Otis Dudley Duncan (1921–2004) was one of the most influential sociologists of the twentieth century, introducing to his specialty several analytical tools that are now widely used. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the author of “The Rise of the Nones” (FI April/May and June/July 2004). He submitted this paper to FI shortly before his death. Lisa Ferraro Parmelee is a freelance editor and writer who taught history for a number of years at Villanova University. She was previously the editor of Public Perspective, published by the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, and she is presently the publisher and editor of PublicOpinionPros.com, a monthly online magazine on public opinion and survey research.
When the president of the United States proclaims a National Day of Prayer, as he has every year since 1988, we infer—unless he is a completely cynical politician—that he thinks praying will bestow some benefit upon the nation he governs. It is hard to imagine how such a benefit could be detected or measured; that is, how to demonstrate to the skeptic that the president is justified in assuming the efficacy of prayer. But our nation once did carry out—albeit unintentionally—a well-designed experiment that yielded strong evidence on the matter. The individual responsible for initiating it, although he was almost certainly unaware he was doing any such thing at the time, was Benjamin Franklin.
We have it on the authority of James
Madison that Franklin took a pragmatic attitude toward religion.
Madison reports that “the Dr.” would have liked to see an
experiment in which a religion provided no pardon for transgressions,
“the hope of impunity being the great encouragement to them.”
Franklin was projecting from a time in his youth when he learned that
having a remedy for indigestion brought on by indulgence encouraged
him to continue eating too much. Thus, his real-life experiment on
the efficacy of wormwood as a remedy served as a template for his
Gedanken experiment—a
thought experiment in which one speculates on the outcome—on the effect of removing pardon for transgressions from the creed of a religion.
It could also be seen as a template for the real-life, historic experiment on the efficacy of prayer that is described herein. Franklin set forth the hypothesis that prayer would have a favorable effect on the deliberations of the 1787 Constitutional Convention and put it to a motion, the failure of which resulted in a convention with no formal prayer. The contrasting outcomes of the 1787 convention and the earlier work of the Continental Congress that produced the Articles of Confederation provide a test of Franklin’s hypothesis.
The groundwork was laid in September
1774 at the very first meeting of the Continental Congress, when that
body asked a certain Reverend Jacob Duché to begin its
sessions with a prayer. Duché’s service is memorialized in a
stained-glass panel in a Philadelphia church depicting the good
reverend delivering the first prayer, and the entire text of the
eloquent, lengthy invocation is preserved to this day. The Reverend
Duché was elected the first chaplain of the Congress on July
9, 1776. (His service was short-lived, however, as he defected to the
British the following year.) On November 15, 1777, the Continental
Congress agreed to the Articles of Confederation, which took effect
after ratification in 1781 and served as our constitution until 1788,
when they were replaced by the present version.
Thus, by analogy with the wormwood
experiment, the actions of the Continental Congress constituted the
“treatment” phase of the prayer experiment. The appointment of
Reverend Duché was only the first of many steps taken to
appeal to a higher power to affect favorably the emergence of the new
nation. Although the Articles of Confederation did not specifically
authorize the Congress to promote religion, the Congress kept quite
busy doing so—appointing chaplains, sponsoring the publication of a
Bible, and, among other things, regularly proclaiming days of
thanksgiving and prayer. It would be difficult to exaggerate the
emphasis this pious body placed on religion.
The second stage of the experiment was
launched by Franklin himself in a meeting of the Constitutional
Convention of 1787, when he put forth a motion to employ “one or
more of the Clergy of this City” to officiate in a prayer service
every morning before proceeding to the business of the assembly. He
made his case by observing that daily prayer for divine protection
was the practice of those guiding the new nation during the American
Revolution and by claiming that “Our prayers . . . were heard &
they were graciously answered. All of us . . . must have observed
frequent instances of a superintending providence in our favor.”
Franklin complained that the Constitutional Convention had been four
or five weeks into its deliberations without having “once thought
of humbly applying to the Father of Lights to illuminate our
understandings.”
