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The Importance of Prayer: 10 Reasons Why We Pray

Modified: January 9, 2024

Written by: Andy Reece

What is prayer? Why is it important? Find out the importance of prayer and how it can help us to grow in spirit and character.

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The importance of prayer is often overlooked. Most of us just pray for God to help us, or to bless us. And most of the time because of our busy lives, prayer is like an afterthought. But why is prayer important? In fact, what is prayer? In this article, we look at the definition of prayer and 10 reasons why we pray. Then, we can understand the power of prayer that God has so lovingly bestowed upon us. 

What is Prayer?

Christian prayer is our way of communicating with God. Just like how a child talks and listens to their father, prayer is how we as Christians and children of God converse with Him. And everyone’s conversation with God is different. That is why prayer is the most intimate form of communication that directly connects us to God on a personal level. 

Praying to God is simple – all you really have to do is speak to Him with a genuine heart. And the Bible also makes it clear that prayer is really that straightforward. If we call upon the name of the Lord and come to Him in prayer, God listens to us. (Jeremiah 29:12). Prayer is freely given to us by God, which is why we need to understand the importance of prayer. I like a quote by Hudson Taylor that captures the true importance of prayer – “When you work, you work. But when you pray, God works.”. 

Read more : Know The Power Of Prayer

10 Reasons To Know The Importance of Prayer 

1. praying to god helps us to grow closer to god.

If I can sum up the importance of prayer into one big reason, it would be this: prayers help us grow closer to God. When we pray, we are welcoming God to be in every part of our lives. The more you spend time talking and listening to God through prayer, the more we draw closer to Him and know more of Him. And thus, God naturally draws close to us too. 

If God is close to us, what else do we have to fear? What else do we have to achieve? Nothing! Just like Paul, we can live fearlessly and courageously because we know that our mighty God is for and with us. 

Psalm 145:18 The LORD is near to all who call on him, to all who call on him in truth.

Image by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash

2. Prayer Helps Us To Align Ourselves with God’s Will

When we pray, we are also aligning ourselves with God’s will. We are asking Him to lead us and help us in our journey through life. Prayer is a way for us to surrender our lives to God and trust that He will lead us down the path He has planned for us. When we take the time to pray, we are opening up a dialogue with our Creator. We are able to hear from Him and understand His heart for us.

Additionally, through prayer, we are able to discern the will of God for our lives. As we spend time talking to God and listening for His guidance, He will begin to reveal His plans for our lives. And as we surrender our plans to Him, He will begin to work in ways that we never could have imagined because His plans and ways are higher than ours. That is the importance of prayer. 

Philippians 4:19   And my God will meet all your needs according to the riches of his glory in Christ Jesus.

Image by Samuel Ferrara on Unsplash

3. Prayer Shows You That Your Life is Not About You

​​Not only will praying help us to align to God’s will, but it also helps us come to terms with reality – life is indeed not about us after all. It has and always been about God and fulfilling His will on earth as it is in heaven. Prayer helps us to acknowledge that God is the center of the universe and in control.

Prayer is important because it also helps us to realize that others’ needs can also come before ours, especially when we pray for others. When we do so, we are putting others at the forefront of our minds. In a world that propagates self-centeredness, the importance of prayer cannot be slighted. It helps us to be humble and compassionate toward others. 

John 17:15   My prayer is not that you take them out of the world but that you protect them from the evil one.

Image by Danie Franco on Unsplash

Read more : How To Pray With A Heart That Desires God

4. Prayer Gives Us Strength and Hope

It can be easy to feel like we are alone when things are tough, but God is always with us. When we pray, we are reminded that He is in control and will help us through whatever situation we are facing. Prayer for strength can help us get through anything life throws our way because God is always there for us. He will always give us the strength and hope we need to get through anything. So don’t be afraid to pray, because God is always listening and ready to help. 

If you’re feeling lost or scared, take a few minutes to pray and ask God for strength and hope. Take some time to also pray the Armor of God prayer daily to help us overcome our battles. 

Psalm 73:26 My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.

Image by Dan Freeman on Unsplash

5. Praying Gives Us Wisdom and Guidance

Sometimes we pray to seek God’s wisdom and guidance, especially during times we need to make an important decision. When the going gets rough and we don’t know what to do, it’s important to remember that we can always seek guidance from God. Prayer is the perfect way to welcome God to help us. When we pray for wisdom, we are asking God to help us understand what we should do in a certain situation. And when we pray for guidance , we are asking God to show us the path that we should take. 

James 1:5   If any of you lacks wisdom, you should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to you.

Image by Billy Pasco on Unsplash

6. Prayers Will Increase Our Faith

Another importance of prayer is that it puts our faith into action. We are acknowledging that God is real and that He is in control. That even though we have not received the answers yet, we are already believing that it has been done because God has already answered it. When we make time to talk to God, it helps us keep our focus on Him and His promises instead of our circumstances.

But bear in mind that prayer is not just about us asking God for things. It’s also about us listening to what He has to say. We can learn so much about His will for our lives when we take the time to be still and listen to Him. When we hear from God, it gives us the courage to step out in faith and obey His commands. So if you are looking for ways to increase your faith, start with prayer. It is one of the best things that you can do.

1 Corinthians 2:5 That your faith might not rest on human wisdom but on God’s power .

Image by Jeremy Bezanger on Unsplash

7. Prayers Bring Peace and Comfort

The importance of prayer is also evident when trouble comes. In this fast-paced life, we are constantly bombarded with stress and anxiety from work, school, and other responsibilities. Sometimes, it can all feel too overwhelming and we just need a break. That is why we need prayers for peace for the kind of comfort only God can provide. 

Whenever we pray, we are reminded that we are not alone in this world and that God is always with us. He will never leave us or forsake us (Deuteronomy 31:16). So even when everything else seems to be falling apart, we can find hope and peace in Him through prayer. 

Philippians 4:7 And the peace of God , which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

Image by dominik hofbauer on Unsplash

Read more : Pray for One Another: The Biblical Truth

8. To Seek God’s Forgiveness and Resist Temptation

When we are guilt-ridden because of sin, prayer is the most powerful tool we can use to seek the Lord’s forgiveness as we come to Him in repentance. Prayer allows us to pour our hearts to God, confessing our sins and asking for His forgiveness. When we are sincere in our prayer, He is faithful to forgive us and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

In addition, prayer is essential and is a crucial tool that helps us resist temptation. When we are feeling weak and tempted to sin, we can pray for God’s strength to help us overcome. Additionally, prayer gives us the opportunity to ask God for wisdom on how to avoid future temptations. 

Psalm 86:5 You, Lord, are forgiving and good , abounding in love to all who call to you.

Image by Dương Hữu on Unsplash

9. To Give Thanks and Praise

We pray not only to ask things from God but also to give Him thanks and praise for who He is and all that He has done in our lives. Essentially, prayer helps us to count our blessings. Prayer allows us to remember all of the good things that God has done in our lives, no matter how big or small. We are also able to reflect on His abounding grace and mercy.  

