“I have but one more discourse with you, My child—that is that you must go forward and demand that the prayers be returned to the schools. In that manner, We can approach the children, and return them to their rightful place in the reign of God.”
- The Bayside Prophecies
Jesus, October 5, 1985
[32-32] A Case for School Prayer...
Congressman James Trificant stated, “A Congress that allows God to be banned from our schools while our schools can teach about cults, Hitler and even devil worship is wrong, out of touch, and needs some common sense.”[1]
In an article for WorldNetDaily, Mychal Massie wrote:
Question: If God is so bad for public schools, if God is so intrusive, if the separation of church and state is as clear as some (insert lawyers and socialists) would have us believe--why did it take an atheist and a lawyer until 1962 to figure it out?
Question: If saying the Lord’s Prayer and /or observing moments of silence is so destructive to the psyche of school children and tantamount to sanctioning religion--why does the U.S. Congress employ a taxpayer-paid chaplain, i.e., preacher, to begin every session of Congress with prayer? (Note: This has continued uninterrupted since 1777.)[2]
Although prayer is banned in public school classrooms, the history of all three branches of U.S. government shows a consistent support of public prayer and belief in God. Robert Bork notes that “The first Congress, which proposed the First amendment for ratification by the states, also appointed chaplains for the House, Senate, and the armed forces. The early Congresses regularly petitioned the president to issue Thanksgiving Day proclamations addressed to God.”[3] Furthermore, eleven of the thirteenth original states required faith in Jesus Christ and the Bible as a qualification for holding public office.
In his presidential proclamation for the National Day of Prayer (May 6, 2004), President George Bush stated:
“In his first Inaugural address, President George Washington prayed that the Almighty would preserve the freedom of all Americans. On the National Day of Prayer, we celebrate that freedom and America’s great tradition of prayer…. Prayer is an opportunity to praise God for His mighty works, His gift of freedom, His mercy, and His boundless love…. Through prayer, we recognize the limits of earthly power and acknowledge the sovereignty of God.”
On May 6, 1982, President Ronald Reagan said:
“Our Pledge of Allegiance states that we are ‘one nation under God,’ and our currency bears the motto, ‘In God We Trust.’ The morality and values such faith implies are deeply embedded in our national character. Our country embraces those principles by design, and we abandon them at our peril. Yet in recent years, well-meaning Americans in the name of freedom have taken freedom away. For the sake of religious tolerance, they’ve forbidden religious practice in the classrooms. The law of this land has effectively removed prayer from our classrooms. How can we hope to retain our freedom through the generations if we fail to teach our young that our liberty springs from an abiding faith in our Creator?”[4]
The first public act of President George Washington included a public prayer to God: “It would be peculiarly improper to omit in this first official act my fervent supplications to that Almighty Being who rules over the universe, who presides in the council of nations, and whose providential aids can supply every human defect.”[5] In his Thanksgiving Proclamation, he emphasized that nations have the duty to acknowledge God: “Whereas it is the duty of all nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey His will, to be grateful for His benefits, and humbly to implore His protection and favor….”[6]
The first Congress of the United States publicly legislated that religion “shall forever be encouraged.” According to William Rehnquist, the “the actions of the First Congress, which reenacted the Northwest Ordinance for the governance of the Northwest Territory in 1789, confirm the view the Congress did not mean that the government should be neutral between religion and irreligion.” This ordinance provided that “[r]eligion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools, schools, and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.”[7]
The Supreme Court in 1892 publicly stated that “our civilization and our institutions are emphatically Christian”: “Our laws and our institutions must necessarily be based upon and embody the teachings of the Redeemer of mankind…. It is impossible that it should be otherwise; and in a sense and to this extent our civilization and our institutions are emphatically Christian.”[8]
“There is an unbroken history of official acknowledgement by all three branches of government of the role of religion in American life from at least 1789.” (Cited in the Supreme Court case, Lynch v. Donnelly, 1984)
It is the current practice in every federal court to open proceedings with an announcement that concludes, “God save the United States and this Honorable court.”[9]
America fallen from grace
Our Lady of the Roses message warns, “The United States of America has fallen from grace.” (Jesus, May 23, 1979) Similar words were echoed by Henry Lamb, in an article explaining the Supreme Court case that outlawed prayer in American public schools:
It might have been that day in 1959, when 13-year old Bill Murray stood up in class and announced that he would not recite the Lord’s Prayer and the Pledge of Allegiance. Normally, in most every school in the country in 1959, such a stunt would have been rewarded with a paddling at school, and whipping at home. Bill Murray was not a normal kid. How could he be normal; his mother was Madalyn Murray O’Hair.
It could have been June 17, 1963, the day the Supreme Court decided O’Hair’s lawsuit, Murray v. Curlett. That’s the day prayer in public schools became “unconstitutional.” It probably actually started long before either of these two events, but since these events, American has been spiraling in a free-fall from Grace.
