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When news broke last month that a Minnesota district would include Islamic prayer rooms in its new high school buildings, many commenters drew the wrong conclusion. Some expressed legitimate concerns about the scale of Muslim migration, but others seemed committed to accusing the district of hypocrisy.

“Separation of Church and State for 1 religion only it appears,” one X user snarked.

To which another replied, “What do you mean? Christian and Jewish kids can use this room too.”

They both have a point. The blueprints include foot-washing stations for Islamic ritual ablutions, which makes it pretty obvious which religion these prayer rooms are designed to serve. At the same time, there’s nothing stopping Christian students from using these rooms. They just won’t do it. And that should set off alarm bells for Christians.

A quick example should suffice to illustrate what I mean. One day last spring, when I was between jobs working as a substitute teacher at a local public middle school, a few Muslim students approached my desk and let me know they’d be leaving class to pray in a room set aside for that purpose.

A few minutes later, the conclave in Rome elected Cardinal Robert Prevost as Pope Leo XIV, the first American pope. I’d been monitoring the election closely (because I had money on it), so I saw the news right away and decided to share it with my students, of whom a plurality, if not a majority, were Hispanic.

And because I still had the prayer room on my mind, I mentioned that I’d be happy to let any Catholics among them leave class briefly to pray for their new pope. In response, I got nothing but blank stares.

I realize this is a bit of an apples-to-oranges comparison. The obligation to pray at five set times each day is one of the five pillars of Islam. There’s no comparable Catholic tradition of laypeople interrupting their day to pray for a newly elected pope (or for any other reason).

But maybe that’s the problem.

American Christianity has become invisible in the public square. We don’t wear headscarves, grow forelocks, carry special daggers, or stop what we’re doing to flop down on prayer rugs. Our Sabbath-keeping is a joke compared to how the Jews do it.

We don’t even fast much anymore. In 1966, U.S. Catholic bishops “ended the obligation to abstain from meat on the Fridays outside of Lent” as long as “some other form of penance or work of charity was done,” the Catholic Times explains. That leaves a grand total of seven mandatory meatless days per year. Whoop-dee-doo.

Evangelical Protestants, meanwhile, tend to define their faith as a liberation from man-made rituals and religious obligations. They might endorse fasting as a valuable personal discipline, but the idea of requiring everyone to fast in the same ways on the same days sounds too much like works-based righteousness.

Why Christianity has adapted itself to secularism more fully than other religions is a tricky question. Tom Holland addresses it at length in his book “Dominion,” but the short answer is that this transformation is the product of the Christian West’s unique history and of Christianity’s own internal logic.

The reasons might be complex, but the negative consequences are obvious.

First, Christians lose cultural influence. A religion that’s willing to make demands on secular institutions can often extract concessions. Muslims get foot-washing stations in public schools. Jews get “sabbath elevators” that stop automatically on every floor so they don’t have to break their law by pushing an electronic button. Catholics got the Filet-O-Fish, but that was back in 1963. Today, with the fasting rules relaxed, McDonald’s would have little reason to introduce it.

Second, Christians internalize the idea that there’s nothing different about them. This is especially true during adolescence, the stage when peers become a bigger influence than parents. If faith is part of a tween’s home life but doesn’t matter at school, it will naturally become less important to him over time.

Third, non-religious people come to regard Christianity as thin and ephemeral, something anyone can simply “identify as” without any skin in the game. Remember, these “nones” don’t see what happens at mass or mosque. They’ve watched their Muslim friends, even those for whom religion is mostly cultural, suffer through Ramadan fasts. But what do their Christian friends do? Try to be nice to people? That’s fine as far as it goes, but it doesn’t exactly scream “come and see.”

Fortunately, I have a solution: Catholics should use the noon Angelus as a ministry to members of their church who attend public schools. This medieval devotion consists of ringing a bell, followed by a few scripture verses commemorating the Annunciation and a few Hail Marys. The whole thing takes about two minutes.

Implementing the Angelus in public schools would be easy. All you’d need is a bell, a parent, or a mature student to lead the prayers, and an empty room reserved from 11:55 to 12:05. If the school won’t give you a room, sue them. You’ll win.

For Protestants, a shortened version of the midday prayer service from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer would be just as workable.

It is, of course, possible that some kids would attend these services just to get out of class. But that’s a feature, not a bug.

Carving out space for Christian worship in public schools would strengthen the faith of devout students, but it would also give nominal adherents a stronger sense of themselves as Christians while showing non-believers that Christianity is a religion worth taking seriously.

The reason Muslims have public school prayer rooms and we don’t isn’t because administrators favor Muslims over Christians (though I’m sure they often do). It’s because Muslims demand them and we don’t. It’s time for that to change.

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Grayson Quay is the author of “The Transhumanist Temptation” and a former editor at the Daily Caller.

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