Our gratitude through our prayers is also an act of honoring Him. It is an acknowledgment that everything we have and all the battles that we have won are because of God who loves us so. That is why prayer is important for us to exalt God and show our love for Him.

James 1:17   Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights .

Image by Satyajit Bhowmik on Unsplash

10. To Experience God’s Miracles

Prayer also gives us an opportunity to experience God’s miracle. It allows us to tap into His infinite power that is much greater than ourselves. When we do that, amazing things can happen. When we pray, we are putting our trust in God and asking him to intervene in our lives. Sometimes, we may not even know the things to pray for. But that’s okay! God knows what we need and he is always ready to answer our prayers. We only need to look around us. 

There are countless examples of people who have experienced amazing miracles as a result of prayer. Whether it’s healing from a serious illness, overcoming addiction, or finding a job when you’re unemployed, God can work wonders in your life if you let Him. This is the importance of prayer.

Job 5:9 He performs wonders that cannot be fathomed, miracles that cannot be counted.

Image by Lucas Ludwig on Unsplash

How To Pray to God

When you pray, you are talking to God. It is a conversation between you and Him. There is no wrong way to pray. Like how Max Lucado puts it, “our prayers may be awkward. Our attempts may be feeble. But since the power of prayer is in the one who hears it and not in the one who says it, our prayers do make a difference.”

If you aren’t too sure how to pray, here are the 15 most powerful prayers in the Bible that you can follow too. But, the one prayer that I always pray is the Lord’s Prayer by Jesus Christ himself: 

Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name; thy kingdom come; thy will be done; on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation; but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, forever and ever. Amen.

Read more : Prayer of Repentance in the Bible: Its Significance and Meaning

7 Steps We Can Learn From The Lord’s Prayer

1. Declaration of God’s identity. Declare and acknowledge God’s rightful place as the Father of us.

2. Prayer of Adoration. Praise God for who He is and all that He has done for us. 

3. Prayer of Surrender and Faith.  Acknowledge that it is God’s Will and He is in control of our lives. This is one of the greatest forms of submission.

4. Prayer of Petition. Ask in God’s name for the things that we need such as strength, guidance, and wisdom to overcome whatever circumstance we might be facing. 

5. Prayer of Confession and Forgiveness.  We should always confess our sins so that we can receive forgiveness from God.

6. Prayer of Healing and Deliverance. Ask God for protection and help in overcoming our sins, to deliver us from Satan’s temptations so that we may achieve healing.

7. Glorify God’s name. When we glorify God’s name, we are bringing Him honor and He takes delight in that. 

And if you don’t know how to get started, just say a simple prayer like this: 

“Father, I praise You for the magnificent, loving, and merciful God that You are. I thank You for Your Son, Jesus. I confess that I have sinned against You and ask for Your forgiveness. Please help me to forgive others as You have forgiven me. I pray that Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Please meet my daily needs and help me share the gospel with others. Protect me from evil and give me the strength to overcome temptation. All the glory, honor, and praises are Yours alone. In Jesus’ name, Amen.”

Short Prayer Quotes 

“True prayer is a way of life, not just for use in cases of emergency. Make it a habit, and when the need arises you will be in practice.” – Billy Graham

Image by Jasmin Ne on Unsplash

“Prayer lays hold of God’s plan and becomes the link between his will and its accomplishment on earth. Amazing things happen, and we are given the privilege of being the channels of the Holy Spirit’s prayer.” – Elisabeth Elliot

Image by Lachlan Gowen on Unsplash

“The reality is, my prayers don’t change God.  But, I am convinced prayer changes me.  Praying boldly boots me out of that stale place of religious habit into authentic connection with God Himself.” – Lysa TerKeurst

Image by Melissa Askew on Unsplash

“True prayer is neither a mere mental exercise nor a vocal performance. It is far deeper than that – it is spiritual transaction with the Creator of Heaven and Earth.” – Charles Spurgeon

Image by Daniel Roe on Unsplash

“Prayer is simply talking to God like a friend and should be the easiest thing we do each day.” – Joyce Meyer

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Prayer in Schools: In Search of a New Paradigm

• First Online: 14 March 2023

Cite this chapter

• Julian Stern 2 &
• Eli Kohn 3 , 4  

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Prayer and schools have an uncomfortable history together. Prayer is therefore a useful ‘test’ of various aspects of schooling. Empirical research on prayer in schools is used here to develop a new paradigm—a new way of understanding prayer in school, in terms of particular theories of spirituality, and a new way of understanding schooling, in terms of prayer and spirituality. The paradigm that we present reflects the views of young people studied in various recent research projects, and it also reflects well-established religious and philosophical positions. It proposes a model of ‘mundane’ spirituality inspired by the work of various Jewish and Christian scholars, notably Kook, Buber, Macmurray and Hay. This is exemplified by research on young people in Israel and the UK. Implications of this work for schools are described, noting the value of uncertainty and the as yet unknown, the plural, the open. The chapter does not reject education—or religion—as a search for ‘truth’: it recognises that truth is still emergent, and that there is room for the mysterious, the ineffable.

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We do not attempt to define ‘prayer’ in this chapter, theologically or sociologically, and in the reports of empirical research we accept the contextual uses of the word ‘prayer’ used in the UK and Israeli schools, respectively.

‘God/gods’ might be best used throughout the chapter, but we use ‘God’ for convenience, recognising that the majority of participants in the research were Christian or Jewish. To make more general points, we also use ‘sacred or divine’, and this was used, in particular, in reports on the UK-based research.

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Stern, J., Kohn, E. (2023). Prayer in Schools: In Search of a New Paradigm. In: Gross, Z. (eds) Reimagining the Landscape of Religious Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20133-2_15

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Why School Prayer Matters

I n his State of the Union address and elsewhere, President Trump has emphasized the importance of prayer in public schools. In one speech he promised “big action” on the matter. But just what action he is contemplating remains obscure. Teacher-led prayer to open the school day? Football players kneeling in the end zone? Religious clubs meeting after school?

The effort to return prayer to public schools may seem quixotic. The unconstitutionality of school-sponsored prayer has become a legal commonplace. Once a routine part of the day for millions of students, classroom prayers were banished more than a half-century ago—declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in two major decisions in 1962 and 1963. Those decisions provoked a massive public reaction, but the Court dug in and extended its disapproval to other forms of school prayer, including prayers at graduation and before football games. The Court even struck down a state law mandating that the school day begin with a moment of silence “for meditation or voluntary prayer.”

Perhaps the president aims to challenge this entrenched position. Would a newly constituted Court listen to such a challenge? It seems unlikely. The decisions from the early 1960s turned against the informal establishment that for nearly two centuries had been presumed to be in accord with the Constitution. Those decisions were part of a cultural shift that has had massive consequences in our culture and law. But in our time, much that was considered settled has become unsettled, for better and worse. So we do well to look back on the school-prayer decisions—on how audacious they were, and how momentous: momentous not just for schools, or even for the jurisprudence of church and state, but for what we may call the culture and constitution of America.

