If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then will I hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and will heal their land.

CHRONICLES 7:14

Part One

It was the night before I was to deliver the keynote address at the National Day of Prayer metting in the capital (Washington DC). Parading through my mind was the litany so often used before this bipartisan political gathering: Recite 2 Chronicles 7:14 and pray for national renewal.

Suddenly I felt led to give an entirely different message. The theme chosen for that day was honoring God. But does our nation honor God? Clearly not. I realized that no matter how fervently we pray, the Lord will not grant renewal to a nation that does not honor Him. First we must repent, fall on our knees, and confess our nation's failure to acknowledge God.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn summed up the evils of the twentieth century in a pithy Rusian proverb: "Men have forgotten God." Surely that is true of Americans. Just before the Day of Prayer, political pundits were scandalized because a Supreme Court justice-(Antonin Scalia) admitted he believed in Christ's resurrection. He was pilloried by columnists and lampooned by cartoonists, who found it beyond the credence that anyone would take the Bible seriously in public life. Columnist Richard Cohen even wondered whether Scalia's faith made him unfit for the Court.

This climate of hostility has mushroomed suddenly. Only 44 years ago, another Supreme Court justice penned these words: "We are a religious people, whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being." That was the great liberal William O. Douglas, writing in 1952. He urged the state to encourage religion and to "acommodate the public service" to the needs of religious believers. Within the lifetime of many who are reading this, we have gone from justices who encourage religion to justices who are excoriated for their religion.

Admittedly, we do not yet face outright persecution. In places such as Iran, Sudan, and China, the cost of faith may be liberty, property, and even life. Yet even in the U.S., we're witnessing the gradual but certain erosion of religious freedom. For example, in the District of Columbia, a judge ruled that an upcoming referendum may not include a vote on whether to allow voluntary, student-initiated prayer in public schools. Voters are being denied a voice on a question of religious freedom. A student in Utah was arrested for leading a commencement audience in singing a hymn in defiance of a court order.

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