On Mother’s Day in 1980, Bill Murray renounced his mother’s atheism and became a Christian.
He later wrote: “In the three decades since this landmark case, the nation has lost its moral center. Violent crime has increased from 16.1 to 75.8 incidents per 10,000 population. Juvenile violent crime arrest rates have increased from 13.7 to 40 per 10,000 population. Teen pregnancy has almost tripled from 15.3 to 43.5 per 1,000 teen-age girls. Almost half of these pregnancies end in abortion. For a startling 28 percent of all live births in America today, the mothers are unwed. The teen-age suicide rate has increased 400 percent since 1963.”[10]
Ann Coulter describes the anti-Christian fanatics coercing even little child from praying in some of the public schools:
In a public school in St. Louis, a teacher spotted the suspect, fourth-grader Raymond Raines, bowing his head in prayer before lunch. The teacher stormed to Raymond’s table, ordered him to stop immediately and sent him to the principal’s office. The principal informed the young malefactor that praying was not allowed in school. When Raymond was again caught praying before meals on three separate occasions, he was segregated from other students, ridiculed in front of his classmates, and finally sentenced to a week’s detention.
Before snack time in her kindergarten class in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., little Kayla Broadus held hands with two of her classmates and recited this prayer: “God is good, God is great, thank you, God, for my food.” The alert teacher pounced on Kayla, severely reprimanded her, and reported her to the school administration. In short order, the principal sent a sternly worded letter to Kayla’s parents advising them that Kayla was not allowed to pray in school, aloud or with others.
The school board then issued a triumphant press release crowing about its victory over a kindergartner praying before snack time. Thus was creeping theocracy in Saratoga Springs stopped dead in its tracks! Kayla’s mother brought a lawsuit, winning Kayla the right to pray out loud. But she was still prohibited from holding hands with others while she prayed. Hearing the G-word in kindergarten might interfere with the school’s efforts to teach proper sexual techniques in the first grade.[11]
The courts and school prayer
Our Lady of the Roses has warned us that many of the American judges are perverse: "Judges in the court, you are perverse! Judges in the court, you have degraded your profession! You have, as a ruling body, turned from your God and have accepted the prince of darkness! " (Our Lady, June 16, 1977) This truth is evident in the judicial decisions such as the legalization of murder of the unborn, and the banning of prayer in public school classrooms.
The following are highlights showing the court battles for public expression of faith in the United States:
1892: The Supreme Court stated in the case Church of the Holy Trinity v. United States, “Our laws and our institutions must necessarily be based upon and embody the teachings of the Redeemer of mankind…. It is impossible that it should be otherwise; and in a sense and to this extent our civilization and our institutions are emphatically Christian.”[12]
1952: William O. Douglas, although at the time one of the most liberal of the Supreme Court Justices, wrote, “We are a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being. We guarantee the freedom to worship as one chooses. [When] the State encourages religious instruction or cooperates with religious authorities by adjusting the schedule of public events to sectarian needs, [it] respects the religious nature of our people and accommodates the public service to their spiritual needs. To hold that it may not would be to find in the Constitution a requirement that the government show a callous indifference to religious groups. That would be preferring those who believe in no religion over those who do believe.”[13]
1963: In his dissent in Abington School District v. Schempp, Justice Potter Stewart wrote, “[A] compulsory state educational system so structures a child’s life that if religious exercises are held to be an impermissible activity in schools, religion is placed at an artificial and state-created disadvantage. Viewed in this light, permission of such exercises for those who want them is necessary if the schools are truly to be neutral in the matter of religion. And a refusal to permit religious exercises thus is seen, not as the realization of state neutrality, but rather as the establishment of a religion of secularism, or at the least, as government support of the beliefs of those who think that religious exercises should be conducted only in private.”[14]
1983: The U.S. District Court stated, “The First Amendment was never intended to insulate our public institutions from any mention of God, the Bible or religion. When such insulation occurs, another religion, such as secular humanism, is effectively established.”[15]
1992: In Lee v. Weisman, the Supreme Court case that struck down high-school graduation prayer, Justice Scalia dissented saying that non-sectarian prayer at public gatherings and celebrations is a tradition that ought to be protected within the confines of the Establishment Clause.
1998: The Supreme Court in 1998 narrowly rejected a proposal for a constitutional amendment to allow prayer in schools and religious displays in federal buildings.
2000: In Santa Fe Independent School District v. Doe, the Supreme Court upheld a lower court ruling invalidating prayers conducted prior to a public high school football game. Chief Justice Rehnquist dissented, complaining that the majority’s opinion “bristled with hostility to all things religious in public life.”[16]
2000: The Eleventh Circuit Court, in Chandler v. Siegelman, struck down a portion of an injunction that banned students from praying at any school function. In this case the Circuit Court condemned “school censorship of student prayer.” The Court concluded that it is “not the public context that makes some speech the State’s. It is the entanglement with the State…. Therefore if ‘nothing in the Constitution prohibits … any public school student from voluntarily praying at any time before, during, or after the school day,’ then it does not prohibit prayer aloud or in front of others, as in the case of an audience assembled for some other purpose.”