There is no hint here of an intention to run an experiment. The experiment therefore was “double blind”—to use the current term for experiments in which subjects and investigators are not informed as to who gets the treatment and who gets the placebo. In this case, they did not even realize an experiment was in progress.
Franklin’s motion was not passed; it was not voted down either. It was simply allowed to die. After a brief and perfunctory debate, in which only frivolous objections to the motion were offered, an alternative motion was proposed. It called for a sermon to be preached on the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, with prayers to be offered daily thereafter. The session was adjourned without a vote on this second motion, and the matter did not come up again in the convention’s deliberations.
The de facto decision by the Constitutional Convention not to institute a routine prayer allows us to classify it as the “no treatment” category of the experiment. How different this was from the “treatment” that had been tried on a wholesale basis by the Continental Congress! Unlike the religious zeal that infused the creation of the Articles of Confederation, the drafting of the Constitution was a thoroughly secular enterprise, a ransacking of history and political theory to come up with the principles embodied in the document that would thereafter serve as the foundation of our laws and political system. “We have gone back to ancient history,” Franklin observed, “for models of Government, and examined the different forms of those Republics which having been formed with the seeds of their own dissolution now no longer exist. And we have viewed Modern States all round Europe.” Surely, it was only his exasperation at the slow progress of the convention’s work in its first few weeks that led Franklin to deplore this procedure and to advocate (perhaps with tongue in cheek) his alternative, a request for divine guidance.
The convention’s failure to pass Franklin’s prayer motion was no accident. It was, rather, a logical outgrowth of the work the convention was doing and the instrument of government it ultimately produced. There is no mention of God, not even as “the Creator” of the Declaration of Independence, in either the preamble or the body of the Constitution of the United States. And the final substantive provision in the Constitution reads, “[N]o religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.” If Franklin ever had any reservations concerning these omissions, he deliberately kept them to himself when expressing his support of the document on the last day of the convention.
Moreover, the debates on ratification in the several states, and the criticism of the Constitution after it was enacted, seldom came to focus on the “no test” clause, although several vocal anti-Federalists continued to advocate some kind of religious test. Indeed, one of the major objections to the Constitution, as submitted for ratification, was that the document made insufficient provision for the protection of religious liberty. That defect was remedied in 1791 with the ratification of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. By the time the Constitution and Bill of Rights had come into being, Americans apparently had grown weary of religious controversy. Garry Wills points out that every major feature of our Constitution, save one, had precedents in history and political theory: “[We] invented nothing except disestablishment.”
In sum, thanks in part to Ben Franklin, a comparison of two major enterprises in writing a foundational document—one relying heavily on prayer, the other thoroughly secular in its procedure—provides us with a straightforward experiment: try praying for success in a difficult venture on one occasion and omitting to pray on another such occasion, and observe which approach is the more successful. It took only a few years for the Articles of Confederation to be exposed as fatally inadequate, as was conceded by those trying to live under them and later confirmed by the judgments of historians. In contrast, the Constitutional Convention provided a sturdy and serviceable legal framework for the nation’s subsequent development. So, if the test of the experiment is the amount of time it takes to fail, the no-prayer condition wins hands down—even if one wants to argue that the Civil War constitutes a failure.
But if we compare contemporary evaluations at comparable times after the two documents were ratified, the contrast is equally striking. Almost everyone agreed that the Articles, in effect for only seven years, were an inadequate foundation for a national government. The ratification of the Constitution, to be sure, was a chancy affair, with much opposition from certain quarters. For a short time after ratification, there were critics still holding out for its replacement. But within five years after ratification, the Bill of Rights had been added, and Washington’s success in his first term had rendered moot the question of whether there should be another convention. Henceforth, as Saul Cohen has shown, Federalists and anti-Federalists argued about the interpretation of the Constitution, not about whether to replace it.
