What Mark Twain’s ‘The War Prayer’ says about ICE raids in Washington

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What Mark Twain’s ‘The War Prayer’ says about ICE raids in Washington

When armed agents pulled five fathers from their tents on Labor Day weekend, they answered a prayer many Americans have been saying without saying it aloud.

Guest Column by Rev. Linda Bartholomew

The views expressed in this opinion column are those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect the views of FāVS News. 

In 1905, Mark Twain wrote a short piece so incendiary he refused to publish it in his lifetime. 

“The War Prayer” imagines a congregation gathered to pray for victory in war — for their soldiers’ safe return, for triumph, for God’s favor on a righteous cause. An aged stranger interrupts the service. 

He has come, he says, to speak the other half of their prayer — the half they meant but did not say aloud. He speaks it for them: a prayer to “drown the thunder of the guns with shrieks of their wounded enemies writhing in pain; to help us lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolate land in rags and hunger and thirst, . . . broken in spirit, worn with travail,” and on and on. “You have prayed it,” he tells them. “It shall be granted, if your hearts do not shrink from it.” 

The congregation decides he is simply insane and returns to its prayer unchanged.

I have been thinking about that stranger since Labor Day weekend, when five families camping together for one last trip of the summer were woken just before midnight by armed federal agents shaking their tents in the Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest.

The half we don’t say aloud

Earlier that day, two Forest Service rangers had approached the group over what they called a garbage complaint and photographed the identification of some of the adults present. Hours later, those same rangers returned — one now carrying a rifle — alongside immigration agents who ordered the families out of their tents in the dark. Five men were handcuffed in front of their children, ages 1 to 14. 

One young girl begged the agents not to take her father. As each man was cuffed, an agent radioed the others: “We got one, we got one” — as Carmen, 19, who watched it happen to her father, put it, “as if they were fishing.” 

The men — all primary breadwinners for their households — were walked to waiting trucks and driven off into the night, leaving their wives and children alone in the forest with no cell service, afraid the agents would return. Their husbands are being held now at the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma. Their families are trying to raise money for lawyers before the men can be transferred somewhere farther away and harder to reach.

This is not a story about a garbage complaint. It is a story about what a country is willing to pray for and call it order. It is happening everywhere. 

Twain understood that the prayers we say in public are only ever half of what we’re asking. We ask for safety, for our jobs, for our streets, for our nation “made whole” — and we do not say aloud what that requires: that a park ranger’s clipboard become the first link in a chain that ends with children waking to an empty tent; that a doctrine of vigilance depend on federal agents timing a raid for a moment when families have nowhere to run and no one to call. 

We do not say: Grant that the fathers be taken in the dark, so the daylight version of ourselves need never watch it happen. We do not say: Let the children forget, in time, what it sounded like when their father was walked away with only a flashlight in his hand. But this is what we have asked for, whether we said it or not, every time we cheered the raids and called it strength.

The great cost of a whole prayer

Twain’s stranger warns that a prayer is granted whole, not in the flattering half we intend. Five families in Washington now know exactly what the whole prayer costs. It costs a breadwinner. It costs a childhood memory that will not fade. It costs the one thing a family thought was still theirs — a campsite, a last weekend together before the season turned — turned instead into the site of the exact fear they had gone there to escape.

Twain’s congregation decided the man who told them the truth must be mad because there was no sense in what he said, and went back to their prayer as if nothing had changed. That is still the easier ending. It is not the honest one. The honest one requires admitting that when we ask for a nation “returned to order,” we are asking, whether we say it or not, for exactly what happened in that forest at midnight — and that we do not get to keep asking for it and call ourselves innocent of what it costs.

Rev. Linda Bartholomew is the vicar of St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Moscow, Idaho

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