In 1959, Leo Pfeffer, the legendary separationist lawyer and scholar, was alarmed when a group of parents in Nassau County, New York, assisted by the ACLU, filed a lawsuit ( Engel v. ­Vitale ) challenging the use of the so-called Regents’ Prayer in the county’s public schools. The prayer read, “Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon Thee, and we beg Thy blessings upon us, our parents, our teachers, and our country.” Pfeffer was not a proponent of school prayer—on the contrary. He believed that the lawsuit was a sure loser, and was concerned that it would produce unfavorable precedent confirming the constitutionality of prayer in public schools. He turned out to be mistaken.

Pfeffer’s fears seemed well-founded at the time. The product of lengthy deliberations by a group of ministers, priests, and rabbis, the Regents’ Prayer had been endorsed by the New York Association of Secondary School Principals, the New York School Boards Association, and the New York Association of Judges of Children’s Courts. There was little in American tradition or constitutional jurisprudence to suggest that it was unconstitutional.

Yet this is just what the young but exceptionally conscientious trial judge concluded—at least initially. Judge Bernard Meyer, a recent Democratic appointee at the beginning of a distinguished career that included service on New York’s highest court, was hardly a school-prayer enthusiast. After hearing the evidence and arguments, Judge Meyer wrote a draft opinion declaring the use of the Regents’ Prayer in schools unconstitutional.

Then, before issuing the final opinion, Meyer devoted six months of careful study to the question. When he wrote his lengthy and scholarly opinion, he ended up reaching the opposite conclusion. Meyer remained personally unsympathetic to the schools’ position, and he insisted that they take stronger measures to ensure that students be able to abstain from the prayer if they or their parents objected to it. But after a thorough review of Founding-era history and later tradition and a careful analysis of the relevant precedents, the judge concluded that the Constitution could not be fairly interpreted as prohibiting school prayer.

Judge Meyer’s decision was appealed through, and affirmed by, two levels of New York courts. By the time the case reached the Supreme Court, eleven of the thirteen judges who had considered the case had concluded in favor of the permissibility of school prayer. The Supreme Court reversed the decision as emphatically, in a 6–1 ruling that would almost surely have been 8–1 if Justices Frankfurter and White had voted. (Frankfurter had been crippled by a stroke; White had only recently joined the Court.)

The majority opinion by Justice Hugo Black presented a stark contrast to Judge Meyer’s meticulous opinion. Citing not a single supporting precedent, showing no deference to the long American tradition of official prayer running back to the Congress that had drafted and approved the First Amendment’s religion clauses, Black declared in dogmatic terms that government-sponsored prayer had ­created controversy in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, that some colonists had come to this country to escape such practices, and that this purpose had been built into the First Amendment. Black’s colleague and frequent ally Justice William O. ­Douglas thought his opinion did not touch on the right themes. In a note to Black, he commented, “I still do not see how most of the opinion is relevant to the problem.” Reliably idiosyncratic, Douglas wrote a much more aggressive opinion proposing to root religion out of American government.

Public reaction to the Supreme Court case was prompt and vehement. Newspaper ­editorials throughout the country denounced the Court’s decision. At a conference of state governors, every governor except New York’s Nelson Rockefeller condemned the decision and urged passage of a constitutional amendment to overturn it. Bruce Dierenfield, a historian who has written in support of the 1960s school-prayer cases, reports that Engel provoked “the greatest outcry against a U.S. Supreme Court decision in a century”—a century that had recently included Brown v. Board of Education .

The reaction took the Justices by surprise. ­Dierenfield notes, “In a rare moment of political tone-­deafness, [Chief Justice Earl] Warren did not anticipate the fallout.” It was evident that the Justices were already bunkered on one side of a cultural divide. That divide was to become wider and more conspicuous in the ensuing years.

What explains the national outrage provoked by the elimination of a one-sentence prayer that many schools in New York didn’t use anyway? Was this one more instance of an uninformed and hysterical public reacting to the necessary progress of ­American law toward an acknowledgement of our religious ­pluralism? Sophisticated, disdainful observers such as the esteemed constitutional scholar Philip Kurland asserted as much. But in hindsight, we can see that the indignant citizens were more prescient than the sophisticates.

T he Engel case was succeeded and consolidated in the following year by another major decision, Abington Township v. Schempp (1963). In this case, the Court invalidated school-sponsored prayer and Bible reading exercises. Schempp attempted to make up for Black’s lackluster performance in Engel by offering a more deliberate majority opinion by Justice Tom Clark, aided by an even more comprehensive concurring opinion by Justice William Brennan. Boiling down the reasoning of these opinions: The Constitution demands that governments in this country be “neutral” in matters of religion, and governments can be neutral only if they limit themselves to actions serving “secular” purposes and having primarily “­secular” effects.

The Schempp opinions introduced the odd couple of principles—religious neutrality and governmental secularity—that have governed religion-clause jurisprudence ever since. The principles have been reverently invoked in hundreds, probably thousands of judicial decisions. This uneasy conjunction of principles would be incorporated less than a decade later into the controversial “Lemon test,” after Lemon v. Kurtzman (1971), which has been the on-again, off-again official doctrine for almost half a ­century. Secular neutrality also became the basis of the Court’s proclamations in the 1980s that the Constitution prohibits governments from doing or saying things that “endorse” religion. This doctrine has been invoked in scores of cases dealing with holiday displays, publicly sponsored crosses, Ten Commandments monuments, and the words “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance.

The incoherence of those conjoined principles was apparent from the start, as Justice Potter Stewart’s dissenting opinions reflected. A steadfastly “secular” government can be considered “neutral” toward religion only if we assume that religion is an inherently private matter. But that assumption is false. And as soon as we acknowledge that some or even most religions have a public dimension, with implications for public policy, a determinedly secular government is no longer religiously neutral; it eschews and implicitly rejects those religions. To say that government must be “neutral” toward religion and therefore is “secular” is tantamount to saying that a business is committed to being non-partisan and therefore will hire and serve only Democrats.

Sensing the tension inherent in the equation of “neutral” with “secular,” Stewart pointed out the problem. Some people believe, as a religious matter, that prayer is appropriate in public settings and institutions, including schools. This group has included not only many Christians and devout Jews but many or most American presidents, notably Washington and Lincoln. Rejecting this widely held view in its newly fashioned approach to religious-establishment jurisprudence, the Court in its requirement of governmental secularity plainly departed from anything plausibly describable as “religious neutrality.”

