The Kennewick City Council should begin each meeting with a prayer, but only in words that recognize a specific concept and historic understanding, according to a resolution introduced this week by council member John Trumbo.

Under terms of Trumbo’s resolution, the prayer would “be directed in name and reference to the same God addressed in the Founding Fathers’ signatory documents that established the nation.”

Specifically, the councilman said, he is referring to “the God of Abraham, the same God who Jesus Christ refers to as his father and is one with him.”

The historian might wonder what a free-thinking Thomas Jefferson would have thought of having an official theology in Kennewick.

Even the U.S. Supreme Court’s Greece vs. Galloway ruling, a 5-4 decision that cleared the way for a New York town to pray at council meetings — and reflected Justice Antonin Scalia’s desire to restore religion to the public square — spoke of the diversity of religious expression in the plaintiff community.

Trumbo’s resolution has been “tabled indefinitely” due to the press of council business. The Tri-City Herald, for which the councilman worked 12 years as a reporter, warned of its consequences, writing:

“Religion is personal, and forcing it into a public arena where it is not enthusiastically welcome is bound to cause tension instead of the harmony sought by praying in the first place.”

The Tri-Cities area used to have a quasi-official religion — nuclear power. The Manhattan Project gave birth to the Southeast Washington population center, plutonium production at Hanford employed thousands, and three Washington Public Power Supply System nuclear power plants were once under construction.

Anti-nuclear activist Ralph Nader was decried in the Herald when he came to debate nuclear advocate Dr. Ralph Lapp. The Hanford House hotel had on its message board: “Nuclear power: Clean, cheap, safe.” Another hotel sign declared: “A little nukie never hurt anyone.”

But official religions have short shelf lives even when their half-lives last thousands of years. Marxism is a secular god that failed but has sprung back to life in the rhetoric of a Seattle City Council member.

In the case of the Tri-Cities, two WPPSS reactors were abandoned — one triggering 6,000 layoffs. The third limped into operation, after massive cost overruns, seven years after it was scheduled to start generating kilowatts. The plutonium-producing N-reactor was shut down after the Soviets’ Chernobyl disaster.

The current chief source of employment in Kennewick, Richland and Pasco is cleaning up environmental problems once denied by the high priests of nuclear energy.