America’s decline since prayer was removed from schools
Since the Supreme Court banned school prayer in 1963:
the murder rate tripled;
Violent crime went up 544%;
Prior to 1963, divorce had been declining for 15 consecutive years. After 1963, the divorce rate more than doubled;
unwed birth rates 10-14 years of age shot up 553% by 1983;
Sexually transmitted disease rates (15-19 years of age range) shot up 226% by 1975;
the percent of children living in fatherless households increased from 6% to 40%.
Nationally syndicated columnist William Raspberry writes:
“Almost every commentator on the current scene bemoans the increase of violence, lowered ethical standards and loss of civility that mark American society. Is the decline of religious influence part of what is happening to us? Is it not just possible that antireligious bias masquerading as religious neutrality is costing more than we have been willing to acknowledge?”[17]
The duty to publicly honor Christ as King
The phrase “separation of church and state” does not appear in the U.S. Constitution. It does, however, appear in the Constitution of the former Soviet Union: “The church in the U.S.S.R. is separated from the state and the school from the church (article 52).” Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist observers, “There is simply no historical foundation for the proposition that the Framers [of the Constitution] intended to build the ‘wall of separation’ [between church and state].”[18]
The U.S. Constitution cannot of itself restrain lawless and immoral citizens. James Madison warned, “Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation. No theoretical checks—no form of government can render us secure. To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without virtue in the people is a chimerical idea.” William E. Simon, Jr. stated, “… the Framers repeated it, that a strong constitution is not enough because human nature left to its own devices would eventually subvert the constitution itself.”[19] In his History of the United States, Noah Webster wrote: “If a republican form of government fails to secure public prosperity and happiness, it must be because the citizens neglect the divine commands, and elect bad men to make and administer the laws.”
Moral, God-fearing citizens are essential to the common good of the country. John Adams wrote, “We have no government armed with powers capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry would break the strongest cords of our constitution as a whale goes through a net.” How can the United States encourage students to become moral citizens, when it bans God from its public school classrooms? Pope Leo XIII wrote that “… civil society must acknowledge God as its Founder and Parent, and must obey and reverence His power and authority. Justice therefore forbids, and reason itself forbids, the State to be godless.”[20] Pope Pius XI, in his encyclical on Christ the King entitled, Quas Primas, wrote, “When once man recognize, both in private and in public life, that Christ is King, society will at last receive the great blessings of real liberty, well-ordered discipline, peace and harmony.”[21] He also emphasized that the whole of mankind (including the State) is subject to the power of Jesus Christ: “Nor is there any difference in this matter between the individual and the family or the State; for all men, whether collectively or individually, are under the dominion of Christ. In Him is the salvation of the individual, in Him is the salvation of society.”[22]
In 1984 Ronald Reagan said, “The time has come to turn back to God and reassert our trust in Him for the healing of America. This means that all of us who acknowledge a belief in our Judeo-Christian heritage must reaffirm that belief and join forces to reclaim those great principles.” Speaking of the Equal Access Act (allowing students who wished to conduct religious meetings the same access to schools as other groups), Reagan said, “In 1962, the Supreme Court banned prayers. In 1963, the Court banned the reading of the Bible. ... We had to pass a special law to allow student prayer groups the same access to schoolrooms that a Young Marxist Society enjoys. ... Without God there is a coarsening of the society. ... If we ever forget that we are One Nation Under God, then we will be a nation gone under.”[23]
Write to your Congressman and Senator and demand that prayer be returned to the schools.
“Your country must bring back public prayer. Your country must make atonement for the offenses being committed against the God, your Lord, the King of Heaven and earth, your Creator. Man upon earth has chosen to give honor to man. After the great cleansing, the fruits of man’s hands shall fall! Much will be reduced to ashes and rubble. He will rebuild in the manner the Father directs, under the direction of the Father.”
- The Bayside Prophecies
Our Lady of the Roses, August 21, 1973
“My child and My children, prayer has not become a way of life for many. That is why communism has got such a foothold in your country and in other countries of the world. The prayers given to you in your childhood will be remembered always, I know, My children; but there are those who have not received these prayers in their schools, for prayer has been outlawed in many areas of your country and the world. It took but a few without faith to bring down the flag, for even your country’s flag is being defiled, My children.”
- The Bayside Prophecies
Our Lady of the Roses, October 2, 1987
“Your children are being educated in the schools, to take all Christianity from their lives, and believe not in the supernatural things of God, but the diabolical processes of satan, in cults.”
