Penna Dexter

In the mid-20^th century, powerful societal forces were asking the question: ‘Does the culture really need religion?’ The Christian consensus lost ground to multicultural ideology and the ideas of the sexual revolution. A new secularist theology took hold.

It turns out, society is not improved by our insistence on a naked public square. In an article for First Things, Gerard Bradley, Professor of Law at the University of Notre Dame, points out that the term “secular” means God is absent. Americans are signaling they’d like Him back.

The Supreme Court is key to these shifts.

In his piece, “How to Bring Back School Prayer,” Gerard Bradley writes: “The Supreme Court’s decision in Kennedy v, Bremerton School District removed the secularist constraints it had imposed on our public life six decades earlier in Engel v. Vitale.” 

In 1962, in that case, the Supreme Court decided that “a prayer composed by state officials in New York and disseminated for recitation in public schools” amounted to government establishment of religion and was unconstitutional. That students could opt out of the prayer didn’t matter. The next year, the Court ruled against state-mandated Bible reading and — again —school prayer.

Gerard Bradley says the justices seemed convinced “that religion should be privatized and the public square secularized.” No longer.

Sixty years later the Supreme Court’s pivotal decisions protecting Coach Kennedy’s public prayer and safeguarding the Bladensburg Peace Cross remove what Professor Bradley describes as “major barriers and precedents against religious freedom.”

He writes: “School boards, legislatures, and other government bodies entrusted with responsibility for the common good are no longer required to pretend that religion is purely a private matter.”

The decision in Kennedy also overrules Stone V. Graham, the forty-six-year-old decision that kept Ten Commandments displays out of public schools. Some are putting them up again.

Professor Bradley’s article is packed with reasons the decision in Kennedy ushers in a good opportunity to bring back school prayer.