The incoherence of the neutrality-secularism composite has bedeviled religion-clause cases ever since. It is at the root of the confusion that plagues our current jurisprudence. Consider the occasionally contentious issue of the teaching of evolution, creationism, and intelligent design in the schools. Curricular decisions are ordinarily left to states and localities; this area is an exception. The Court has ruled, in effect, that state schools may not teach creationism or intelligent design, and also that states may not prohibit the teaching of evolution. In ­ Epperson v. Arkansas (1968), the Court tried to explain why. “Government in our democracy, state and national, must be neutral in matters of religious theory, doctrine, and practice,” the Court solemnly intoned, invoking Schempp . “The State may not adopt programs or practices in its public schools or colleges which ‘aid or oppose’ any religion. This prohibition is absolute.” The Court judged that Arkansas had prohibited the teaching of evolution because evolution contradicts the religious beliefs of some citizens. In that way, the Court concluded, Arkansas had aided religion, in violation of its obligation of neutrality.

This time, though, Justice Black noticed the contradiction that had worried Justice Stewart in earlier decisions. Black endorsed the result in Epperson . But in a concurring opinion he complained that on the Court’s own premises—namely, that the Constitution imposes an “absolute” prohibition of public school teachings that “‘aid or oppose’ any religion,” and that evolution directly contradicts the teachings of some religions—it would follow that the teaching of evolution in the public schools is itself constitutionally prohibited. On the Court’s own premises, one could conclude that the First Amendment prohibits states from either (a) teaching evolution or (b) forbidding the teaching of evolution.

The Court, of course, declined to acknowledge this contradiction, as it has declined to acknowledge similar contradictions and confusions that have pervaded its religion-clause jurisprudence since Schempp . Instead, the Justices presumed that what is “secular” is by definition “neutral.” The consequences for religion-­clause jurisprudence are by now notorious.

Y et the consequences have not been limited to religion-clause jurisprudence. They permeate, often in barely visible but powerful ways, many of the most prominent and controversial constitutional doctrines and cases over the last two ­generations.

The most important and contested constitutional controversies over abortion, contraception, marriage, and assisted suicide are adjudicated under the Fourteenth Amendment’s due process and equal protection clauses. As interpreted by the Court, those clauses mean that state governments must advance at least a “legitimate” and “rational” basis for imposing restrictions on liberty or in order to use legal classifications that impose a burden or confer a benefit. But what constitutes a “legitimate” and “rational” basis? Here the notion of secular neutrality quietly but powerfully enters into the Court’s reasoning, limiting the kinds of rationales or interests states can invoke. A rationale or interest that sounds “religious” will be avoided by lawyers tasked with defending existing laws from constitutional challenge, and for good reason. In today’s constitutional regime, lawyers understand that a “religious” rationale will invite swift and instinctive condemnation.

Consider the cases culminating in Obergefell v. Hodges . In this litigation, traditional marriage laws were challenged under the Fourteenth Amendment. Typically, government lawyers who tried to defend existing marriage laws argued that limiting matrimony to one man and one woman is good for families and children. Finding the supporting evidence insufficient, many courts rejected these rationales and struck down the laws, as the Supreme Court itself eventually did in Obergefell .

Notably absent from the rationales offered in defense of marriage was any straightforward claim that a society founded on traditional marriage is more virtuous or moral, more in accordance with natural law or some other metaphysical outlook. At least in some states, majorities of citizens probably did believe something like that. But the lawyers defending marriage were formed by the “secular ­neutrality” doctrine introduced in the school-prayer cases. They understood that substantive moral ­rationales would sound “religious,” and hence not “secular,” with the result that they would be ­peremptorily dismissed as illegitimate. Indeed, in the litigation over marriage, some judges asserted their suspicion (as the Iowa Supreme Court did) that the “secular” rationales were really pretexts for—God forbid (so to speak)—“religious” rationales. The social science was a screen for an unconstitutional imposition of religion. Or so some judges assumed, which allowed them to join their reasoning about the Fourteenth Amendment to the school-prayer cases—not ­consciously, perhaps, but as part of the general consolidation of the doctrine of secular ­­neutrality.

But why should views of morality or virtue be illegitimate bases for public policy just because, like so much else in our culture, they were informed by the Bible or some other religious teaching? It is a sign of how central the thinking of the school-prayer cases has become that most lawyers today find this question impertinent, even obtuse. When I raise the question in a seminar, students wonder whether I am being serious. Isn’t it just obvious that the use of a “­religious” rationale would . . . well . . . violate the First Amendment’s establishment clause? Self-evident, almost?

Actually, no. The establishment clause forbids certain things—any sort of state-sponsored church, to mention the central instance. But to conclude that a religious rationale used to justify a law or public policy in itself violates the Constitution would have been implausible at the time the First Amendment was adopted, and through much of American history. In the early 1960s, when the school-prayer cases were decided, Martin Luther King and others argued for civil-rights legislation using overtly religious language and rationales. Only as the idea of a constitutionally mandated “secular neutrality” took hold could it seem plausible and eventually axiomatic that religious considerations in lawmaking are unconstitutional. And that idea received its official inauguration in the school-prayer cases.

T he school-prayer decisions have been significant beyond the realm of constitutional law. They have had dramatic consequences for America’s public culture, as constitutional doctrine often shapes the official self-understanding of the American people. The school-prayer decisions are a conspicuous case in point.

The cultural importance of the school-prayer decisions was magnified by the fact that they concerned public schools, a vital practical institution and a crucial public symbol. Harvard professor Noah Feldman observes that by the mid-nineteenth century, public schools “were already understood as sites for the creation of American identity.” Martin Marty notes that in America, public schools came to assume the role formerly filled by an established church: They form and express essential public values. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that schools have been the most frequent subject of establishment-clause disputes.

This observation helps explain the passion generated on both sides of the issue. At first glance, the stakes seem low. The prayers contested in court typically lasted a minute at most. Designed to be ecumenical, they likely did little to instill genuine piety. But they were richly symbolic. Their regular recitation in public schools expressed and reinforced a nation that understood itself to be, as the Pledge of Allegiance puts it, “under God.” This understanding of America was subtly communicated not only to fidgeting or distracted students, but to the citizenry as a whole. The backlash against the Engel and Schempp decisions was severe because the majority of American citizens recognized, correctly, that the official prohibition of school prayer expressed and inculcated a very different national self-understanding.

The school-prayer cases marked a first step toward the presumption that “secular neutrality” defines America—a self-understanding that represented a decisive break with American traditions. Although the words “under God” were added to the Pledge only in the 1950s, they were taken from one of the most revered public statements in our history. We are, ­Lincoln declared in his Gettysburg Address, “this nation, under God.” Lincoln, too, spoke from within a well-established tradition. In his first inaugural address, George Washington offered these earnest words:

It would be peculiarly improper to omit in this first official Act, my fervent supplications to that Almighty Being who rules over the Universe. . . . No People can be bound to acknowledge and adore the invisible hand, which conducts the Affairs of men more than the People of the United States. Every step, by which they have advanced to the character of an independent nation, seems to have been distinguished by some token of providential agency.