- The Bayside Prophecies
Our Lady of the Roses, June 18, 1987
"Mothers and fathers, how often have I counseled you to protect your children in these days. You will find that many of those that you entrust to teach your children are bringing them into a world of unrealistic atheism. Already, My child, it saddens My heart to know that you are not, as a nation, allowed any longer to pray in your schools."
- The Bayside Prophecies
Our Lady of the Roses, June 18, 1992
References:
1. Rep. James Traficant, D-OH, April 27, 1999.
2. Mychal Massie, “Now what?” WorldNetDaily, April 20, 2004
3. Robert H. Bork, Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline, p. 289.
4. quoted in “Prayer is still important for our nation,” WorldNetDaily, Rev. Jerry Falwell, May 6, 2004
5. First Inaugural Address, August 30, 1789.
6. Thanksgiving Proclamation, October 3, 1789.
7. Dissent of Justice Rehnquist, in Wallace v. Jaffree, 1985.
8. Church of the Holy Trinity v. United States, 1892.
9. American Center for Law and Justice website.
10. Henry Lamb, “America: Falling from Grace,” WorldNetDaily, November 15, 2003.
11. Ann Coulter, “It’s the winter solstice, Charlie Brown!” September 25, 2003.
12. Church of the Holy Trinity v. United States, 1892.
13. Zorach v. Clauson, 343 U.S. 306, 72 S. Ct. 679, 96 L.Ed 954 (1952)
14. Abington School District v. Schempp, 374 U.S. 203, 313 (1963)
15. U.S. District Court, Crockett v. Sorenson (W.D. Va. 1983).
16. Lee v. Weisman, 505 U.S. 577 (1992).
17. William Raspberry, “Christmas Without Meaning: Must the Religious Make a Secret of Their Beliefs?” The Washington Post, December 24, 1993, p. A15.
18. Phil Valentine, “America’s cornerstone: belief in God,” WorldNetDaily, September 11, 2003.
19. William E. Simon, Jr., “Why America Needs Religion,” Heritage Foundation lecture, #687, September 26, 2000.
20. Pope Leo XIII, encyclical letter Libertas, #21.
21. Pope Pius XI, On the Feast of Christ the King (Quas Primas), December 11, 1925, #19.
22. Ibid., #18.
23. Quoted in “Today’s American Minute,” Bill Federer, WorldNetDaily, August 11, 2003.
These Last Days News - April 1, 2026
How To Bring Back School Prayer...
DEMAND PRAYERS BE RETURNED
“I have but one more discourse with you, My child--that is that you must go forward and demand that the prayers be returned to the schools. In that manner, We can approach the children and return them to their rightful place in the reign of God.”
- The Bayside Prophecies
Jesus, October 5, 1985
TO REMOVE CHRISTIANITY
"My dear parents, please! Listen to your Mother. Listen to what I have to say to you, for I tell you the truth. The Eternal Father sees all, and makes us knowledgeable as to what is happening upon earth that will bring its eventual destruction. Your children are being educated in the schools to take all Christianity from their lives, and believe not in the supernatural things of God, but the diabolical processes of satan, in cults.”
- The Bayside Prophecies
Our Lady of the Roses, June 18, 1987
The above Messages from Our Lady were given to Veronica Lueken at Bayside, New York.
FirstThings.com reported on March 31, 2026:
By Gerard V. Bradley
Though it was overshadowed by the reversal of Roe v. Wade the Friday before, the Supreme Court’s decision on June 27, 2022 in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District was just as epochal as Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. In it, the Court removed the secularist constraints it had imposed on our public life six decades earlier in Engel v. Vitale, a case about school prayer. The consequences of this decision are great. School boards, legislatures, and other government bodies entrusted with responsibility for the common good are no longer required to pretend that religion is a purely private matter. They are now free to enrich our common life by promoting the general conditions for religious awareness, attentiveness, and practice. Pending cases about displaying the Ten Commandments in public schools present an opportunity for them to do just that.
Decided in 1962, Engel v. Vitale concerned a prayer composed by state officials in New York and disseminated for recitation in public schools. The short prayer was this: “Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon Thee, and we beg Thy blessings upon us, our parents, our teachers and our Country.” Students could opt out if they wished. The Supreme Court nonetheless ruled that the exercise violated the establishment clause of the First Amendment.
Some might argue that Engel signaled little beyond its school context, since pupils are immature, impressionable, still subject to parental control—a special case. But this is not so. In the early 1960s, public support for school prayer was very strong. The Court’s majority knew that their decision would engender bitter opposition. Their willingness to defy the opposition and prohibit even a modest expression of reverence tells us that they meant business. Engel was no one-off. It was not just about kids. It was meant to be revolutionary. And it was.