Readers acquainted with the literature of the past few years on the efficacy of prayer in a medical context—much of which borders on junk science—will note that Franklin’s experiment lacked the apparatus of randomization and the sophisticated tests of significance that play a crucial role in regard to the conclusions drawn from the comparisons. Two statisticians independently provided a crisp critique of my analysis: “It’s only one case.” So it is. But significance tests are required only because the effects of prayer on the outcomes of medical treatment detected in these studies are so small relative to the variety of other causal factors assessed. In these experiments, it is not obvious whether the effects are due merely to chance.
In this case, however, the effects are not even in the expected direction. The prayer effect—if any is to be inferred—is spectacularly contradictory to Franklin’s hypothesis. Even in the absence of comparable experiments elsewhere in history—if any could be found—one conclusion is inescapable: public prayer in a collective political endeavor is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for success. If it were sufficient, the Articles of Confederation would have succeeded; if it were necessary, the Constitution would have failed.
Historians adduce a variety of historical reasons why the Articles failed and the Constitution succeeded. But any history-based argument intended to explain or excuse the inferior performance of the Continental Congress will be tantamount to questioning the ability or willingness of the Deity to support the project of that body, its professionally rendered prayers notwithstanding. If Franklin’s “Father of Lights” hears and acts upon prayers as requested, His power would surely suffice to make the effect of His intervention unmistakable, regardless of the effects of other factors.
It may seem strange that Franklin himself did not see that the failure of the Articles of Confederation was not due to a deficiency of praying. Or perhaps he did and kept his counsel to himself. He was a member of the Continental Congress and offered the first draft of the Articles, which was mostly discarded. We can only speculate as to whether he expected his motion at the 1787 convention to pass.
A curious side-note here concerns Franklin’s early interest in the efficacy of prayer. In 1845, Franklin’s brother John was leading an expedition to Cape Breton (now part of Nova Scotia, then a possession of France) in what proved to be an unsuccessful and historically unimportant attempt to take the fort there. Benjamin wrote him a hopeful letter, but the greater part of it described the difficulties facing the expedition. He went on to calculate that the prayers on behalf of the small fort, even with daily prayers by a priest, would be few in number when compared to the millions of prayers for John and his forces offered by people in New England. “If you do not succeed, I fear I shall have but an indifferent opinion of Presbyterian prayers in such cases,” he wrote. Evidently, Franklin did not remember or chose to ignore the conclusion he had reached four decades earlier.[1]
Obviously, difficult theological questions are raised by the supposition embedded in our current practice of ceremonial deism, most notably prayer days and the like, that God makes a practice of blessing his most favored nation. It should be noted that answers to such questions are almost as varied as the flavors of religion on offer in this country. One line of comment on the outcome of Franklin’s experiment is simply to falsify the historical facts. One can even find on the Internet a site claiming that Franklin’s call for prayer was accepted, and that the success of the Constitution was due to the divine guidance afforded to the delegates in their further deliberations. Madison himself had to quash this slander, first made in his time. Another suggestion, plausible enough but unverifiable, is that the individual delegates offered their own prayers in private. But if that explains the success of the Constitution, how might one account for the failure of the Articles, the authors of which were surely as prone to pray in private as were the delegates in Philadelphia in 1787?
Perhaps God’s way of dealing with our incessantly repeated appeal, “God bless America,” is to leave the conduct of national affairs to the devices of mere mortals, with their hard-won knowledge of good and evil. In that event, the understanding of our history, rich as it is in religious expression, is best left to the historians rather than theologians. They will no doubt conclude that the struggle for religious liberty is never-ending, but perhaps successful more often than not, thanks to our secular constitution.
Note
1. The letter can be read at this site: http://www.historycarper.com/
resources/twobf2/letter5.htm.
CFI SUMMIT
OCTOBER 24-27 2013
TACOMA, WASHINGTON
Joint Conference of the Council for Secular Humanism, Center for Inquiry, and Committee for Skeptical Inquiry
The transnational secular humanist magazine
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