Is there anything uniquely distinct about the American prayer experience?
RABOTEAU: Is there anything distinct about the American prayer experience? I think the distinctiveness, if there is one, would lie in what I referred to earlier, that is the sense that Americans have, or many Americans have, of having a peculiar relationship with God, peculiarly blessed relationship. And perhaps a peculiar obligation that we are in some sense a specially chosen people. To the extent that that still is alive within our national consciousness and our, some of our national ceremonies and holidays, that to me a mark of specificity. Now, it’s not that other nations may not have that. That is, that there may be other nations and other peoples who think of themselves as in some sense specially chosen or have thought of themselves as specially chosen. But again, that would be specific to their own, to their own histories and their own understandings of those histories. But I think of most nations, Americans tend to be more emphatic about that than many others. I’d like to get
