray in Jesus’ name, even at events attended by non-Christians.
The so-called Jesus amendment, which was shelved in an end-of-session compromise, said: “Each chaplain shall have the prerogative to pray according to the dictates of the chaplain’s own conscience, except as must be limited by military necessity, with any such limitation being imposed in the least restrictive manner feasible.’
What’s really interesting is that Coughlin is a Roman Catholic priest, the first to serve as House chaplain. He was appointed by outgoing Speaker Dennis Hastert in 2000 after an unedifying campaign against another Catholic who had been expected to get the post. (You can read about that controversy here.)
Coughlin’s prayer for encapsulates several developments in American church-state relations, from the mainstreaming of Catholicism to greater solicitude for Jews and Muslims. Yet Coughlin’s choice not to pray explicitly in Jesus name would sit poorly not only with evangelical Protestants but also with some Catholics, who might ask: “What price assimilation”?
The prayers for Ford offer a twist on the debate over whether religion has been banished from the public square (or the Capitol Rotunda). Obviously, it hasn’t been, but in both Congress and the military the price for government-endorsed “civic religion” is a certain fudging of doctrine. Maybe advocates of a more porous wall between church and state should be careful what they pray for.