As with so many revolutions, the causes of this one are shrouded in mystery. Commentators at the time fixed on what they held to be the crux of the majority opinion: “It is no part of the business of government to compose official prayers for any group of the American people to recite.” Yet in the next year, the Court ruled against devotional Bible reading and saying the Lord’s Prayer—neither text composed down at City Hall.
A close look at the majority opinion reveals that the justices had nothing to say about First Amendment jurisprudence. They offer a turgid parable about freedom-loving colonials throwing off the yoke of British oppression. Cases are cited, but none of the Court’s own prior holdings on relevant matters. The only reference to an earlier decision is meaningless, a footnote to Everson v. Board of Education (1947). Engel did not claim to be based on judicial precedent.
The reasoning, such as it was, would not have been out of place in an op-ed written by the atheist activist Madalyn Murray O’Hair. “It is true,” Engel conceded, that New York had not erected a “total establishment.” It allowed that the “governmental endorsement of that prayer seems relatively insignificant when compared to the governmental encroachments upon religion which were commonplace 200 years ago.” But we must be vigilant. Quoting James Madison (who was talking about Virginia politics, not the First Amendment), Engel intones: “It is proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties.” “Threepence” today might mean your fortune tomorrow. Allowing mention of God in schoolrooms is the first step toward theocracy! By this slippery-slope logic, anything that hints of the establishment of religion amounts to the establishment of religion. The only constitutionally permissible stance is complete secularism.
The Court had previewed this secularist ideology in two earlier cases—Everson and McCollum v. Board of Education (1947 and 1948)—but then abandoned the initiative. The fifties were, as a matter of constitutional law, a godly decade. The Court made no objection as Congress added “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance and made “In God We Trust” the national motto, and as public-school prayer was made the norm rather than the exception. On the eve of Engel, the controlling principle was best expressed in a line from Zorach v. Clauson (1952): “We are a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being.”
The controlling opinions in Engel at all three levels of New York’s courts were based in the Zorach tradition. Chief Judge Desmond wrote for the Court of Appeals, the state’s highest, that when the Founders ratified the establishment clause,
they could not have meant to prohibit mere professions of belief in God for, if that were so, they themselves in many ways were violating their rule when and after they adopted it. Not only is this prayer not a violation of the First Amendment (no decision of this or of the United States Supreme Court says or suggests that it is) but a holding that it is such a violation would be in defiance of all American history, and such a holding would destroy a part of the essential foundation of the American governmental structure.
Desmond was expressing views widely held, not just in past centuries, but in mid-twentieth-century America. The settled law of nonestablishment in 1962 did not entail a “wall of separation,” much less a “strict” or “high” one. It entailed a picket fence permeated by cooperation between Church and state for the common good. Governments could and did encourage and aid religion and religious institutions, so long as the different faiths were treated equally and no one was coerced.
The Engel Court recognized that the prayer at issue was “non-denominational.” It, in fact, comprised a few truths about divine realities that reason can affirm without aid of revelation, along with thanksgiving and petitions that any intelligent creature of a divine Creator could offer. Engel also recognized that participation was voluntary; objecting students could absent themselves.
But a review of the oral arguments in Engel shows that the justices’ minds were made up before the gong rang. They—excepting only Potter Stewart—believed that religion should be privatized and the public sphere secularized. Probably sensing that the justices were ready to take a big leap “forward,” the complaining parents’ lawyer, William Butler, urged them to adopt the unprecedented position that the only way to preserve religious liberty in America was to keep religion out of public life. One justice asked, “Is it your position that our public schools, by virtue of our Constitution, are frankly secular institutions?” Butler answered, “Absolutely yes.”
The opposing lawyers sharpened the point. Representing the state authority, Bertram Daiker observed that from “the earliest days of this country . . . the men who put the country together have publicly and repeatedly recognized the existence of a Supreme Being, a God.” Porter Chandler represented some parents who welcomed the prayer. He correctly noted that the other side was “now seeking to . . . eliminate all reference to God from the whole fabric of our public life.”
Butler prevailed, as the Court concluded that the New York exercise was “wholly inconsistent” with the establishment clause. The closest thing to an “authority” for this ruling was not the past but the future. As the constitutional scholar Alexander Bickel explained in The Supreme Court and Idea of Progress (1970), the Warren Court characteristically bet on the future, secure “in the belief that progress, called history, would validate their course, and that another generation, remembering its own future, would imagine them favorably.” The Court bet, in other words, that a grateful populace would forgive their fanciful opinions, so at odds with American tradition in law and culture. All the flaccid reasoning would be forgotten, as would the law dons who criticized the Court, the moral conservatives who denounced it, and the politicians who vowed to overturn its errant holdings.
And indeed, corrective constitutional amendments got aloft, only to die in congressional committees. The broader political pushback against Engel went from boil to simmer within a few years, as Vietnam and civil rights overwhelmed our politics, society grew more secular, and many believers exchanged the canonical Gospels for the social one.
