"When we took prayers out of schools, guns came into schools," said the clueless mayor

In what must have been an attempt to oust Rudy Giuliani as the most embarrassing mayor of New York City, Eric Adams told an audience yesterday that church/state separation didn’t matter and that bringing prayers back in school would solve all kinds of societal problems.

Adams was speaking at an interfaith breakfast in Manhattan’s branch of the New York Public Library. And from the moment he stepped in front of the microphone, he denigrated the very idea of religious neutrality by the government. (His speech begins around the 40:40 mark below.)

… “Don’t tell me about no separation of church and state. State is the body, church is the heart. You take the heart out of the body, the body dies. I can’t separate my beliefs because I’m an elected official.”

He added: “When I walk, I walk with God, when I talk, I talk with God. When I put policies in place, I put them in with a God-like approach to them — that’s who I am.”

Obviously, no one was asking him to set aside his own faith while serving as mayor. What Adams did was equate his personal beliefs (which he can hold without consequence) with the role of his office (which cannot promote one religion over another or religion over non-religion).

But even if you let that slide as some kind of rhetorical flourish, Adams made clear how much he wanted religion in public spaces:

“When we took prayers out of schools, guns came into schools,” the mayor said.

“We are destroying our next generation,” he continued. “We say over and over again: We need to build a world that’s better for our children. No! We need to build children that’s better for our world. And we have to be honest about that, and it means instilling in them some level of faith and belief.”

Since when is Adams getting advised by Christian pseudo-historian David Barton? These are conservative Christian lies getting repeated by the Democratic leader of the largest city in the country.

We never “took prayers out of schools” because kids and adults are still welcome to pray on their own time, as they always could. The only thing that got removed—in the 1960s—was forced Christian prayers. It was the right decision then and it’s appalling that any elected official thinks pushing religion on kids would solve any of our problems today.

More to the point, gun violence in schools didn’t magically begin after those Supreme Court decisions. There was a multi-decade lull between the 1962 Supreme Court decision to end school-sponsored prayers and Columbine in 1999. Adams didn’t bother explaining that because he can’t. There are many factors that explain the rise in gun violence in schools, but removing mandatory prayers from classrooms isn’t one of them.

(If anything, there’s plenty of horrific evidence that more God doesn’t stop gun violence in any setting.)

Adams also denigrated atheists when he pretended faith and belief are ingredients to create children who are “better for our world.” How so? As sociologist Phil Zuckerman wrote in his 2019 book What It Means to Be Moral: Why Religion Is Not Necessary for Living an Ethical Life (affiliate link), atheists often come out ahead on questions of morality:

In terms of who supports helping refugees, affordable health care for all, accurate sex education, death with dignity, gay rights, <strong>transgender</strong> rights, animal rights; and as to who opposes militarism, the governmental use of torture, the death penalty, corporal punishment, and so on — the correlation remains: The most secular Americans exhibit the most care for the suffering of others, while the most religious exhibit the highest levels of indifference.

What on that list does Eric Adams not support?

Then came the sponge:

No one needs spirituality. If it works for you, so be it, but it’s not necessary to achieve your full potential.

You want a better metaphor? That sponge represents Eric Adams’ faith because it gets nasty quickly and it’s full of holes. (Boom. Roasted.)

The sponge tangent was so bad that even failed presidential candidate and Democratic kook Marianne Williamson dunked on him: