Liberty For All
By Tanya L. Green, J.D., and Rita Thompson, J.D.
September/October 2000 Family Voice

Last spring, a crowd defied the American Civil Liberties Union by reciting the Lord’s Prayer during a high school graduation ceremony in Calvert County, Maryland. This was to protest a “compromise” manipulated by the ACLU that a student speaker change her prayer to a “time of reflection” and not mention God.

During the ceremony, in spite of—or because of—the compromise, a lone voice started to recite the Lord’s Prayer, soon joined by half of the 4,000-member audience. A columnist in the Potomac News described it as “a wonderful, spontaneous moment of mass protest.” One student walked out.

Said County Commission President Linda L. Kelly (R-Owings), who also joined in the prayer, “No one in Annapolis or Washington, D.C., is going to tell us when or where we can pray.”

This incident illustrates the problem Christians too often face in the public schools. Intimidated by threats of lawsuits from irate parents or the ACLU, teachers and administrators often err on the side of repression—at the expense of students’ First Amendment rights.

Mychele Brickner serves as a member of the Fairfax County School Board in Virginia. She noted, “Many school board members and administrators have barred religious activities simply because they don’t know how to distinguish between school-sponsored prayer and the individual student’s right to pray or to gather with others to pray.”

In one example, New York school officials censored the artwork of a student because he drew a picture of Jesus. In another, a Minnesota principal prohibited a student from sharing her favorite music tape with her classmates, because it contained religious songs. The principle claimed that jobs would be jeopardized if the first-grader played her tape.

After intervention from a civil liberties organization, the principal relented on his position and allowed the student to play her tape.

The line between the Establishment Clause, which forbids the federal government from setting up a state religion, and the Free Exercise Clause, which protects citizens’ rights to freely express their faith, often becomes blurred.

The trend began with the 1947 landmark U.S. Supreme Court case, Everson v. Board of Education. Justice Hugo Black, writing for the majority, said the Establishment Clause created a “complete separation between the state and religion.” This set the precedent for future rulings in which the Court would focus on the Establishment Clause to the detriment of the Free Exercise Clause—especially in public school cases.

Later, a 1962 U.S. Supreme Court ruling banned prayer in schools. It mandated that state-sponsored, state-composed daily school prayer was unconstitutional in the case of Engel v. Vitale. The Court ruled the same in 1963 concerning daily recitation of the Lord’s Prayer.

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