No more prayers

The Sunday January 18 Daily Sentinel reports there will be No more prayers at meetings of the Nacogdoches City Council.1 The report seemed almost unreal. Apparently yielding to a secularist's inquiry to offer prayers at the council meeting, the mayor decided there would be no prayers at all. Up until this point it was the tradition of the city council for one of its members to open with prayer.

The Sentinel reports that Mayor Roger Van Horn stated, "I knew that if we ever got challenged, there would be no argument. And we were challenged, finally."

The challenge came from Daniel Ross of nearby Jacksonville, Texas -- who had picked a fight with Cherokee County in 2014 over a nativity scene on the grounds of the county courthouse.2 Since Ross believed all the Nacogdoches city council members are "of the same faith" (i.e. Christian), he feels that it is "important that citizens be exposed to all faiths."

It is not clear why Ross is interested in the prayer traditions of the Nacogdoches City Council, or whether he has challenged the tradition of his own city. Perhaps such incidents help get his name out in the public domain as one who performs secular ceremonies (according to his web site HERE). Perhaps he is a crusader for the way of humanists. Perhaps some Nacogdoches resident requested his help. I'm not sure why he made it his business.

It is not clear why Van Horn and the city council yielded so meekly. Perhaps they didn't want to fight. Perhaps they didn't want the administrative headache. The city attorney, according to the Sentinel, advised the council that they could either offer opportunities to pray to people of other faiths or not have prayer. This is quite strange in light of the very recent Supreme Court ruling in Town of Greece v. Galloway, May 2014. In it, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote, “To hold that invocations must be non-sectarian would force the legislatures sponsoring prayers and the courts deciding these cases to act as supervisors and censors of religious speech.” It does not fall on a legislative body to make sure all types of prayers are represented in their invocations.

Like Daniel Ross, I don't live in the city of Nacogdoches and their decision is not my business -- beyond interest in such incidents and the direction of "church-state" issues in our society. But I did find the decision of the city to quite unusual indeed!

1. You have to have a Daily Sentinel subscription/account to read the full article.
2. As best I could determine his efforts resulted in a protest on the courthouse lawn of about a dozen people, but not in the removal of the nativity scene (it was there as late as the Saturday before Christmas).