THE ANSWER IS, YES AND NO!

Certainly it would be wrong to pray for someone to experience an untimely, violent and painful death in retribution for some wrong, real or imagined.  It would also be wrong to pray for death to occur to someone before they are given time to repent of their wrongdoing and be converted to peace with God and man.

There were undoubtedly millions of people, presumably of good faith, who were praying for the death of Joseph Stalin, Adolph Hitler, Pol Pot, et al.  Some of those people were possibly hoping these monsters would find a quick entry into Hell.  Others, probably were praying for their conversion and early entry into paradise.

All morality depends on the intention of the one acting, in this case praying.

Here is James Taranto on a current case:

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THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

By JAMES TARANTO

If you think overheated political rhetoric is something new under the sun, you’re either very young or have a short memory. In either case, this United Press International dispatch from Los Angeles, which appeared in the Pittsburgh Press on June 2, 1986, may offer some perspective:

A fundamentalist church protesting a commencement address by Supreme Court Justice William Brennan hired a plane to tow a banner calling the jurist a “baby killer” and exhorting followers to pray for his death.

Brennan, one of the seven justices who supported the 1973 decision legalizing abortions, gave an outdoor commencement speech yesterday at Loyola Marymount law school, apparently unfazed by the plane circling overhead and trailing a banner reading, “Pray for Death: Baby-killer Brennan.”

The banner was the work of the Fundamentalist Baptist Tabernacle, whose pastor, the Rev. R.L. Hymers, had “led about 400 worshipers in prayer asking God to remove Brennan if he refuses to ‘repent’ “:

“We hope he will turn back to the Catholic teachings of his childhood and repent,” Hymers said. “Short of that, we pray to God to pave the way for Justice Brennan to be removed from office.

“We are not advocating violence, we are advocating prayer as an alternative to violence,” Hymers said, stopping short of directly calling for Brennan’s death. “We are leaving it in the hands of God.”

Two and a half weeks later, this follow-up hit the UPI wire:

The resignation of Chief Justice Warren Burger is being hailed as the “answer to our prayers” by a fundamentalist pastor who recently had prayed that God “take” Burger and four other Supreme court justices.

The Rev. R.L. Hymers of the Baptist Tabernacle, choking back tears, said Tuesday:

“It’s astonishing . . . it’s not only an answer to our prayers, but a victory for the Jews, Catholics and Protestants who have fought so hard against abortion.”

We remember this story quite vividly because we were an intern at UPI’s Los Angeles bureau that summer. By early July, when Hymers delivered a sermon praying for God to dispatch the four justices who had dissented in Bowers v. Hardwick (which upheld state laws criminalizing homosexual sodomy), his shtick had worn thin enough that the UPI editors thought it worth sending only the lowly intern to cover it. We met Hymers, who was quite personable, notwithstanding that the things he said were cracked.

A reporter for Knight-Ridder Newspapers, meanwhile, spotted a trend. A story published in the Evening Independent of St. Petersburg, Fla., on June 14, 1986, reported that “fundamentalist preachers from coast to coast are urging an age-old solution to their woes: praying for the death of their foes.” A Texas church held a “trial” of Jim Mattox, the state attorney general, in which Mattox was “convicted” and sentenced to be “delivered into God’s hands.”

The Knight-Ridder reporter dated the modern death-prayer trend to 1982, when Bob Jones Jr. of Bob Jones University “railed against then-Secretary of State Alexander M. Haig Jr. as a ‘monster in human flesh’ and called on God to ‘smite him hip and thigh, bone and marrow, heart and lungs . . . and destroy him quickly and utterly.’ ” It seems that Haig had denied a visa to Ian Paisley, a Presbyterian minister and Northern Irish unionist politician.

The Knight-Ridder story included this quote:

“I wouldn’t use the word aberration. I think it may be that we’re on the avant garde. We’re doing something the others will do later,” said Rev. R.L. Hymers Jr., pastor of the Fundamentalist Baptist Tabernacle in Los Angeles.

And wouldn’t you know it, Hymers turned out to be a prophet. Fast-forward nearly a quarter century and read this story from the Bergen (N.J.) Record:

Bergen County representatives of the state teachers union have ratcheted up the campaign against Governor Christie’s agenda in a fiery memo that encourages members to “get some dirt” and “go public,” and adds the education commissioner to the “attack list.”

But it’s the memo’s closing “prayer” that is sure to ignite controversy:

“Dear Lord . . . this year you have taken away my favorite actor, Patrick Swayze, my favorite actress, Farrah Fawcett, my favorite singer, Michael Jackson, and my favorite salesman, Billy Mays. . . . I just wanted to let you know that Chris Christie is my favorite governor.”

Hey, we thought school prayer was illegal! Joe Coppola, president of the Bergen County Education Association, echoes Hymer’s 1986 claim that he wasn’t “advocating violence”:

Coppola said the “prayer” was a joke and was never meant to be made public.

“Obviously, it’s inappropriate,” he said. “I would never wish anybody dead.”

The Governor’s Office, however, wasn’t laughing.

“There is nothing professional about this ‘professional’ group,” Christie’s spokesman Michael Drewniak said, referring to the NJEA. “These tactics come from the same people who in public Web postings wish the governor would die. How do they explain themselves to the children?”

The “prayer” has also been posted by fans a number of times on the Facebook page of New Jersey Teachers United Against Governor Chris Christie’s Pay Freeze, a group that now has nearly 67,000 followers. The site contains other vitriolic and profane postings as well.

Back in 1986, Hymers & Co. drew an editorial rebuke from the Gainesville (Fla.) Sun:

What such death-praying fundamentalists may be doing with such hate tactics is setting the stage for physical violence later on. A disturbed, misguided member of the L.A. church, for instance, might have decided Hymers’ prayer for Brennan was a command from God and taken matters into his own hands.

Who, then, would have been at fault? God?

Calling from the pulpit for the death of a political foe is not avant-garde, it is dangerous. If preachers want to call upon the wrath of God for politicians they don’t like, they should remember to direct that wrath through the ballot boxes, where the only violence is that caused by landslides on the egos of the badly defeated.

Let us hope that no disturbed, misguided member of the New Jersey Education Association takes the union’s prayer for Christie as a command from God.

Incidentally, William Brennan died in 1997, Jim Mattox in 2008, and Alexander Haig this past February. Today Justice John Paul Stevens, the last living Hardwick dissenter (and the only remaining Protestant justice), announced his retirement–although he has already outlived Hardwick, which the court overturned in 2003.

Teachers unions, take note: If you pray for somebody’s death, God will always oblige eventually. If you pray for a particular policy outcome, it’s going to be hit and miss.