Unapologetic invocations of divine providence have been common enough throughout American history. As late as 1952, the Supreme Court itself declared, “We are a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being.” Insofar as constitutional jurisprudence from the school-prayer decisions onward has insisted on a constitutionally required secularism, it has cut us off from our own past.

At their inaugurations, presidents still sponsor prayers and other expressions of religious piety. They take the oath of office with “so help me God.” They end their speeches with “God bless America.” And the words “under God” are still in the Pledge (the Ninth Circuit notwithstanding). Legal challenges to this residual piety have been rebuffed. The Supreme Court upholds these practices by insisting that these seemingly religious expressions no longer send a religious message. According to Justice Sandra Day O’Connor (the leading sponsor of the “no endorsement of religion” doctrine), prayers at inaugurations, prayers to open legislative sessions, and other religious expressions are permissible because they serve “the legitimate secular purposes of solemnizing public occasions, expressing confidence in the future, and encouraging the recognition of what is worthy of appreciation in society.” That is what a “reasonable observer” would perceive— not an endorsement of religion. Or at least, so Justice O’Connor decreed.

N ot everyone is “reasonable” in the sense intended by the Justice. Some less-than-reasonable citizens perceive religious purpose in what remains of the old tradition. They are indignant at violations of what they have been assured is a basic constitutional norm of secular neutrality. That assurance aggravates their sense of grievance, exacer­bating cultural division. From across the divide, other citizens likewise perceive the persistence of a religious purpose. But the faithful rejoice that the Justices have not wholly succeeded in suppressing the national self-understanding that prevailed during much of the nation’s history—a self-understanding that many still cherish.

Can the traditional self-understanding of the American people be revived? Will the law of the land permit, as was the case for more than a century and a half following the Founding, invocations of divine providence and the inculcation of a civil religion “under God”? For that to happen, the school-prayer decisions will have to be reversed, or at least significantly revised.

A judicial reexamination of Engel , Schempp , and establishment-clause decisions seems unlikely. But who knows? History, like its Author, can work in mysterious ways. 

Steven D. Smith is a Warren Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of San Diego.

Articles by Steven D. Smith

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March 2020 Church & State - March 2020

Prayer in public schools: it's time to set the record straight.

Mar 02, 2020   Prayer In Public Schools: It's Time To Set The Record Straight

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Editor’s Note: This article outlining 10 common myths about religion in public schools originally ran in Church & State magazine in March 2019 in conjunction with a story about Americans United’s victory in a school prayer case in Bossier Parish, La. Because the issue of prayer in school remains so contentious and is plagued with misinformation, we’re reprinting it here.

We had prayer in schools for 200 years, and no one complained until the 1960s . There are a couple of problems with this statement. For starters, public education in the United States didn’t really begin to take off until the latter half of the 19th century. That’s when states began to fund public schools (often called “common schools” then) and pass laws mandating that children be educated.

Some states had laws requiring public schools to begin the day with a prayer and/or Bible reading, but others did not. Regardless, the practice was controversial from the start. Roman Catholics often complained because the prayers recited were Protestant and the Bible used for readings was the King James Version. Some parents filed lawsuits in state courts against these coercive religious practices in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The rulings that resulted were a mixed bag. Courts in Ohio, Illinois, Wisconsin and Nebraska invalidated the practices, but courts in Iowa, Massachusetts and Kentucky upheld them.

Far from no one complaining, the issue of religion in public schools was so controversial that it sometimes sparked outbreaks of violence. In the 19th century, riots and other forms of violence erupted in New York, Pennsylvania and Maine over the issue of religion in public schools.

All public schools had prayer and Bible reading prior to 1962. As mentioned above, policies on religion in schools varied from state to state. State-sponsored religious practices in public schools were less common than many people think.

In 1960, two years before the Sup­reme Court ruled on the matter, Am­ericans United surveyed states to find out what (if anything) they were doing about official Bible reading in public schools. AU found that only five states had laws on the books mandating that some form of Bible reading take place in public schools. An additional 25 states had laws allowing “optional” Bible reading at the discretion of local public school districts. The remaining states had no laws on the books addressing the matter. It’s also worth noting that despite what state laws might have said, courts in 11 states – Arizona, California, Colorado, Illinois, Michigan, Missouri, Nevada, Oregon, South Dakota, Washington and Wisconsin – had already declared the practice unconstitutional.

Myth Three:

We can find a “non-sectarian” prayer for public schools that fits all comers. A moment’s thought will demonstrate that this is impossible. In a country as diverse as the United States, there is no such thing as a “one-size-fits-all” prayer. Many believers would find a watered-down prayer to be offensive, and, obviously, some people reject belief in God (atheists, agnostics and humanists) and thus don’t pray at all; others have non-traditional concepts of God.

The first school prayer case to reach the Supreme Court,  Engel v. Vitale  in 1962, challenged an allegedly “non-sectarian” prayer that had been composed by a bureaucratic body called the Board of Regents in New York state. The so-called “Regents’ Prayer” was allegedly non-sectarian and had been adopted in part to combat juvenile delinquency and ward off communism. Several parents objected to their children’s being compelled to recite a government-composed prayer and filed a lawsuit.

Only non-religious people oppose school prayer. It’s true that many non-religious people have opposed official school prayer over the years. Madalyn Murray O’Hair, a prominent atheist leader, filed one of the early cases against school-sponsored Bible reading, and today many atheists are quick to oppose it as well. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that a non-religious person would oppose man­datory prayer, but plenty of religious people have opposed these practices as well. When the “Regents’ Prayer” was challenged in court, many clergy labeled it spiritually vacuous. The Rev. Charles Lee, a Methodist minister in New York, blas­ted the state-written invocation, calling it “a mockery of the idea of prayer” and “an insult to our spiritual integrity.”

Students who don’t want to take part in prayer can remain silent or get up and leave the room. Children should not be compelled to single themselves out and run the risk of abuse from others later by walking out of the room. Nor should they be expected to remain silent while an activity takes place that violates their fundamental rights.

Thanks to the school prayer rulings, there can be no religious activity or discussion about religion in public schools at all. That’s simply not true. In the school prayer rulings of 1962 and ’63, the Supreme Court struck down only mandated, school-sponsored and coercive forms of prayer and Bible reading. Truly voluntary prayer was left intact. Students are free to engage in voluntary, non-disruptive forms of prayer, and they may read religious books during their free time. In secondary schools, students may form voluntary religious (and non-religious) clubs that meet during non-instructional time. Attendance at these clubs is entirely voluntary.

Furthermore, nothing in the school prayer rulings limits objective instruction about religion in public schools. Justice Tom Clark, who wrote the majority opinion in  School District of Ab­ington Township v. Schempp  in 1963, made this clear.

Clark wrote, “[I]t might well be said that one’s education is not complete without a study of comparative religion or the history of religion and its relationship to the advancement of civilization. It certainly may be said that the Bible is worthy of study for its literary and historic qualities. Nothing we have said here indicates that such study of the Bible or of religion, when presented objectively as part of a secular program of education, may not be effected consistently with the First Amendment. But the exercises here do not fall into those categories. They are religious exercises, required by the States in violation of the command of the First Amendment that the Government main­tain strict neutrality, neither aiding nor opposing religion.”

Myth Seven:

If the majority of people want prayer in schools, they should be able to have it. Our constitutional system doesn’t work that way. Under the First Amendment, all religious and non-religious beliefs have equal rights. The majority does not have the right to impose its views on the minority simply because it has numerical superiority.

Myth Eight:

The lack of official prayer in schools has spawned negative consequences, such as violence and school shootings. Such claims are symptomatic of what could be characterized as lazy thinking in that they attempt to link two things that, in fact, have no connection at all (i.e., post hoc, propter hoc ). Furthermore, the claim that school prayer will cure every ill that plagues modern society is simplistic. The difficulties that some schools (and by extension entire communities) are undergoing are complicated and will require equally complex solutions. A few minutes of man­dated prayer in schools is unlikely to do much to address entrenched social problems.

Some children don’t receive religious instruction at home, and that’s why we need prayer in schools. Some children don’t receive religious instruction at home because that’s what their parents want. It is up to parents, not public school officials, to decide what religion, if any, a child is exposed to. When public school officials interfere in this relationship by imposing prayer and religious activity on youngsters against their will, they are usurping parental rights.

Because official prayer has been expelled, public schools can offer no moral instruction.   While public schools can’t sponsor prayer or other religious activities, they can and do work to instill a sense of ethics and morals in students. Public schools promote cooperative learning, encourage tolerance for different points of view and promote shared civil values. Schools reward good behavior and punish infractions such as cheating, lying and disrupting class. In this sense, public schools reflect and enforce the commonly held values that are embraced by larger society.     

Read All About It: Books On School Prayer

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Pros and Cons of Prayer in School Essay

The majority of the people all over the world believe in a supernatural being in which they believe provides them with the necessary day-to-day needs. The supernatural being is believed to provide the required needs only when the believer requests them through prayer accompanied by faith. This show is regarded sacred since one is supposed to be consistent, specific, and gentle in his or her prayers. The same is even experienced in small aged children who are school going and not only by ‘praying because their seniors are doing so’, but ’pray’ for their different needs from their supernatural being. This paper analyses the advantages and disadvantages of prayers in schools especially in school-going children further giving the stand of the writer.

School Prayer is believed to bring benefits back to society since it brings a sense of morality. With the increased use of drugs and spread of immorality among the youths, the majority of which are, still ’school going’ tends to disintegrate society. Not only do the above-listed negative acts deteriorate society but also the consumption of alcoholism, teen pregnancy, and HIV transmission demoralizes the community generally. People believe that when school-going students engage themselves in prayer; such negative morals get off them. In the case of a child who is already involved in such ill morals, by belief and faith, prayer transforms him or her. The community’s supernatural being since is believed to come along with only good deeds and never negative ones solemnly do this transformation (FAQ par.3).

In addition, school prayer has the power to create an ample environment, which instills discipline in schoolchildren, as perceived by the majority. Schools are big institutions, which, constitutes of children from different families with very different upbringings. Some may be undisciplined, inhumane while others may be humane and disciplined. With prayer, the majority of the students can be disciplined and be of humility. This enhances children to develop good ethics, therefore, abiding by the school rules (Manali, par.2).

Furthermore, prayer addresses the needs of the ’whole person just as school prayer would do. This implies that it touches on various issues of a person, for example, academics, social life, and even economic life. Schools should not only concentrate on building a child’s mind academically but also socially. This is recommended since a person does not, at all times, live with books but other human beings too, therefore school prayer is very essential (FAQ par. 4)

As the saying goes, “give Caesar what belongs to Caesar”, School prayer grants an opportunity to religious students to observe their religious beliefs while they are at school. They include those who started practicing praying sometime back and are serious about doing it. Since it is one thing they are used to doing, they may feel void and despised when their religious beliefs are not respected (FAQ par. 5).

On the contrary, prayer has its cons. At school, some religious students tend to concentrate too much on prayer than their academic work. The minority of them will shift all their attention to prayers thinking that they can still make it academically without reading but by only praying hard. This promotes laziness in schools (Manali par.5)

At the same time, school prayer is deer to a certain extent. Christians are required to contribute something, however little, to ensure the smooth running of the exercise. The financial contributions assist mostly in organizing and conducting religious seminars, which are based on varied topics such as drug and substance abuse education. Not all people are rich neither all of them are poor, some will comfortably afford the costs while some will strain a lot thus becoming a disadvantage to them (Warner par.3).

Not all students believe in supernatural beings therefore not all believe in prayer. In the majority of the schools around, children are forced to attend prayer meetings (Pros and Cons of Prayer 1). This becomes inconvenient for those who do not believe in it. it is therefore impossible to observe that all students pray voluntarily (sitemap P1).

A school cannot satisfy everyone’s religious needs. Different religions differ in the way they pray therefore that students in schools would pray differently from one another. If these differences are carried to learning centers, there is the likelihood that they may bring controversy. Each student will claim his or her religion to be the supreme over the rest. Therefore, this issue of prayer should not be carried to schools but left at home since the primary duty of a school is to offer formal academic knowledge (FAQ par.13)

Therefore, this ongoing debate of whether prayer should have cooperated in the school daily routine should be viewed keenly before making the necessary conclusions. In my perspective, I believe that prayer should be involved in the school’s daily routine since its beneficial to society in general, allowing religious students to comfortably pray thereby building a morally upright and disciplined society.

Works Cited

FAQ. Pros and cons of prayer in school . 2002. Web.

Manali Oak. Pros and Cons of Prayer in School. 2009. Web.

Pro and Cons of Prayer in School. 2009. Web.

Sitemap. Cons and Pros of Prayer in School . 2002.

Warner K. P ros and cons of Prayer in School . 2002.Web.

• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2021, December 12). Pros and Cons of Prayer in School. https://ivypanda.com/essays/pros-and-cons-of-prayer-in-school/

"Pros and Cons of Prayer in School." IvyPanda , 12 Dec. 2021, ivypanda.com/essays/pros-and-cons-of-prayer-in-school/.

IvyPanda . (2021) 'Pros and Cons of Prayer in School'. 12 December.

IvyPanda . 2021. "Pros and Cons of Prayer in School." December 12, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/pros-and-cons-of-prayer-in-school/.

1. IvyPanda . "Pros and Cons of Prayer in School." December 12, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/pros-and-cons-of-prayer-in-school/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Pros and Cons of Prayer in School." December 12, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/pros-and-cons-of-prayer-in-school/.

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“Morning Prayer in School: Cultivating Gratitude and Focus”

The practice of morning prayer in school has long been a cherished tradition, enriching the lives of students and educators alike.

