No American Should Be Afraid to Pray—or Afraid Not To
Moshe Davis’s recent Wall Street Journal essay, “No American Should Be Afraid to Pray,” makes an argument with which I fundamentally agree. Americans should be able to enter a synagogue, church, mosque, temple, or any other house of worship without being threatened, assaulted, intimidated, or physically prevented from doing so. Davis describes a disturbing increase in fear among worshippers and argues for stronger protection around houses of worship. The principle is straightforward: peaceful people should be protected against force.
Yet the title of the article raises another question that may be even more revealing about American culture. No American should be afraid to pray. But should an American be afraid to say that he does not pray, does not believe in God, and considers prayer irrational?
In theory, of course not. In practice, the evidence suggests that we have created a peculiar asymmetry. Public declarations of religious faith are considered normal, admirable, sometimes practically obligatory for political candidates. Presidents invoke God. Candidates discuss prayer, churches, Scripture and their personal relationship with religion. A profession of faith can be offered as evidence of character. A profession of atheism, however, remains politically dangerous.
That should trouble anyone committed to reason.
The Freedom to Believe Is Also the Freedom to Disbelieve
The philosophical issue begins with a distinction that should be obvious but increasingly is not: protecting a person's right to believe something is not the same as validating the belief.
An individual has the right to believe in God, Jesus, Allah, Yahweh, reincarnation, revelation, miracles, astrology, or anything else, provided that he does not initiate force against others. He has the right to pray privately or collectively, to associate with people who share his convictions and to construct a place of worship with voluntarily acquired resources.
But if we truly mean his resources, we should follow that proposition to its logical conclusion.
Why should the state confer a financial privilege upon the activity because it is religious?
Under current federal law, churches satisfying §501(c)(3) requirements are automatically treated as tax-exempt. They do not even have to apply to the IRS for recognition of that exemption, and donors may claim charitable deductions for qualifying contributions. Churches are also generally exempt from the annual filing requirements imposed on many other tax-exempt organizations.
That is not merely freedom of religion. It is preferential treatment of religion.
There is an important qualification. Churches are not the only tax-exempt institutions in America; secular charitable, educational and scientific organizations may also qualify under §501(c)(3). Therefore intellectual consistency does not require imposing a special tax on churches while leaving every other nonprofit untouched. It requires something more principled: religion should receive no governmental privilege merely because it is religion.
If an organization operates a hospital, feeds the poor, provides education, shelters the homeless or performs some other activity qualifying under a generally applicable nonprofit standard, evaluate it under the same rules applied to a secular organization performing exactly the same activity. But the proposition that worship itself deserves favorable tax treatment merely because government labels it “religious” is much harder to reconcile with genuine separation of church and state.
If religion is private, let it actually be private.
A person who wants a church should support his church. A person who wants a synagogue should support his synagogue. A person who wants a mosque should support his mosque. A person who believes none of them should not be required, directly or indirectly, to bear the fiscal consequences of someone else's supernatural convictions.
The Objectivist principle is not hostility to religion. It is opposition to unearned privilege.
Does God Need a Tax Deduction?
The contradiction becomes especially visible when we compare religion with other ideas.
Suppose I establish an organization devoted to the philosophy of Aristotle. Another person establishes an Objectivist discussion society. Someone else creates a club dedicated to Stoicism. Another establishes a society devoted to skepticism. We would naturally ask what those organizations actually do before deciding whether government should confer tax advantages upon them.
Yet introduce supernatural belief and our culture historically changes the presumption.
Why?
Religious people frequently defend this treatment by pointing to the social services churches provide. That is a legitimate argument for the services, not for the theology. If a Catholic charity feeds homeless people and a secular charity feeds homeless people, their equivalent charitable work should receive equivalent legal treatment. The government does not need to decide whether the Eucharist is the body of Christ in order to recognize that feeding hungry people constitutes the same activity in either organization.
The proper principle is neutrality.
Freedom of religion should mean that government neither suppresses religion nor rewards it for being religion. The First Amendment prohibits establishment as well as interference with free exercise. Its conceptual achievement is precisely that government need not answer the theological question.
Build your church. Attend it. Finance it. Preach from it. Convince others to join you. But do not confuse your liberty to practice religion with an entitlement to have government confer a preferred fiscal status because the beliefs practiced inside the building are supernatural.
That is the first uncomfortable implication of taking religious freedom seriously.
There is another.
The Religion Nobody Dares to Announce: None
Consider American electoral politics.
Politicians have publicly proclaimed virtually every major form of American religiosity. Catholic politicians discuss Catholicism. Evangelicals discuss their Christianity. Jewish politicians discuss Judaism. (Well, not very often lately) Muslim politicians discuss Islam. Candidates are photographed attending services, quoting Scripture and invoking God. Even politicians whose personal religiosity is questioned frequently find it advantageous to affirm some relationship with religion.
Now imagine a serious presidential contender stepping to the microphone and saying:
“I am an atheist. I do not believe that God exists. I do not pray. I base my judgments on reason, evidence and reality.”
Why does that statement sound politically extraordinary? Not constitutionally extraordinary. Not philosophically extraordinary. Politically extraordinary.
The numbers help explain why. Gallup's 2024 survey asked Americans whether they would vote for an otherwise qualified presidential candidate possessing various characteristics. Ninety-two percent said they could vote for a Catholic, 88% for a Jew, and 71% for a Muslim. Only 60% said they could vote for an atheist, while 36% said they would not. That is an astonishing result in a society that congratulates itself on religious tolerance. (An astonishing stat: 71% Muslim vs. 60% atheist) The most revealing comparison may not even be between atheists and Christians. An explicitly atheist presidential candidate remains less acceptable to American voters than a Muslim candidate. That does not establish that every politician conceals atheism or that every nonreligious candidate is frightened. It establishes something more defensible: there remains a substantial electoral penalty attached specifically to disbelief.
