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Prayer in Public Schools

Until the 1950s, prayer was routinely offered in public schools across the nation and generally supported by the courts. This reflected the quest for religious freedom that was part of American history and the religious, mostly Protestant, influences that were common from colonial times to the mid-20th century. Beginning in the 1960s, however, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a series of decisions related to prayer and other religion-oriented activities in schools, setting tests for what is constitutionally permissible, as discussed in this entry.

Early Rulings

More than half the states have, at some point, allowed or required prayer and/or Bible reading in public school classrooms. This was considered to be part of the exercise of freedom of religion, and proponents of religious exercises, mostly prayer and Bible reading, generally argued in defense of the practices as voluntary and traditional. In the 1960s, prayer and Bible reading faced legal challenges. Since the 1960s, there has been a continual battle between church and state, in the form of public schools, over the right of freedom of expression to address prayer in the schools since that time.

Many significant court cases have reflected the will of individuals, areas of the country, and the nation itself. In 1962, in Engte v. Vitale, the U.S. Supreme Court resolved its first case involving school prayer, finding that a prayer composed by the New York State Board of Regents was unconstitutional. The dispute arose after a local school board adopted this prayer as part of a policy, requiring it to be recited in class and allowing students to be exempted from this recitation.

Subsequent litigation defined religious exercises as clearly unconstitutional. A year after Engel, in the companion cases of Aldington Township School District v. Schempp and Murray v. Curlett (1963), the Supreme Court struck down prayer and Bible reading, creating the first two parts of the tripartite Lemon v. Kurtzman (1971) test in deciding that these practices were invalid, because they lacked a secular purpose and they advanced religion.

The Lemon Test

The legal battle between religion and the public school sector raged on in the Supreme Court's landmark 1971 decision in Lemon v. Kurtzman. While the constitutionality of government aid to religious schools was at issue in Lemon, rather than prayer, the Court developed a standard that continues to be applied in questions of the right to prayer in the schools as well as when dealing with state aid to religiously affiliated nonpublic schools. According to the Court, any time that religion and government intersect, first, the statute must have “a secular legislative purpose” second, its primary effect must neither advance nor inhibit religion; finally, the statute must not foster “an excessive government entanglement with religion” (p. 615). Laws or policies that fail any one of the three parts of the Lemon test are invalid.

The Supreme Court turned to the issue of a period of silence in schools in Wallace v. Jaffree (1985). At issue were three statutes from Alabama. The Court found that the first, which allowed a period of silence for meditation, was constitutional. Conversely, the Court struck down the second law that authorized teachers to lead willing students in a prayer to “Almighty God … the Creator and Supreme Judge of the world” (p. 40). The Court also invalidated a statute that authorized a period “for meditation or voluntary prayer” (p. 57) on the basis that the inclusion of the words, “or voluntary prayer,” was made for the specific unconstitutional purpose of returning prayer in public classrooms.

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