As the first rays of sunlight kiss the school campus, students gather together for a moment of reflection and gratitude. This simple yet powerful ritual sets the tone for the day ahead, instilling a sense of unity and purpose among the school community.

Beyond its symbolic significance, morning prayer holds a deeper purpose – it nurtures spiritual growth and fosters a sense of connectedness with something greater than ourselves.

In this blog post, we will delve into the profound impact of morning prayer in school, exploring how it shapes the minds and hearts of students, and why it remains an essential part of the educational experience.

Let’s start.

Table of Contents

Morning Prayer for Students Going Back to School

“ Jesus, help my feet to go In the way that You will show. Jesus, help my hands to do All things loving, kind, and true. Jesus, guard me through this day In all I do and all I say. “

Dear Heavenly Father,

As the morning light dawns upon us, we come before Your presence with hearts filled with gratitude and anticipation. Today, we lift up our students who are embarking on a new journey as they return to school. We seek Your divine guidance and blessings upon each of them.

Lord, we pray for clarity of mind and the ability to grasp knowledge with ease. Grant them the wisdom to discern right from wrong and to make sound decisions throughout their academic pursuits. Bless them with a hunger for learning and a passion for excellence in all they undertake.

In times of challenges and setbacks, remind them that they are never alone. May they always find solace in Your loving presence and draw strength from the knowledge that You have a purpose and plan for each of their lives.

We offer this prayer in the name of Your Son, Jesus Christ, who is the ultimate teacher and guide. 

Morning Exam Prayer for Students

As the sun rises and a new day begins, we come before You with hearts filled with both excitement and apprehension. Today, we lift up our students who are facing exams, and we seek Your divine guidance and grace upon each one of them.

Lord, we pray for a calm and focused mind for our students as they prepare to take their exams. Remove any anxiety or fear that may threaten to overwhelm them. Replace it with a deep sense of peace and confidence in Your loving presence.

Grant them clarity of thought and the ability to recall the knowledge they have acquired. May they remember the lessons taught to them, apply critical thinking, and demonstrate their understanding with clarity.

We ask for Your favor to rest upon them. May the questions they face be fair, and may they have the opportunity to showcase their true potential and understanding of the subjects they have studied.

As they step into the examination hall, remind them that You are with them. May they face each question with courage, knowing that You are guiding and supporting them every step of the way.

We offer this prayer in the name of Your Son, Jesus Christ, who is our source of hope and assurance in all circumstances. 

A Morning Prayer for Strength

As the morning sun rises, we come before Your throne seeking Your presence and strength for the day ahead. We acknowledge that our human strength is limited, but we know that in You, we find an unyielding source of power and courage.

Lord, we ask for strength to endure difficult circumstances and trials. Life can be filled with uncertainties, but with You as our anchor, we remain steadfast and unshaken. May we find solace in Your promises and draw courage from the knowledge that You are always with us.

Grant us the strength to persevere in our endeavors, whether it be in our work, studies, relationships, or service to others. Help us to press on, even when the road ahead seems daunting, knowing that You have equipped us for every good work.

When we feel weak and inadequate, remind us that Your strength is made perfect in our weaknesses. Let us boast in our weaknesses, knowing that when we are weak, then we are strong through You.

As we navigate this day, may Your strength be evident in our lives. May our actions, words, and attitudes reflect the power of Your Spirit working within us.

We offer this prayer in the name of Your Son, Jesus Christ, who demonstrated the ultimate strength through His sacrifice on the cross. 

A Morning Prayer for Courage

“Dear God, thank you for our school. We pray it would be a safe place of learning, fun, and friendship. Please watch over all our teachers, children and families. Help us to learn new things, explore the world together, and to play and be happy “

As the morning sun breaks through the darkness, we come before You, seeking Your presence and courage for the day ahead. We acknowledge that life can be filled with uncertainties and challenges, but we know that in You, we find a constant source of strength and bravery.

When we face challenges and obstacles, may Your courage rise within us. Let us not be paralyzed by fear, but instead, may we confront difficulties with resilience and determination, knowing that You are our ever-present help in times of trouble.

May Your courage enable us to live out our faith boldly and unashamedly. Let us be a light in the darkness, showing the world Your love and grace through our words and actions.

As we face the challenges and opportunities of this day, may Your courage flow through us, guiding our every step. May Your name be glorified in all that we say and do.

We offer this prayer in the name of Your Son, Jesus Christ, who demonstrated the ultimate courage by laying down His life for us. 

Morning Prayer in School During Covid

As the morning light breaks through the darkness, we come before You with hearts burdened by the challenges of these uncertain times. We lift up our students who are facing the impact of the Covid pandemic, seeking Your comfort, guidance, and protection.

Lord, we pray for the safety and health of every student. Shield them and their families from the grasp of this virus. Grant wisdom and discernment to those in authority, guiding them in making decisions that prioritize the well-being of students and their communities.

May this period of adversity be an opportunity for students to grow in resilience, compassion, and empathy for others. Teach them valuable life lessons as they witness the importance of caring for one another in times of crisis.

Finally, Lord, we ask for a swift end to this pandemic. Heal those who are sick, comfort those who mourn, and bring a sense of restoration and renewal to our communities.

We offer this prayer in the name of Your Son, Jesus Christ, our source of hope and healing. 

Prayer to Seek God Each Day

Heavenly Father,

As the sun rises upon a new day, I come before You in reverence and humility, seeking Your presence with a sincere heart. Each day is a gift from You, and I desire to seek You earnestly, knowing that in Your presence, I find joy, peace, and purpose.

Lord, I confess my weaknesses and shortcomings. I pray for Your grace and forgiveness in the areas where I fall short. Empower me to walk in obedience to Your commands and to live a life that honors You.

Lord, help me to seek You not only for my personal needs but also for the needs of others. Make me an instrument of Your peace, love, and compassion in this world.

Thank You for the privilege of seeking You each day. May this daily communion with You transform my heart and mind, making me more like Christ and reflecting Your glory to those around me.

I offer this prayer in the name of Jesus Christ, my Savior and Redeemer. 

Morning Warfare Prayer for Students

As the morning light breaks through the darkness, I come before You, seeking Your protection and strength for the day ahead.

I recognize that as a student, I am engaged in a spiritual battle, and I need Your help to stand firm against the schemes of the enemy.

Lord, I put on the helmet of salvation, guarding my mind with the assurance of Your eternal love and the victory You have secured for me through Jesus Christ.

I pray for protection over my mind and heart. Guard me against distractions, anxieties, and negative thoughts that may hinder my progress. Fill my mind with focus, diligence, and creativity.

As I go about my day, I commit to being a vessel of Your love and grace. Let my actions and words reflect Your character, and may I be a positive influence on those around me.

I declare that I am more than a conqueror through Christ Jesus, and I will walk in victory as I trust in You.

I offer this prayer in the mighty name of Jesus. 