Congress displays the same distortion. Pew found that 28% of American adults were religiously unaffiliated, while fewer than 1% of the members analyzed in the incoming 119th Congress fell into that category. Christians constituted about 62% of the adult population but 87% of Congress.
One should be careful about causation. Those numbers do not prove that 27% of Congress consists of secret atheists frightened into churches. Candidate selection, geography, age, party affiliation and many other variables matter. But a representational disparity of that magnitude tells us something important about the cultural environment in which politicians operate. Open religiosity carries little stigma. Open atheism still does.
So perhaps Moshe Davis's title contains an unintended irony. We are properly concerned that a Jew might become afraid to enter a synagogue, a Catholic might become afraid to enter a church, or a Muslim might become afraid to enter a mosque. We should be concerned. Physical intimidation is intolerable. But there is another kind of fear that receives much less attention: the social and political pressure not to say that one considers all three theological systems unsupported by evidence.
We Protect Faith More Than Doubt
This brings us to a strange feature of modern discourse. Almost every important claim is considered fair game for rational criticism except certain claims categorized as religious.
Tell me that corporate tax rates should be 50%, and I may ask for your economics. Tell me that an insurance strategy will outperform another, and I may ask for the assumptions. Tell me that a pharmaceutical product cures a disease, and I will demand evidence. Tell me that climate change will produce a particular consequence, and I can examine the models. Tell me that capitalism is immoral, and I can challenge your premises.
Tell me that an invisible supernatural intelligence created the universe, observes human behavior, answers prayers and determines an eternal existence after death, and suddenly questioning the proposition can be regarded as disrespectful.
Why?
The magnitude of the proposition should require more evidence, not less.
Objectivism is particularly useful here because Ayn Rand's critique of religion was ultimately epistemological rather than merely theological. The fundamental problem was not simply arriving at the wrong answer to the question “Does God exist?” The deeper problem was accepting faith as a means of knowledge. Reason begins with reality and proceeds through evidence and logic. Faith begins with a conclusion that must be accepted independently of evidence. The difference is categorical. Yet American culture often gives the latter greater protection from intellectual scrutiny than the former.
This creates a bizarre hierarchy. The believer may publicly proclaim that the universe was created by God and receive social approval for his “faith.” The atheist who replies that there is insufficient evidence for that proposition must often carefully soften his language lest he be accused of intolerance. The burden has been inverted.
The person making the extraordinary claim receives cultural protection; the person asking for evidence is expected to apologize.
That is not tolerance. It is epistemological privilege.
The Right to Pray Does Not Include the Right to Be Believed
None of this weakens Davis's argument concerning physical protection of worshippers. It strengthens the underlying principle.
A free society does not determine which ideas citizens are permitted to hold. It protects their right to hold and express them. A Protestant may consider Catholic theology false. A Muslim may believe Christian Trinitarianism profoundly mistaken. An Orthodox Jew may reject both. An atheist may regard the supernatural premises of all three as unsupported. Government's job is not to adjudicate which one has correctly identified the creator of the universe.
Its job is to prevent them from attacking one another.
That is freedom.
The moment we add a requirement that beliefs must also receive deference, we have crossed from liberty into privilege. I must tolerate your right to believe. I need not respect the intellectual content of the belief. You owe me exactly the same freedom.
Indeed, disagreement is the test of tolerance. There is nothing tolerant about allowing people to say things with which everyone agrees.
And What Would Carlo Cipolla Say?
Carlo Cipolla's theory of human stupidity provides an amusing but surprisingly useful distinction. Cipolla did not define stupidity as low intelligence or mistaken belief. He examined consequences. In his framework, stupid behavior harms others while producing no compensating benefit to the actor and may even harm the actor as well.
Consequently, an Objectivist could classify supernatural prayer as epistemologically irrational without necessarily calling the individual praying “stupid.” A person may pray privately, obtain comfort, impose no cost on anyone and continue living an otherwise rational life. There is no Cipollian disaster there.
The problem begins when unsupported belief acquires institutional authority and starts imposing costs on others.
That problem is hardly unique to religion. Political ideologies, universities, corporations, governments and professional organizations can elevate doctrines beyond criticism just as effectively as churches can. The moment an institution declares that certain propositions cannot be questioned because they are sacred—whether sacred to God, society, equity, nationalism, the environment, or some fashionable political orthodoxy—it abandons the corrective mechanism of reason.
Then error can reproduce itself institutionally.
Religion merely provides one of humanity's oldest examples.
No American Should Be Afraid Not to Pray
Moshe Davis is right that no American should fear entering a house of worship. People who intimidate worshippers, obstruct entrances, vandalize religious institutions or commit violence against believers should face the same rule of law that protects everyone else.
But a genuinely free society requires the reciprocal proposition.
No American should be afraid to say that he does not believe.
No candidate should feel compelled to manufacture religiosity to establish moral legitimacy. No citizen should have to preface criticism of religion with ritual apologies. No supernatural proposition should receive immunity from ordinary standards of evidence. No religious institution should receive governmental privilege merely because its doctrines are theological rather than philosophical.
People have rights. Ideas do not.
A church has a right to exist because the individuals who create it possess rights of property, association and expression. Those rights do not make the church's theology true, its prayers efficacious, or its activities deserving of special governmental favor. The same government that must protect the worshipper from violence should also protect the atheist from religious coercion and remain neutral between them.
That is actual religious freedom.
The slogan, therefore, should not stop with the person entering the church.
No American should be afraid to pray. No American should be afraid not to pray. And no American should ever be afraid to ask: What is the evidence?