For nearly eighty years the Oneida (Tennessee) High School football team had opened its games with a prayer. Naturally, such an act could not be allowed to stand. The comically misnamed American Civil Liberties Union and the bigots of the Freedom from Religion Foundation objected and sent a letter to the Oneida Special School District promising the usual bouts of litigation, an activity that is expensive for a school district and a fund raising scheme for the ACLU and FFRF. The school district folded like a cheap suit and ordered that pre-game prayers cease.

Kevin Acres, the voice behind the loudspeaker for many years, was told that instead of leading the crowd in a pre-game prayer as had been done for close to eighty years he was instructed to initiate a moment of silence.

When Oneida’s football coach Tony Lambert heard the moment of silence initiated over the loudspeaker for the first time he said it gave him a “sick feeling in my stomach.”

Now, that’s typically the end of the story. It has been at dozens, probably hundreds, of schools around the country.

But at Oneida, Acres surprisingly added, “if you want to say a prayer, that would be perfectly fine.”

Senior Cheer Co-Captain, Asia Canada, didn’t miss a beat.

Asia Canada is a cheerleader for Oneida. She and her squad felt a moment of silence wasn’t enough, so they took action.

“He called for the moment of silence and I started off, ‘Our Father who art in heaven’ and everyone joined in,” said Canada.

Even the visiting team’s cheerleaders and fans joined in.

“When they started saying it, the crowd started saying the Lord’s prayer. And by the time the prayer was over with, the entire stadium was saying it,” said Acres.

Co-Captains Alley Meyers (left) and Asia Canada

The move to ban public prayer is nothing more that a petty activity carried out by tiny and morally corrupt people. Like it or not, America is a religious nation and in may communities, though not enough, religion plays a significant role. While the notional reason for the mindless jihad the ACLU and hate groups like the FFRF continue to carry out against Christianity… I say Christianity and not religion because you can look long and hard to find an instance of either of those groups harassing Muslims in Dearborn, MI… is tolerance. Tolerance is the deity of the modern left and in its view nothing is more egregious than that a single person’s feeling get hurt for a reason that the left disagrees with. So Christians can be forced to take part in homosexual marriages because “tolerance” and Christians can be prevented from voluntarily praying in public because, you guessed it, “tolerance.”

As Archbishop Charles Chaput put it:

My point is this: Evil talks about tolerance only when it’s weak. When it gains the upper hand, its vanity always requires the destruction of the good and the innocent, because the example of good and innocent lives is an ongoing witness against it.  So it always has been.  So it always will be.  And America has no special immunity to becoming an enemy of its own founding beliefs about human freedom, human dignity, the limited power of the state, and the sovereignty of God.

We are finding that our courts and government are fundamentally hostile to Christianity and we can expect no justice and, ironically, no tolerance for holding true to orthodoxy. Our response must be civil disobedience to unjust laws and perhaps it will come to pass, as someone famous once said, that “a child shall lead them.”