But Warren and the brethren forgot that what a future generation giveth, it might also taketh away. The justices thought “progress” was linear, not cyclical. They would be astonished to learn that, two generations out, many Americans reject the naked public square. They want their kids to know God, even when those kids go to public schools. They have voted and funded and organized and agitated for decades to return God to our public life. And now they have succeeded in removing an impediment to that goal. The essential holding of Kennedy is that Engel’s elevation of the secularist project to constitutional status is wholly inconsistent with the establishment clause.
Kennedy began as a humble affair. The opinion relates that a public high school football coach named Joseph Kennedy had a custom of “[kneeling] at midfield after games to offer a quiet personal prayer.” Over time, “the number of players who joined Mr. Kennedy eventually grew to include most of the team, at least after some games. Sometimes team members invited opposing players to join. Other times Mr. Kennedy still prayed alone.” The school district reprimanded Kennedy for his “public religious display,” because “reasonable . . . students and attendees” might perceive the “district [as] endors[ing] . . . religion.” Following the secularist doctrine laid down in Engel, “the District argues that its suspension of Mr. Kennedy was essential to avoid a violation of the Establishment Clause.”
Kennedy won his case on free speech and free exercise grounds. An essential part of the Court’s holding, though, concerned the establishment clause. Speaking matter-of-factly through Justice Gorsuch, the Court noted that “this Court long ago abandoned Lemon and its endorsement test offshoot.” If only this were true! The cases that the Court said “abandoned” Lemon did no such thing. In 1993, in the Lamb’s Chapel v. Center Moriches free religious speech case, Justice Scalia lampooned Lemon as living on like “some ghoul in a late-night horror movie that repeatedly sits up in its grave and shuffles abroad, after being repeatedly killed and buried.” Scalia correctly observed that “Lemon stalks our establishment clause jurisprudence once again, frightening the little children and school attorneys.” Only with Kennedy has that ghoul been exorcised from our legal regime.
Lemon v. Kurtzman, decided in 1971, was the Court’s last full expression of Engel’s secularism. In it, the Court formulated a three-part test: (1) state action must have a secular purpose; (2) the primary effect of a law must be neutral with respect to religion, neither advancing nor inhibiting its practice; and (3) a law must not foster “excessive entanglement” of government with religion.
In subsequent decisions, the Court set aside aspects of the Lemon test, though never with great clarity. But with Kennedy, the Court has explicitly “abandoned” the Lemon test as (in the Court’s words) “abstract” and “ahistorical.” The important metric here is “ahistorical.” Examining any law’s “purpose” is the basic task of the Court. It is not “abstract.” The term “secular” is not “abstract,” either. It means: God is absent. The Court here and elsewhere deploys “abstract” not in its literal sense, but as a term of opprobrium, to stigmatize a concept or form of reasoning it deems inappropriate to the judicial task. Justices often use “metaphysical” and “philosophical” in the same way. Thus, Kennedy is saying that the problem with Lemon is that its secularism is at war with American history. It is “abandoned” for that reason.
As goes Lemon, so goes Engel. It is now a dead case walking. So much so that lower court judges need not wait—as generally they must—for the Supreme Court to issue the death certificate. Without Lemon’s secularism to prop it up, nothing else in the constitutional corpus supports Engel’s ban on school prayer.
One might object here by reviving the presumption, present in Engel, that there is so much psychological pressure in a classroom to participate in “voluntary” school prayer that the provision of an optout is illusory. Notwithstanding their ostensible freedom, kids are being forced to pray.
Last summer’s “optout” case defeats this argument. Mahmoud v. Taylor concerned parents’ religious objections to their grade-school children’s exposure to LGBTQ material. They sought an optout, which the public school district refused to provide. The Supreme Court sided with the parents. What Mahmoud contributes to Engel’s demise is this: Absent from the Mahmoud majority opinion is the suggestion that a child who opts out of a required exercise would be stigmatized by classmates as an outlier, a weirdo, or worse. Mahmoud presumed that abstention can be a normal option for children rather than a perilous undertaking. The same holds for school prayer. Taking a pass on a non-curricular prayer is no more subtly coercive or productive of peer ridicule than skipping curricular readings about having two dads.
Alternatively, one might suggest that the Engel corpse could be reanimated, though this time without a soul. Engel allowed that the challenged recitations could be performed, just not as an actual prayer: “Such patriotic or ceremonial occasions bear no true resemblance to the unquestioned religious exercise that the State of New York has sponsored in this instance.” This transposition of religion into one or another secular category is a staple of the whole post-Engel era: Bible-reading for history or literature, but never as devotional; public crosses and the like as markers of a faith-filled past, not of present belief; opening prayers to “solemnize” an occasion.
