America’s National Prayer Breakfast has a problem. It is in
danger of becoming an empty social ritual rather than a meaningful
spiritual event. As a reasonably regular attendee at the NPB for
several years, your High Spirits columnist is sad about the decline
in its standards and sorry to be firing these warning shots of
criticism across its bows. But before this historic gathering
drifts further toward being just another secular convention with a
dash of prayer added, its mission needs to be reexamined and its
course re-chartered.
The origins of the NPB go back to the Great Depression, when 19
leading businessmen in Seattle met to pray over breakfast for the
poor and unemployed of their community. The idea, inspired by the
meal cooked by Jesus on the shore of the Sea of Tiberias as
described in John 21, spread to other cities.
In 1942 breakfast prayer groups were founded in the U.S. Senate
and House of Representatives. Eleven years later President
Eisenhower asked the senators if he could join them. That was the
birth of what is now called the National Prayer Breakfast. The
great generation of the Eisenhower era were God-fearing people,
rooted in faith, raised in hard times, and tested in war. Those
traditions died slowly, but even so no president since 1953 has
dared to miss the NPB, although some must have longed to strike it
from their calendars. Bill Clinton looked a most bedraggled lion
thrown to the Christians when he had to attend at the height of the
lurid allegations about his most un-Churchillian use of cigars with
Monica Lewinsky. Another unrepentant White House sinner was Richard
Nixon during Watergate. He declared that he would prefer to spend a
couple of hours in the dentist’s chair without an anaesthetic
rather than to go and pray in public at this event—but in the end
he went. February 5, 2009, saw the 57th NPB, and President Obama
was dutifully on parade. But he too looked and sounded as though he
would rather have been somewhere else.
The NPB’s modern weakness lies in its success. It has become the
worldliest of events, a see-and-beseen extravaganza with a Cecil B.
DeMille–sized cast of 4,000 extras featuring major donors and minor
diplomats. The latter now far outnumber members of Congress. This
seemed to be a matter of pride for the organizers, who kept
referring to this great international breakfast.
Too much internationalization can bring its problems, for there
were moments when the proceedings seemed to have turned into a
diplomatic networking exercise for B-list embassies. The NPB
co-chairman, Rep. Vernon Ehlers of Michigan, had such difficulty
making himself heard above the hubbub that he needed the apocryphal
advice once given by a cathedral verger to a preacher: “You’ll have
to speak up, sir, in this church the agnostics are something
dreadful.” When Rep. Ehlers eventually became audible he
complained, “Obviously some people here are not aware of our
spiritual traditions.” By this he meant that about a quarter of the
breakfasters at this feeding of the four thousand began tucking
into their croissants without waiting for a blessing. Other little
breaches of protocol included an African ambassador who took
multiple calls on his cell phone during the Scripture readings, a
politician from Laos who fell asleep while the opening hymn was
being sung, and a table full of Central Asian businessmen who
noisily swapped visiting cards with Washington lobbyists as their
neighbors attempted to pray.
President Obama clearly missed these equivalents of the
moneychangers in the temple because in the opening lines of his
remarks he solemnly intoned: “And today, as I see presidents and
dignitaries here from every corner of the globe, it strikes me that
this is one of the rare occasions that still brings much of the
world together in a moment of peace and goodwill.” Since the
highest ranking of these great global statesmen attending the NPB
turned out to be the prime minister of Albania, the president of
Haiti, and the secretary of state of Kazakhstan, one began to
wonder if the expectations were running too far ahead of the
realities.
President Obama had his expectation problems too. Some of them
were perhaps due to the event coming so soon after his election. He
can’t always reproduce the soaring oratory of his acceptance night
speech in Chicago, particularly to an audience where foreigners and
Republicans were in the majority. But at least he brought attention
back to where the original prayer breakfasts were focused— “on the
afflicted and those who have fallen on hard times,” even if his
announced solution to these problems, “a new White House Office of
Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships” seemed rather
underwhelming.
Obama’s unexpected difficulty was that he had to speak
immediately after Tony Blair. The contrast between them was
reminiscent of Tacitus’s comparison between the two greatest
orators of the ancient world: “When Cicero sat down his hearers
said, ‘How well he spoke!’ But when Demosthenes finished they rose
up, crying, ‘Let us march!’”
As the keynote speaker, Tony Blair was the day’s Demosthenes, on
fire with passion. As this column has previously noted (June 2008),
the former British prime minister has become a powerful advocate
opposing the growth of aggressive secularism. “I say that there are
limits to humanism and beyond those limits God and only God can
work,” he told the NPB, urging his listeners to return to the fear
of God because the phrase “really means obedience to God, humility
before God, acceptance through God that there is something bigger,
better, and more important than you. It is that humbling of man’s
vanity, that stirring of conscience through God’s prompting, that
recognition of our limitations that faith alone can bestow.”
This was a fine speech by Blair, combining self-deprecating
humor, personal testimony, and sound theology. More importantly, he
touched a deeper wavelength of spirituality than seemed to be
present in most of the outer atmospherics of the 2009 NPB. The
Fellowship, a group inspired by Doug Coe that runs the event today,
needs to get back to the 1953 basics of prayers for the nation, for
victims of the recession, and for the God-fearing leaders of
Congress. Irrelevant diplomats, multi-faith political correctness,
international glitz, and networking businessmen are not the right
components for America’s National Prayer Breakfast in the 21st
century.
