Parenting & Family Quote by Alexander Cockburn

The line lands like a taunt dressed up as a public-health warning, which is exactly Cockburn's game: take the sanctimony of moral “protection” and flip it into the language of contagion. “Inoculated” and “infection” are doing the heavy lifting here. Compulsory prayer is framed not as spiritual nourishment but as a vaccine administered by the state - a controlled dose of belief meant to harden children against rival faiths. The joke is acidic: if prayer is mandatory, it’s no longer prayer, it’s conditioning.

The subtext is less about theology than about power. Cockburn isn’t worried that kids will become religious; he’s mocking the premise that religion is an external threat from which the innocent must be immunized. That logic treats a “childish soul” as property of an institution (school, church, nation) that gets to decide which “infection” is legitimate. The insult is aimed at the adult anxieties behind schoolroom piety: fear of pluralism, fear of doubt, fear that belief won’t survive without coercion.

Context matters. Cockburn, a polemical journalist with a savage anti-clerical streak, wrote in the long aftershock of U.S. culture wars over prayer in public schools. Casting prayer as inoculation satirizes the arguments of prayer advocates: they talk about “values” and “character,” but the mechanism is compulsion. He exposes the transactional core: forced ritual as an early-life branding exercise, less about God than about who gets to claim the next generation.