THE POSSIBILITY of reviving prayer in public schools has all the earmarks of a bona fide conservative cause.
It's got religion.
It's got morality.
It's got most everything -- until you look at it closely.
For what kind of prayer do Newt Gingrich and other enthusiasts think might, in a realistic best-case scenario, actually end up being said?
It's difficult to believe that in choosing prayers, school administrators or parents would be given absolute liberty. A constitutional amendment permitting school prayer would surely include language to ensure that it is neither sectarian nor coercive.
But even if Jewish and Christian parents could agree on, say, the beloved Psalm 23, where would that leave Muslims? Or atheists? Or feminists who object to referring to God as He?
Outside the most homogeneous districts, school bureaucrats could be forced to do endless battle with enraged parents. But bureaucrats do not relish controversy. Either they would end up writing prayers specifically designed to avoid the wrath of parents or the proposed amendment to the Constitution would dictate the national prayer.
Noting that 75 percent of Americans favor allowing school prayer, a Wall Street Journal editorial recommended that an amendment specify the text of the prayer that was the centerpiece of Engel vs. Vitale, the Supreme Court decision in 1962 that banned prayer in the first place.
This little number, composed by the New York State Board of Regents, was calculated to offend no one: "Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon Thee, and we beg Thy blessing upon us, our parents, our teachers and our country."
This is the kind of prayer that schools will use if Mr. Gingrich, the next speaker of the House, gets his way. Bland, undemanding, essentially meaningless, it says: You've been nice to us in the past, God. Be nice to us in the future.
If Mr. Gingrich and his allies want to inspire children to a more religious life, they should consider what happened to those who, like me, grew up on prayers similar to the one that inspired Engel.
The past few decades have been a time of liturgical overhaul for many major denominations, from Roman Catholics to Episcopalians to Reform Jews. It has also been a time of profound decline, especially for the liberal mainline religious groups. This is not a coincidence.
Catholics, who after 1963 started replacing the Latin Mass with bland vernacular translations, have seen interest in their priesthood -- the ultimate index of Catholic passion -- drop precipitously. In 1965, 10.6 of every 10,000 American Catholics were enrolled in a seminary; by 1990, the figure was 1.1.
The Episcopalians replaced their beautiful 1928 Book of Common Prayer with the anodyne 1979 version. Since the early 1960s, the number of Episcopalians has declined, though losses have leveled off since 1990.
Fallen-away Episcopalians tell me that the book perfectly symbolized the thinning of their ranks. Among Christians generally, the booming Mormons and Southern Baptists are the ones who, when they pray, do it for keeps.
A book by Roger Finke and Rodney Stark, "The Churching of America, 1776-1990," argues convincingly that American churches fail to inspire congregants, and so lose them, in direct proportion to the degree that the church compromises with the "modern" world and makes few real demands of the congregants in order to avoid offending them.
I know best the woes of the Reform movement, the liberal wing of Judaism, for which compromise with the world is a principle of faith. Reform dispensed with the ancient Jewish prayer book, the Siddur, more than a century ago.
Since 1975, Reform Jews have prayed from a book with the portentous title "Gates of Prayer," from which the Engel prayer might easily have been extracted.
None of my classmates at Reform Hebrew school took this colorless document seriously, full as it was of soft words that asked little of us and seemed to request of God only that He be nice.
We stopped attending Reform services when we got to college. Today, the only Jewish denomination able to hold on to its young people is Orthodoxy.
After all, authentic religions have distinct ideas about what God is and what He demands. Authentic prayer reflects this, which is why it often seems, to outside eyes, so strange, even dangerous.
Kids know false prayer when they see it. And false prayer, like the one in Engel, has in mind not the supernatural, transcendent relation of God to man but the mundane, political relation of man to man. It seeks to convey only as much truth as it feels confident won't offend anybody.
Maybe I've misjudged Mr. Gingrich. Maybe he wants a constitutional amendment merely to symbolize the sovereignty of public opinion polls.
The Republicans I voted for, however, have pledged themselves to a program that would have real effects: tax relief, welfare reform.
Every hour they spend fighting for a symbol is an hour they don't spend fighting for the things that matter.
Which will it be, Mr. Gingrich?
I'm praying you make the right choice.
David Klinghoffer is literary editor of National Review.