The goal here is to argue that religious idioms serve a secular purpose, such as to signal that chitchat is over and the meeting is about to start. Any number of crunchy or patriotic things might do the job: reciting Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, contemplating Walden Pond with Thoreau, reading a letter from Iwo Jima, listening to the Gettysburg Address. Any of these activities would be edifying and might help those present to recollect themselves by means of personal reflection. But prayer is typically less long-winded and has a nice sheen of historical usage, and by these points it recommends itself. The whole enterprise of secularizing the sacred is a Lemon hangover, a state of mind oblivious to the import of Kennedy.
The most decisive blow to Engel comes in Kennedy’s instruction to look to the Founding Era’s “historical practices and understandings” for guidance in interpreting the First Amendment. For there was no more commonplace axiom of practical politics at the Founding than that a free government depended on the people’s virtue, and that only religion could secure that virtue.
The father of our country was a more or less orthodox Episcopalian. He famously opined that of “all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, Religion and morality are indispensable supports.” Washington’s vice president was a Christian but not an orthodox one. According to John Adams, “Religion and Virtue” were nonetheless the crucial foundations, not only of republicanism, “but of Social Felicity under all Governments and in all the Combinations of human Society.” Benjamin Franklin was almost a theist. Of his justly renowned prayer at the Philadelphia Convention, historian Daniel Dreisbach has written: “Franklin acknowledged the existence of an omniscient, superintending Deity who orders the affairs of men and nations and who is aware of the minute details of the material world.”
Quotations could be multiplied endlessly. In their sympathetic study of American atheism, Godless Citizens in a Godly Republic, R. Laurence Moore and Isaac Kramnick wrote:
Our forebears believed that the novel experiment of a democratic republic could not function without a consensus around moral principles rooted in theistic religion. Whatever their disagreements about the content of religion, they were united in the conviction that a heavenly Creator had laid down a plan for virtuous living which democratic citizens could discover by reason, or faith, or a combination of the two.
The Northwest Ordinance organized territories under the governance of the national government. Passed first by the transitional Confederation Congress and then by the first Congress under the the Constitution in 1789, this act declared: “Religion, morality, and knowledge beingnecessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.” It is not by implication or steady inference that one gets from this sentence to the conclusion that public schools might teach—inculcate, instill—religion in their pupils. The Northwest Ordinance said they should!
Nor was it idle talk. Putting its resources behind its thoughts, the national government in 1787 stipulated in contracts for the sale of Western lands that one lot in each township “be given perpetually for the purpose of religion,” and in 1788 that land be reserved for “the sole and only use of supporting religion.” During the incumbencies of Adams and Jefferson, the Indiana (1800), Michigan (1805), and Illinois (1809) territories were organized by reenactment of the Northwest Ordinance. President Madison signed the bill organizing the Missouri territory on basically the same footing.
These measures rested on a broad consensus. Before and after the Founding, civil governments in America affirmed truths about divine realities: God’s eternal existence and his creation of all that is; God’s providential care for mankind, including the promulgation of moral law; and a final justice, which the Founding generation commonly described as a “future state of rewards and punishments.” These affirmations are often repeated in pages of the Founding documents and throughout the history of America’s public life. The Declaration of Independence is the leading specimen: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The preambles of state constitutions, which the Founders wrote, strike the same notes.
We could continue retelling the history of governmental encouragement of religious practice, but to do so would fill too many pages. The evidence is overwhelming that school prayer does “accor[d] with history and faithfully reflec[t] the understanding of the Founding Fathers,” as Kennedy requires.
The Founders, and succeeding generations, adumbrated these affirmations of God’s reality and our duties toward the divine on the basis of reason. Hence the term “natural religion” or “natural theology,” which is not religious faith but a prolegomenon to it. The affirmations were “non-denominational,” not because a poll of believers evidenced commonality, but because “denominations” began where natural theology left off. Prayers such as New York’s, therefore, do not establish a state church, nor do they subject the worship, creeds, and disciplines of the churches to state control.
This same natural theology is the foundation of religious freedom. Religious freedom is an “unalienable” right, according to Madison in 1785, “because what is here a right towards men, is a dutytowards the Creator.” In religion, one makes a judgment about what istrue in ultimate matters, then acts accordingly. To this end, one must be free from coercion and manipulation.Madison concluded, “It is the duty of every man to render to the Creator such homage and such only as he believes to be acceptable to him.” The lowercase h means acceptable to the one who renders homage. It is a duty that can be fulfilled only by the free thought, judgment, decision, and action of each human individual.
The Supreme Court has quoted these sentences from Madison’s “Memorial and Remonstrance” countless times in church–state cases since 1947—without recognizing their import. The moral foundations of religious liberty were not held by the Founders as revealed doctrines, the deliverances of prophets and sacred texts, or obligatory church precepts. The foundation of religious liberty comprises truths about religion—aboutdivine realities, human intelligence and free choice, and the political common good. The Founders thought these truths accessible to unaided human reason, matters of natural religion, or philosophy. By acknowledging these truths—and encouraging our children to do so—we do the opposite of establishing religion. For these truths are the intellectual basis on which to prohibit its establishment.
