“There’s no crying in baseball,” said Tom Hanks’ baseball coach in “A League of Their Own.”
But how about prayer on a public high school’s football field?
After 60 years of precedent-setting battles to maintain a separation of church and state, that question has been thrown into confusion by the Supreme Court’s decision to side with a former high school football coach who held postgame prayer circles on his then-employer’s 50-yard line.
Coach Joseph Kennedy lost his job at Bremerton High School, near Seattle, and claimed his First Amendment rights were violated when he was told by school officials to stop offering prayers on the 50-yard-line after football games.
What began as a solo and personal moment of devotion for him became a lot more public after he allowed his players to join him in prayer. As more team members soon joined in, it ignited questions about church and state separation that unsurprisingly made their way to the Supreme Court.
The court has ruled repeatedly since 1962 that the Constitution’s wording against governmental establishment of religion prohibits prayer in public school classrooms and other functions such as graduation ceremonies.
The reasoning is well known and supported as popularly as any other controversy involving a clash between religion and government in our religiously and politically diverse society, which is to say that the truth depends on where you stand — or kneel.
Conflicts over prayers in public schools are obvious: Students come from all sorts of backgrounds and religions or no religion. In school, they are a captive and impressionable audience. Proselytizing devalues other religions and can constitute discrimination against students who hold minority beliefs.
In the example of a football team, making an issue of religious differences can actually divide the team into outsiders versus insiders and work against team morale.
Of course, the coach expressed no such intentions. He prayed alone on the field after games until a few students asked if they could join him. As the impromptu gathering grew, so did concerns of school officials and others about the coach’s constitutional freedom of speech and assembly clashing with the Constitution’s bar against state-sponsored religion.
That bar was established in the Supreme Court’s 1962 Engel v. Vitale decision, which agreed with a group of parents who objected to a 22-word nondenominational prayer approved by the New York Board of Regents for public schools: “Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon Thee, and we beg Thy blessings upon us, our parents, our teachers and our Country.”
A group led by Jewish parent Steven Engel objected to imposing a one-size-fits-all prayer upon children of many different faiths, or no faith.
That ruling was further refined in the high court’s 1971 Lemon v. Kurtzman decision out of which came what lawyers call the three-pronged “Lemon test” to determine whether a public school activity violates the Constitution’s bar against government establishment of a religion:
• Does it have a significant secular or nonreligious purpose?
• Does it have the primary effect of advancing or inhibiting religion?
• Does it flower excessive entanglement between government and religion?
Although school boards and parents adjusted to the new standards, the arguments in legal and educational circles over what meets the “Lemon” standards have never stopped.
Now the conservative court that overturned Roe v. Wade, among other precedents, has thrown out the Lemon test too.
Writing for the majority in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote that, just as schools should not single out regions for special favor, the school district’s fear of violating the Establishment Clause does not require it “to single out private religious speech for special disfavor.”
“The Constitution and the best of our traditions counsel mutual respect and tolerance, not censorship and suppression, for religious and nonreligious views alike,” Gorsuch wrote.
That sounds lovely, but it begs the question of how much mutual respect and tolerance for “all religions” can be respected without encroaching on families who hold minority views.
Contrary to Gorsuch’s description of the prayer as short, private and personal and the students as “otherwise occupied” during the prayer, the event was quite public and, by its very nature, exclusionary of those who prefer not to join, which hardly sounds like the best way to build team unity in our increasingly diverse society.
Opportunities to peacefully practice one’s religion outside of school grounds and other public spaces are ample enough in our society for the faithful to practice their faith without pushing for it to occupy more time and space in taxpayer-funded spaces intended to serve the entire community.
Students always have been allowed to pray privately and hold religious club meetings after school hours. Still, the decision written by Gorsuch leaves ample room and opportunities for more to argue about, as they surely will.
Come the holiday season, for example, history tells us to expect new dust-ups over the propriety of Nativity scenes on public property and whether their content can pass the “Santa Claus test” that distinguishes the sacred from the secular.
President John F. Kennedy probably offered the best answer to this school prayer dilemma shortly after the 1962 decision when news reporters eagerly sought the view of the nation’s first Catholic president on the matter.
Prudently dodging the question of whether he agreed with the high court’s decision, he urged the nation to support the court and the Constitution and offered this advice:
“We have in this case a very easy remedy and that is to pray ourselves,” he said, adding, “it would be a welcome reminder to every American family that we can pray a good deal more at home, we can attend our churches with a good deal more fidelity, and we can make the true meaning of prayer much more important in the lives of all of our children. That power is very much open to us.”
Indeed, it was, and it still is. Everyone has the power to use that power in their own way, if they choose, free from government-funded pressures.
The Constitution remains silent on crying in baseball. But it protects the rights of all Americans, if they so choose, to pray at home.
