Trump: We're Bringing Back School Prayer

President-elect Trump recently outlined his goals for reforming public education in the early days of his administration. Number five on the list? “Bringing back prayer to our schools.”

Prayer is currently not prohibited in public schools, but it's also not mandatory. Students are free to pray privately, and religious clubs are a common sight on many campuses. But many have interpreted the president-elect’s statement as an intention to bring back mandatory morning prayer sessions to schools across America - which were ruled unconstitutional in 1962.

Should prayer come back to public schools, and what does that mean for Christians and non-Christians alike?

The History of School Prayer

For centuries, Christian prayer was a common sight in schools across the United States. From the nation’s founding until the mid-20th century, many schools opened the day with a public prayer and a reading from the Holy Bible. 

This wasn’t always left up to the state, schools, or individual teachers - By the 1950s, a dozen states legally required a daily prayer in classrooms, with another dozen allowing "optional" Bible readings.

The first significant pushback against school prayer was led by Catholics in the 1860s and 1870s, who objected not to prayer itself, but to the chosen text. In an effort to convert Catholic kids to Protestantism, many schools adopted the Protestant Bible - which Catholics naturally objected to.

Two Supreme Court cases effectively ended school prayer in the United States. The first was in 1962, when the New York Board of Regents created a prayer intended for use in the state's public schools. Although students were under no obligation to recite the prayer, its implementation in at least one school district sparked controversy. Steven Engel, a Jewish parent and co-founder of the New York Civil Liberties Union, along with other parents from Long Island, filed a lawsuit challenging the prayer, arguing that it constituted a violation of freedom of religion under the First and Fourteenth Amendments. This case, Engel v. Vitale, made its way to the Supreme Court, where the Court ruled that the mandatory prayer was indeed unconstitutional.

The second was Abington School District v. Schemp, in which Unitarian Universalist Edward Schemp sued his son's Pennsylvania school district over mandatory daily Bible readings and prayers. In his majority opinion, Justice Tom Clark wrote of the mandatory prayers that "they are religious exercises... in violation of the command of the First Amendment that the Government maintain strict neutrality, neither aiding nor opposing religion."

The Push to Bring God Back to School

In recent years, a number of activists, educators, and politicians have been increasingly emboldened in their efforts to bring Christianity back to public schools. And from the Pacific Northwest to the deep south, they’ve largely been successful. 

• A Washington state football coach won the right to pray on the 50-yard line after the Supreme Court sided with him
• Oklahoma is putting Bibles in every public school classroom
• Louisiana requires the Ten Commandments in every public school classroom (though this was recently halted by a judge)

In many instances, these efforts to inject Christianity into schools are done under the legal justification that these documents are important to the nation’s founding, history, and ethics - an argument many critics don’t buy.

Is Trump’s plan just ripping the Band-Aid off? And is that a good thing?

What do you think? Should mandatory prayer return to the classroom, and will President Trump be the one to bring it back? Or is this simply, as many critics argue, Christian nationalism?