Texas and Louisiana recently passed legislation requiring the display of the Ten Commandments in public schools. In both states, the legislature deferred to the ghost of Engel. They stipulated that the Decalogue is to be featured as historically significant. The Louisiana law recognizes “the historical role of the Ten Commandments,” and its display “faithfully reflects the understanding of the founders of our nation with respect to the necessity of civic morality to a functional self-government.” Texas lawmakers did not make such a statement in the statutory text. But the state’s lawyers are defending it in court on historical grounds, pointing to the Commandments’ role as an ethical foundation for our laws.
This is all true, and good as far as it goes. But it stops far short of recommending the Decalogue because it states true moral norms that students ought to observe. And by “true” I mean “to be affirmed on the basis of reason.” All the Commandments are precepts of natural reason (as well as being revealed). The only element that goes beyond what reason can and should affirm unaided by revelation is the seventh-day Sabbath. But this stipulation is a matter of determinatio, or the concrete specification of a natural duty.
Many Texas and Louisiana legislators would probably recommend the Ten Commandments as teaching true duties and prohibitions. Their presentation of them instead as integral to the historical development of American law and education probably represents the religion-for-secular-purposes dodge mandated by the Lemon test. But strategic muffling of true intent (if that is what it is) is unnecessary after Kennedy. It has also failed. Both laws have been blocked by federal district courts. Louisiana’s has been blocked by a three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. On February 20, 2026, the full Fifth Circuit vacated the lower court injunction in the Louisiana case, ruling on strictly preliminary procedural grounds. These cases are destined to be resolved in the Supreme Court.
The outcome is as self-evident as constitutional questions allow. The forty-six-year-old Supreme Court decision that prohibited the display of the Ten Commandments in public schools, Stone v. Graham, has been overruled by Kennedy. Stone is imbued with the secular imperative that animates Engel and Lemon. In its decision, the Court offered the following sentence as irrefutably, and obviously, true: “If the posted copies of the Ten Commandments are to have any effect at all, it will be to induce the schoolchildren to read, meditate upon, perhaps to venerate and obey, the Commandments. However desirable this might be as a matter of private devotion, it is not a permissible state objective under the Establishment Clause.” In what possible world is that naked assertion in accord with the Founders’ understanding and practices?
Kennedy is the crucial first step toward a pro-life future. Thirty years before Dobbs, Roe was rescued from reversal by secularism. The decisive joint opinion of three Republican-appointed Justices in Planned Parenthood v. Casey rested on this breathtaking discovery: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” Secularism makes this thought thinkable: that, as far as the Constitution reckons, each of us is the ultimate source of our own ethics, indeed our own worldview. Validity—truth—is collapsed into authenticity: My thinking or imagining a concept is warrant enough for holding it (and demanding that others respect it and me). This web of subjectivity depends on the absence of a transcendent source of meaning and value—that is, God.
Secularism made Roe possible. The Roe Court conceded that if the unborn counted as human persons, a right to abortion was constitutionally impossible. The “fetus’ right to life would then be guaranteed specifically by the [Fourteenth] Amendment,” Harry Blackmun wrote. He added that even the attorneys for Jane Roe “conceded as much.” Texas’s lawyers presented to the Roe Court a cogent argument from biology that each of us comes into being as a distinct person at conception. The justices never refuted it. They ignored it, convincing themselves, as their off-the-record memos and correspondence reliably show, that the only way to answer the question of when a person’s existence begins was through religion. And that was forbidden territory. The absurd notion that metaphysical truths are akin to revealed dogmas—the notion presumed by the secularist ideology that was presumed by Engel—exposed the unborn to lawful lethal violence for half a century.
There is little point now in lamenting the Roe Court’s ignorance. Kennedy will not undo all the ill effects of Casey’s solipsism. Even so, the dismissal of Lemon, and with Lemon, Engel, is a good place to start. It’s time for legislators to ensure that school days open with prayers to the Almighty.
"The judgment of your God is not akin to the judgment of man. The Eternal Father will only judge by the heart. Your rank, your accumulation of worldly goods does not set you up before another. Many have sold their souls within the holy House of God. Better that you strip yourself and remove all worldly interests now while you have the time to make amends to your God, for many mitres will fall into hell."
- St. Thomas Aquinas, August 21, 1972
SOURCE:
The electronic form of this document is copyrighted.
Quotations are permissible as long as this web site is acknowledged with a hyperlink to: http://www.tldm.org
Copyright © These Last Days Ministries, Inc. 1996 - 2025 All rights reserved.
