A half century without school prayer

“Almighty God, we acknowl­edge our depen­dence upon Thee and we beg thy bless­ing upon us, our par­ents, our teach­ers and our Country.”

- Offi­cial school prayer

N.Y. State Bd. of Regents, 1962

“As long as there are tests, there will be prayer in schools.”

Anony­mous

There are a hand­ful of land­mark Supreme Court cases that Amer­i­cans can cite by name. Roe v. Wade, Brown v. Board of Edu­ca­tion, Miranda v. Ari­zona and Bush v. Gore are among the cases whose names are as well known as their rul­ings. There are other cases whose hold­ings are well known even though their names are not.

This year marks the 50th anniver­sary of one such case — Engel v. Vitale. The New York State Board of Regents had adopted the prayer laid out in the quote above. It believed that the prayer was non-specific enough to encom­pass all reli­gions and it required that the prayer be recited at the begin­ning of the school day. Sev­eral par­ents in Hyde Park, N.Y., (includ­ing Steven Engel who, as the first plain­tiff listed, has his name for­ever attached to the case) sued the prin­ci­pal and the Board of Edu­ca­tion in Hyde Park alleg­ing that the prayer vio­lated the clause of the United States Con­sti­tu­tion for­bid­ding the gov­ern­ment from estab­lish­ing an offi­cial religion.

The par­ents were unsuc­cess­ful at all lev­els of the New York State judi­cial sys­tem and appealed their case to the Supreme Court. The Court had issued sev­eral land­mark deci­sions in the years lead­ing up to the Engel case and found itself in a period of tur­moil when the case came before it. Jus­tice Charles Evans Whit­taker, who had been on the court only five years, had just retired cit­ing poor health and exhaus­tion. Jus­tice Felix Frank­furter, who had been on the court since 1939 had just suf­fered a stroke and was unable to par­tic­i­pate in cases.

So it was that seven jus­tices, three appointed by Demo­c­ra­tic pres­i­dents (Roo­sevelt and Tru­man) and four appointed by a Repub­li­can (Eisen­hower) had to decide whether prayer in pub­lic schools was per­mis­si­ble. By a vote of 6–1, the court held that the prayer was imper­mis­si­ble and ignited a half-century of debate.

Jus­tice Black issued the opin­ion in the case. Imme­di­ately putting down the argu­ment by the school that the prayer was non-denominational and that it was not a require­ment, he stated that, “The Estab­lish­ment Clause, unlike the Free Exer­cise Clause, does not depend upon any show­ing of direct gov­ern­ment com­pul­sion and is vio­lated by the enact­ment of laws which estab­lish an offi­cial reli­gion whether those laws oper­ate directly to coerce nonob­serv­ing indi­vid­u­als or not.” He con­cluded, “a union of gov­ern­ment and reli­gion tends to destroy gov­ern­ment and degrade religion.”

The lone dis­sent­ing voice came from Jus­tice Pot­ter Stew­art. He noted that the Supreme Court, Con­gress and other gov­ern­men­tal insti­tu­tions began their ses­sions with prayer and then stated, “I can­not see how an ‘offi­cial reli­gion’ is estab­lished by let­ting those who want to say a prayer say it. On the con­trary, I think that to deny the wish of these school chil­dren to join in recit­ing this prayer is to deny them the oppor­tu­nity of shar­ing in the spir­i­tual her­itage of our nation.”

Engel was just the begin­ning of a long line of cases deal­ing with prayer in schools or in other gov­ern­men­tal set­tings, nearly all of which were con­tro­ver­sial. Lawyer and writer Michael Tra­cht­man, author of The Supremes Great­est Hits notes that Engel and another case that fol­lowed it have become, “sub­stan­tially dis­torted.” He writes, “Nei­ther case, as is so often stated, takes God out of the schools or man­dates that schools be ‘reli­gion free zones.’ [They] in no way restrict the teach­ing of reli­gion as a sub­ject of aca­d­e­mic study, and they do not pro­hibit indi­vid­ual stu­dents from say­ing a prayer, dis­trib­ut­ing reli­gious lit­er­a­ture, talk­ing to stu­dents about their reli­gious beliefs, form­ing Bible study groups, or wear­ing reli­gious cloth­ing, sub­ject to the same rules of orderly con­duct and school admin­is­tra­tion as other, non­re­li­gious behav­ior. The Supreme Court placed its focus on the role of gov­ern­ment in pro­mot­ing reli­gion not the role of stu­dents in prac­tic­ing religion.”

Still, 50 years after Engel was decided, the dif­fer­ence between Black’s “union of gov­ern­ment and reli­gion” and Stewart’s “shar­ing in the spir­i­tual her­itage of our nation” remains the fun­da­men­tal dichotomy between the two sides of this issue.

David Hej­manowski is a mag­is­trate and court admin­is­tra­tor of the Delaware County Juve­nile Court and a for­mer assis­tant pros­e­cut­ing attorney.

Posted by Dave Hejmanowski on Jan 20 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.