Praise the Lord and Pass the Football

By Ben Marcus

In the recent Supreme Court ruling against a Texas high school's prayers before football games, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote, "[P]regame prayer has the improper effect of coercing those present to participate in an act of religious worship." The public-school district had argued that attendance at football games was voluntary and "decidedly extracurricular." Because I played high school football in Texas in the 1980s, one aspect of Justice Stevens' majority response to this distinction struck home to me. By pointing out that "team members themselves" have to be there, he defended those of us who were simply feverish for football and less so for the Christian prayer we heard on game days. Yet as much as I agree with the high court's ruling as a matter of principle, my own experience might make an argument for the other side. Rather than feeling an increased "sense of isolation and affront," as the court warns us those in the religious minority might experience, I sometimes found an unexpected degree of the opposite: inclusion and camaraderie with my teammates after taking part in the pregame prayers, a solemn connection that I wanted to scoff at but, because it moved me, could not.

Unlike many of the students this ruling is designed to protect, I didn't have strong feelings that were smothered by the prayer in my Texas high school. Until my family moved there from Chicago, my religious experiences, with a Jewish father and an Irish-Catholic mother, were brief and infrequent. For two days every autumn, I accompanied my dad to synagogue while my mom stayed home making matzo-ball soup, brisket and kasha. At services I sometimes crept from the auditorium and found a game room, where I played pinball like an uptight burglar, braced against discovery. I had a Bar Mitzvah and recited the Hebrew words of my service from memory without comprehending them, but my Little League game later that day still sticks in my memory better than my supposed passage into manhood.

My Texas high school was a different world. Prayer season lasted all year, and I was fascinated by the fervor of my peers. Any cause for anxiety--tests, games, dates --was a chance to invoke Jesus. Up North, if I had seen a group of girls clutched together and whispering, it was a clear sign of gossip. Here it was a prayer circle, and there were boys in it too, holding hands, heads down, powerfully silent. To an outsider who had yet to make many friends, the prayer circles had some compelling advantages. If you aimed your point of entry correctly, you could hold hands with a certain Ann or Julie and get feverish with her and want what she wanted, if just for a little while.

I also discovered that manners were important with prayer. My teammates and I were careful not to "ask God for victory." In the locker room, we were exhorted to "don our battle masks" (helmets) to seek glory "on God's pasture" (the football field). We may have privately prayed for touchdowns--as an offensive guard, I prayed not to trip over the center's leg if I was required to pull and block the defensive end--but praying to win was left to certain circles around school who focused particular energy on the matter all week, less concerned about jinxing our performance than we were. If we lost, the prayer circles just swelled and prayed harder, clusters of buzzing bodies in Laura Ashley dresses and polo shirts. Walking around school during game week, I heard prayers like, "Let's smother Pflugerville, and give James lots of tackles. Thanks."

The initial argument advocating prayers before games asserted that they helped solemnize the occasion. When we took off our helmets and knelt in the end zone, bracketed by the shadow of the goalpost, the crowd was hushed by our seriousness. The prayers added gravity to our game, as if we were characters in the Bible, already legendary. Down on the field, this feeling was undeniable. It wasn't my religion being practiced, and I didn't believe in their God, but I could sometimes feel part of something greater, even if it was make-believe. The distinction didn't always matter to me.

The philosopher Pascal wagered that it couldn't hurt to pray. If there's no God, then no harm done. If God does exist, then welcome to heaven, the reward for your devotion. But for me at the time, not so terribly worried yet about my chances for heaven, there was a much more modest benefit to prayer, even as it clashed with my inherited belief system: speaking the same language as the friends I ran and tackled with all week. I wouldn't wish the experience forced on anyone else, but neither would I give up the glimpse I got into this intense passion of the people I grew up with and my chance to experience it with them.

Ben Marcus is the author of The Age of Wire and String, a collection of stories. He will begin teaching at Columbia this fall.