Eight years ago, on 23 January 1996, Pastor Joe Wright delivered a prayer to the Kansas House of Representatives in Topeka, USA. His prayer was remarkable for its courage and clarity in condemning many evils prevalent in American society and in Western societies generally.
Since its first utterance, ‘The Prayer of Repentance’ has been widely circulated among Christians. Indeed, in recent months, Christians in Australia have been emailing it to one another with admiration and for encouragement.
And now Muslims have adopted Pastor Wright’s prayer, too. Well, sort of.
Voice of Islam, a monthly newspaper published by the Daawah Association of Western Australia and distributed free from various Muslim venues in Perth, has expressed approval of Pastor Wright’s prayer and has encouraged Muslims to “pass this prayer on to your friends”. It is featured on the back page of the February 2004 issue under the heading ‘A Christian’s Prayer to Which I can Say “Amen”’.
The problem is, the published prayer is not as Pastor Wright prayed it. In fact, more than half of it is a complete fabrication. Some duplicitous person has turned this Christian prayer into Muslim propaganda.
Let me quote Pastor Joe Wright’s original prayer in full. This is the true text (right down to the American spelling and the absence of capital letters for ‘son’ and ‘savior’), as posted on the official website of Central Christian Church,1 where Joe Wright is a pastor:
Heavenly Father, we come before you today to ask your forgiveness and seek your direction and guidance.
We know your Word says, “Woe to those who call evil good,” but that’s exactly what we’ve done.
We have lost our spiritual equilibrium and inverted our values.
We confess that we have ridiculed the absolute truth of your Word and called it moral pluralism.
We have worshipped other gods and called it multiculturalism.
We have endorsed perversion and called it an alternative lifestyle.
We have exploited the poor and called it the lottery.
We have neglected the needy and called it self-preservation.
We have rewarded laziness and called it welfare.
We have killed our unborn and called it choice.
We have shot abortionists and called it justifiable.
We have neglected to discipline our children and called it building esteem.
We have abused power and called it political savvy.
We have coveted our neighbors’ possessions and called it ambition.
We have polluted the air with profanity and pornography and called it freedom of expression.
We have ridiculed the time-honored values of our forefathers and called it enlightenment.
Search us O God and know our hearts today; try us and see if there be some wicked way in us; cleanse us from every sin and set us free.
Guide and bless these men and women who have been sent here by the people of Kansas, and who have been ordained by you, to govern this great state.
Grant them your wisdom to rule and may their decisions direct us to the center of your will. I ask it in the name of your son, the living savior, Jesus Christ.
Amen.
This is a bold and bracing prayer—and all the more so given that it was prayed not in a church before Christians but in a parliament before legislators. It is not surprising that it has become modestly famous, and that Christians continue to say “Amen” to it.
Now consider the ‘version’ of the prayer published in Voice of Islam.
Using the exact wording I have seen in emails sent by Christians to fellow-Christians (including the incorrect reference to the Kansas Senate instead of the Kansas House of Representatives), the newspaper prefaces the prayer with this comment:
When Minister Joe Wright was asked to open the new session of the Kansas Senate, everyone was expecting the usual generalities, but this is what they heard.
So, the prayer that follows is explicitly attributed to Pastor Joe Wright. The unsuspecting reader is being led to believe that the prayer that follows is, word for word, the prayer that Pastor Wright actually prayed. But it is nothing like the original prayer.
Six sentences and several phrases have been omitted, including, “We have worshipped other gods and called it multiculturalism” and “I ask it in the name of your son, the living savior, Jesus Christ”. Worse than this, numerous sentences and phrases have been added.
Please note:
- The punctuation errors in the text below are reproduced from the text in Voice of Islam.
- For ease of identification, I have marked the fabricated sections in bold type.
Heavenly father, we come before you today to ask your forgiveness and to seek your direction and guidance. We know Your Word says “Woe to those who call evil good,” but that is exactly what we have done. Yes, there are those in government who have lead us astray by calling evil good! We have lost our spiritual equilibrium and reversed our values. We confess that and we ask your help to change that. We have ridiculed the absolute truth of Your Word and called it pluralism. In fact, we have perverted the truth by calling some evil things good.
We have exploited the poor and called it the lottery, We have rewarded laziness and called it welfare.
We have killed our unborn and called it choice, AND we have killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi born and unborn children and called it “worth it” instead of genocide (so said Secretary of State Albright) and “Doing God’s work” (George Bush Sr.)—we know in our hearts that you really do not need a puny human to do Your Work, Father , and. We have shot abortionists and called it justifiable.
We have neglected to discipline our children and called it building self-esteem,
We have abused power and called it politics, and we have been selective in recognizing crimes against humanity, calling it good one time and evil another time, depending upon the country doing it and ignoring our own crimes against humanity, and we have coveted our neighbour’s possessions and called it ambition, And we have trapped the American taxpayer, people of all religions, into subsidizing theft of land through murder, deceit, greed and lust for a neighbour’s possessions, racism and bigotry by the apartheid state policies of Israel so that all Americans have become a party to actions that are considered criminal in the United Sates—and called this evil good and said YOU God, did it!
We have polluted the air with profanity and pornography and called it freedom of statement, and we have quieted the voices of descent by calling them anti this or anti that, and We have ridiculed the time-honored values of our forefathers, some of whom (George Washington) warned us not to become entangled in a foreign government, and called it enlightenment. Search us, Oh, God, and know our hearts today; cleanse us from every sin and set us free from the evils of government policies that turn all of us into criminals.
Guide and bless these men and women who have been sent : to direct us to the centre of Your will so that they can say NO to the evils of AIPAC when it comes knocking with bribe money to influence them to lie to all their constituents that Israel is a friendly ally, the only democracy in the Middle East and is culturally and historically close to us so that we are being blinded to the crimes we are being forced to accept. (A true democracy does not discriminate against those of a different religion and a friendly ally does not reward spies with praise and money)
This is nothing other than lies and propaganda. There are no mistakes here. The writer has not inadvertently left out or added a word or a phrase in the process of typesetting the original prayer. This is a deliberate, extended, libellous fraud.
The perpetrator of this fraud has put into Pastor Joe Wright’s mouth a series of garbled and spiteful statements that reinforce the prejudices against America and Israel so prevalent among Muslims. The malice in this ‘prayer’ is as palpable as the misrepresentations.
The writer concludes the ‘quotation’ of his fabricated prayer with a comment about the prayer’s impact. He states in part:
In 6 short weeks Central Christian Church, where Rev. Wright is pastor, logged more than 5000 phone calls with only 47 of those calls responding negatively. The church is now receiving international requests for copies of this prayer from India, Africa, and Korea.2
So now readers of Voice of Islam are given the impression that Christians in their thousands endorse the political distortions and national hatreds expressed in the fabricated prayer. And those Muslim readers who (like the writer) can say “Amen” to the fabricated prayer are comforted and confirmed in their prejudices by the thought that those prejudices are shared by Christians.
Voice of Islam states on its second page that it is “a resource guide for Muslims as well as Non-Muslims in WA to provide authentic information about Islam”. The back page of the February 2004 issue does not by any standard provide “authentic information”. But, in a way quite unintended by the editor and publisher, it may in fact provide “authentic information about Islam”.
Endnotes
1 www.centralcc.org/NewsNow/JoeArticles/JoeRepentancePrayer.html
2 Again, this comment has been lifted from an email circulating among Christians—an email that, incidentally, contains the correct wording of Pastor Wright’s prayer.
