Dozens of Heads Were Bowed

The Rev. Patrick Mahoney of the Christian Defense Coalition scheduled a "National Day of Prayer observance" and news conference for 3 p.m. yesterday in front of the Supreme Court. Gannon, wearing a Marines baseball cap, arrived to help with the press outreach.

But the event attracted only one photographer (from the Washington Times), one reporter (author of the Washington Sketch) and not a single television camera. The participants themselves were late, and only eight showed up.

Mahoney acknowledged that his total attendance was only slightly larger than the atheists' six. "Yeah, but we had a bigger crowd at Cannon," Mahoney boasted.

This was true. In the storied Caucus Room of the Cannon House Office Building, 350 people came for the day's main National Day of Prayer event. But even this crowd, secure in their numbers, felt endangered.

"Today we seemingly live in a society totally dominated by secularism," James Smith, the Mississippi chief justice, told the believers, "which would without our vigilance, I submit, remove all vestiges of the Bible, religion and prayer from our government."

Smith chose an odd location to speak of encroaching secularism: He and fellow participants spent three hours praying in a government building with a military band and color guard, the House chaplain, a senior military commander, several congressmen and a member of the president's Cabinet; earlier in the day, many of the same people were at the White House to hear Bush tell them "our Eternal Father inclines his ear to the voice of his children."

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Finally, let us save a prayer for the Democrats, who don't have a prayer of keeping up with Republicans on Prayer Day. Some of them attended Bush's event at the White House. Others released statements recognizing the day; House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer even found Democratic roots in the occasion, saying that "55 years ago, President Harry Truman signed a bill proclaiming a National Day of Prayer."

But the National Day of Prayer Task Force was run by Shirley Dobson, wife of James Dobson, one of the most influential conservative Christian leaders in the country. That explains the list of speakers at the main event in the Cannon Building yesterday, which included Bush Cabinet member and former Republican national chairman Jim Nicholson as well as Rep. Marilyn Musgrave (R-Colo.), the House's leading opponent of gay marriage.

Barbara Byerly, a member of the National Prayer Committee, introduced some abortion politics in her prayer for the judiciary: "We thank you for the recent decision, oh God, to protect that unborn child."

The closing lines of Byerly's prayer drew a loud ovation in the caucus room. "The power of God consumeth," she said. "We pray that that name is above every, every name, that by mention of that name, everything is going to bow and every tongue is going to confess that Jesus Christ is Lord."