Early American organized education was religious in character and content. From the time public education began to spread in the 1820 and 1830s until after World War II, most public elementary and secondary schools in America included daily Bible reading and prayer. The Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, initially drafted to apply, like the rest of the Constitution, to the federal government alone, was not relevant to religious activities in state‐run schools.
Beginning in the 1840s, Catholic immigrants protested the reading of the Protestant King James version of the Bible in the nominally nonsectarian schools, but their concerns were rebuffed, sometimes violently, as in the Philadelphia Bible riots of 1843. A proposed 1876 constitutional amendment that would have extended the Establishment Clause to the states and banned state funding of Catholic schools failed, and although numerous states adopted constitutional amendments banning such funding, Bible reading and prayer continued unabated. Complaints about the Christian orientation of the schools were given renewed attention, however, after the Supreme Court, in Everson v. Board of Education (1947), for the first time applied the Establishment Clause to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment's Due Process Clause.
Since many early commentators understood the Establishment Clause to prohibit not govern‐mental support of religion generally but merely support of one religious sect over others, public school officials in New York formulated a “nonsectarian” prayer. Despite its denominational neutrality, the Supreme Court held in Engel v. Vitale (1962) that the state could not compose an official prayer and that aid to all religions was as impermissible as aid to any one religion. The voluntary nature of student observance was also found immaterial. Compulsion was not a necessary component of an Establishment Clause violation.
The Court in Abington School District v. Schempp (1963) prohibited the common practice of commencing the school day with a prayer or devotional Bible reading. According to the Court, the defect in Engel was not simply who authored the prayer but that its purpose and primary effect was to advance religion. The Court rejected the argument that recitation of the Lord's Prayer and Bible reading fulfilled the secular purposes of promoting moral values and diminishing materialism. The Court emphasized, however, that the Bible could be studied as part of a secular program of education.
Over the years, the Court, using a range of reasons, has gradually expanded the ban on prayer and Bible reading in classrooms to include other practices and other school locations. Kentucky's effort to post the Ten Commandments in public school rooms was held unconstitutional in Stone v. Graham (1980), because it was not motivated by a secular purpose. Alabama's moment‐of‐silence statute was struck down in Wallace v. Jaffree (1985), on the ground that it was in fact enacted to encourage prayer. In Lee v. Weisman (1992), a prayer offered by a rabbi at a high school graduation ceremony was found to violate the Establishment Clause by creating coercive social pressure to participate. The recitation of the Lord's prayer at a Friday night football game by a faculty‐selected student was ruled unconstitutional in Santa Fe Ind. School District v. Doe (2000), because it amounted to government endorsement of religion.
At the same time, efforts to restore prayer or other religious symbols to the schools have remained vital, and the school‐prayer controversy has not gone away. Although efforts to amend the Constitution to permit school prayer have always failed, many states still require a daily moment of silence. Recent polls suggest that a large majority of Americans still favor prayer in the public schools, as they have since polling began on the question.
So long as the government maintains a neutral stance with respect to religion and does not endorse it, however, religious uses of school facilities and even funds are permitted by the Supreme Court. Widemar v. Vincent (1981) held that, where state university facilities were available to student groups of all kinds, the predisposition against content‐based restrictions on free speech required equal access for student organizations wishing to participate in religious expression. Congress then passed the Equal Access Act of 1984, extending the Widmar analysis to public secondary schools. Under the act, any school receiving federal financial assistance that allows non‐curriculum‐related student groups to meet on campus outside regular school hours has created a “limited open forum” and cannot deny equal access to other student groups on the basis of the religious, political, or philosophical content of their speech. In Board of Education v. Mergens (1990), the Court upheld the statute, permitting formation of a student group wishing to read and discuss the Bible, share Christian fellowship, and pray together. The Court found that the equal access principle neither endorsed nor disapproved of religion. Essentially, the Court distinguished between “government speech endorsing religion, which the Establishment Clause forbids, and private speech endorsing religion, which the Free Speech and Free Exercise Clauses protect” (p. 2372).
In a recent line of cases, the Court has further held that government may not prohibit religious organizations from using school facilities that are made available for a range of nonreligious civic activities. In Lamb's Chapel v. Ctr. Moriches Union Free School District (1993), the Court held that a school district must permit a Christian children's group to pray and read the Bible on school property after school hours when other community activities were allowed. Under current Supreme Court rulings, then, school‐sponsored prayer and Bible reading are strictly banned in public schools, but privately sponsored prayer and Bible reading must be permitted after hours when a school allows other civic uses of its facilities.
Bibliography
- Rodney K. Smith, Public Prayer and the Constitution (1987)
— Stanley Ingber
