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In addition to the songs, Carman delivers three sermonettes during the
course of Addicted to Jesus. These pass quickly; the first two clock in
at around two and half minutes
each, the final one lasts less than sixty seconds. In
the first sermonette, which is really the only point in Addicted to Jesus
where Carman presents an
idea and then takes a few moments to develop it, he talks briefly about his
love of '50s music, then segues from
this subject to the social turmoil that marked the '60s. In his opinion, much of
this turmoil resulted from the Supreme Court's decision to ban school prayer
in 1962. Carman recites the prayer he used to say in kindergarten, a
simple petition in which he and the other children asked God to bless them,
their parents, their teachers, and their country. When the Supreme Court banned
them from saying this prayer, Carman notes, teen homicide and alcoholism began
to skyrocket, the divorce rate did likewise, SAT scores started plummeting, and
President Kennedy was shot. That's
right--Carman assigns the blame of Kennedy's assassination to the absence of
school prayer. I never did get
around to seeing JFK, but I don't think even Oliver Stone thought of that one...
Never mind that this simple explanation completely
ignores the impact that technology, media, economics, and politics had on the events and attitudes
that shaped the sixties--what does it say about prayer in churches? Or prayer in homes? It doesn't work?
God's not listening there? If it was only the collective prayers of several million five year-olds protecting us from Satan all those years, what good are preachers like Carman? And how did we survive the many centuries--how
did religion develop and thrive?--prior to the institution of school prayer?
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