This is typical of Fox "News," don't you think? It's obvious that they're arguing a particular point of view, and also that they're woefully uninformed about American history. Note the scroll along the bottom: Preying on Prayer? But no one, absolutely no one, is telling people that they can't pray - or even urging them not to pray. That would also be unconstitutional.
If you're a believer, do you really need the government to tell you to pray? You can't pray without the government's involvement, then? Tell me, how would you feel about the government telling you to praise Allah? Would you also have no problem with government-organized covens? What about our government proclaiming a day of non-prayer, just one special day to support atheism and humanism by urging people to give up their prayer to imaginary supernatural beings? Still no problem with government involvement in religion?
This anchor mistakenly calls Dan Barker's organization the Freedom for Religion Foundation - and the scroll repeats that error - instead of the Freedom from Religion Foundation. And like Sarah Palin, he confuses the Declaration of Independence with our Constitution. (Frankly, that happens so regularly with these people that I'm sure it's not really an accident. They are simply... lying.)
For the record, our Constitution is a secular document, and deliberately so. Our Founding Fathers recognized the perils of religious strife and were intelligent enough to let people make their own decisions about such things. Our government was designed to stay completely neutral. (They didn't even have organized prayers at the Constitutional Convention.)
And as Dan Barker points out, this was confirmed in 1797, when the U.S. Senate unanimously (one of their relatively few unanimous votes) passed the Treaty of Tripoli. Signed by John Adams, the treaty states, in part, "the government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion." No one knew better than our Founding Fathers that America's new government was strictly secular, by their deliberate intent.
"In God We Trust" was not the motto of our new nation. (It was E Pluribus Unum - "Out of many, one.") That "In God We Trust" phrase was adopted by Congress during the notorious McCarthy era in the 1950's, when godless Communist hysteria was at its height. They also made the phrase mandatory on all U.S. currency (it had been on some money since the Civil War era, but not at our founding), and added "Under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance (which had gotten along very well for many years without it).
Our founders would have understood that none of these things are constitutional. But politicians are nothing if not cowardly. And supporting the majority religion in any country is always a popular thing to do. You certainly wouldn't expect McCarthy era politicians to stand up for American principles, any more than you can expect that today, right? Well, most of them, anyway. It's just a shame that we Americans are so ignorant about our own history.
(graphic by Shorthand-Hero, via Bay of Fundie)
Incidentally, the above image might not be entirely accurate. Thomas Jefferson was more of a deist than a complete non-believer. Certainly, he wasn't a Christian. In fact, he made his own Bible of sorts by tearing out all of the supernatural stuff in the New Testament - and skipping the Old Testament entirely. (Is it any wonder the Texas Board of Education is trying to remove him from American history books?)
But his personal religious views are beside the point, anyway. Our Founding Fathers were diverse in their beliefs. And even those who were Christian were determined to keep religion separate from our secular government, since that was best for our country and best for religion, too. That was perhaps their most important contribution to the world, the complete separation of church and state. In America, your religious beliefs, or lack thereof, were your own business, not the government's.
The right-wing has been fighting against our Founding Fathers ever since.
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