The following is excerpted from the Deseret News. To read the full article, CLICK HERE.
A prayer can be more than a prayer; it can be a manifestation of a person’s, or a people’s, overall orientation to life and the world. And a public school can be more than a school; as the institution primarily entrusted with imparting the essential values of the republic to future generations, it can be a site and symbol of the nation’s constitutive principles and aspirations.
So it should not be surprising that cases involving prayer in the public schools can provoke passionate reactions. When the Supreme Court invalidated the traditional practice of classroom prayer in the public schools in the early 1960s, the public reacted with outrage. Historian Bruce Dierenfield reports that the 1962 prayer ruling in Engel v. Vitale provoked “the greatest outcry against a Supreme Court decision in a century.” At a Conference of State Governors, every governor except one denounced Engel and urged enactment of a constitutional amendment to overturn the decision.
No comparable public reaction occurred last year when, in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, the court ruled, 6-3, in favor of a high school football coach who insisted on kneeling after games in a brief prayer at the 50-yard line (and was sometimes joined by players, of both teams). But the decision provoked fierce denunciations from critics. Prominent church-state scholars Ira Lupu and Robert Tuttle called the decision “stunning.” Yale professor Justin Driver contended in the Harvard Law Review that Kennedy “represents a brazen, radical break with the Supreme Court’s long-standing tradition.”
Maybe; maybe not. The court did not actually overrule its past prayer decisions. But it declined to follow doctrines that it had previously used in church-state cases, including the “no endorsement” doctrine, which says governments cannot do or say things that send messages endorsing religion. The disavowal of long-standing doctrine seems potentially momentous.
Even so, a detached observer might find the vehement reactions, then and now, puzzling. The so-called Regents’ Prayer invalidated in Engel (“Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon Thee, and we beg Thy blessings upon us, our parents, our teachers, and our country”) consisted of a single sentence with minimal theological content. It seems unlikely that the prayer did much to instill genuine piety; conversely, how burdensome could it have been, seriously, even for nonbelievers to sit through a few seconds of such pieties?
To read the full article, CLICK HERE.