Morning Prayer for College Students

“ Father, please pour out Your blessings upon our whole school community so that everyone grows in the knowledge of Your truth, love, wisdom and peace.   In Jesus name we pray.   Amen. “

As the morning sun rises, I come before You with a heart filled with gratitude and anticipation for the new day. I thank You for the opportunity to pursue higher education as a college student, and I ask for Your guidance and blessings throughout this academic journey.

I pray for strength and perseverance in the face of challenges and setbacks. When I encounter difficulties, remind me that I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.

Above all, Lord, I pray for spiritual growth during my college years. Deepen my relationship with You, and may I continually seek Your will and guidance in every decision I make.

I commit to being a positive influence on campus, reflecting Your love and grace to those around me. Use me as a vessel of Your light, showing kindness, compassion, and understanding to others.

I offer this prayer in the name of Jesus, my Savior and Redeemer. 

Morning Prayer In school to Start the Day

As the morning light fills the sky, I come before You to start this day in Your presence. I thank You for the gift of a new day and the opportunities it brings. I surrender this day into Your hands and ask for Your guidance and blessings in all that I do.

Lord, I invite You to be the center of my day. I seek Your wisdom and discernment as I make decisions and face challenges. Help me to align my thoughts and actions with Your will and to walk in Your ways.

Thank You, Lord, for the privilege of starting this day in prayer. May Your presence be with me, guiding and shaping my thoughts, words, and actions throughout this day.

I offer this prayer in the name of Jesus, who taught us to seek You first in all things. 

For God’s Grace Daily

As the morning breaks and a new day unfolds, I come before You to seek Your abundant grace and mercy that I need daily. I thank You for Your unending love and faithfulness, which sustain me through every moment of life.

Lord, I am humbled by Your grace, for I know that I am undeserving of Your unfailing kindness. Yet, Your grace abounds, covering my shortcomings and offering me forgiveness for my sins.

Each day, I depend on Your grace to face the challenges that come my way. I ask for Your wisdom and discernment to navigate through the complexities of life, knowing that I can rely on Your guidance.

Lord, I seek Your grace to be poured out on my relationships with others. May I extend the same love and compassion that You have shown me to those around me. Help me to be patient, forgiving, and understanding, just as You are with me.

I offer this prayer in the name of Jesus, who is the embodiment of Your grace and truth. 

In conclusion, the morning prayer in school holds great significance as it sets a positive tone for the day ahead. It is a moment of collective reflection, gratitude, and seeking divine guidance. 

The morning prayer fosters a sense of unity, instills moral values, and encourages students to start their day with a peaceful and focused mindset. By bringing students together in prayer, it creates a conducive atmosphere for learning and personal growth. 

The morning prayer in school serves as a powerful reminder of the importance of faith and spirituality in education, nurturing both the academic and spiritual development of students.

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Student Opinion

Does Prayer Have Any Place in Public Schools?

The Supreme Court heard arguments about a football coach who was told to stop offering prayers publicly after games. What impact will the case have on the role of religion in schools?

By Jeremy Engle

In the landmark case Engel v. Vitale in 1962, the Supreme Court ruled that school-sponsored prayer in public schools violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment — breaching the constitutional wall of separation between church and state.

Do you think prayer has any place in public, state-financed schools? Why or why not?

On April 25, the Supreme Court heard arguments in the case of Joseph Kennedy, a football coach at a public high school in Washington State, who was told by the school board that he could no longer offer prayers on the 50-yard line after games.

In “ Coach’s Prayers Prompt Supreme Court Test of Religious Freedom ,” published before the arguments before the Supreme Court, Adam Liptak writes about the case and its potential implications for society:

BREMERTON, Wash. — Joseph Kennedy, who used to be an assistant coach for a high school football team near Seattle, pointed to the spot on the 50-yard line where he would take a knee and offer prayers after games. He was wearing a Bremerton Knights jacket and squinting in the drizzling morning rain, and he repeated a promise he had made to God when he became a coach. “I will give you the glory after every game, win or lose,” he said, adding that the setting mattered: “It just made sense to do it on the field of battle.” Coaching was his calling, he said. But after the school board in Bremerton, Wash., told him to stop mixing football and faith on the field, he left the job and sued, with lower courts rejecting his argument that the board had violated his First Amendment rights. The Supreme Court will hear arguments in the case on Monday, and there is good reason to think that its newly expanded conservative majority will not only rule in Mr. Kennedy’s favor but also make a major statement about the role religion may play in public life. The court’s decision, expected by June, could revise earlier understandings about when prayer is permitted in public schools, the rights of government employees and what counts as pressuring students to participate in religious activities. The two sides offer starkly different accounts of what happened and what is at stake. To hear Mr. Kennedy tell it, he sought only to offer a brief, silent and solitary prayer little different from saying grace before a meal in the school cafeteria. From the school board’s perspective, the public nature of his prayers and his stature as a leader and role model meant that students felt forced to participate, whatever their religion and whether they wanted to or not. The community in Bremerton appeared to be largely sympathetic to Mr. Kennedy, who is gregarious, playful and popular. But the school board’s Supreme Court brief suggested that some residents opposed to prayer on the football field may have hesitated to speak out given the strong feelings the issue has produced. “District administrators received threats and hate mail,” the brief said. “Strangers confronted and screamed obscenities at the head coach, who feared for his safety.” Rachel Laser, the president of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, which represents the school board, said, “What we’re focused on is the religious freedom of students.” “Going to the 50-yard line directly after the game when you’re the coach, with the students assuming they’re supposed to gather with the coach, and praying at that time puts pressure on kids to join,” she said.

Mr. Liptak provides some constitutional background on prayer in public school:

Over the last 60 years, the Supreme Court has rejected prayer in public schools, at least when it was officially required or part of a formal ceremony like a high school graduation. As recently as 2000, the court ruled that organized prayers led by students at high school football games violated the First Amendment’s prohibition of government establishment of religion. “The delivery of a pregame prayer has the improper effect of coercing those present to participate in an act of religious worship,” Justice John Paul Stevens wrote for the majority. Mr. Kennedy’s lawyers said those school prayer precedents were not relevant because they involved government speech. Rather, they said, the core question in Mr. Kennedy’s case is whether government employees give up their rights to free speech and the free exercise of religion at the workplace. The school district, its lawyers responded, was entitled to require Mr. Kennedy to stop praying as he had. “Regardless of whether Kennedy’s very public speech was official, the district could regulate it,” the school district’s Supreme Court brief said. “His prayer practice wrested control from the district over the district’s own events, interfered with students’ religious freedom and subjected the district to substantial litigation risks.” The sweep of the Supreme Court’s decision may turn on which side’s characterization of the facts it accepts. But even a modest ruling in Mr. Kennedy’s favor, saying that his private, solitary prayer was protected even if it took place in public and at least tacitly invited students to participate, would represent a sea change in the court’s approach to the role religion may play in public schools.

Students, read the entire article , then tell us:

Does prayer have any place in school? Why or why not? How do you think we should navigate the tension between individuals’ First Amendment right to freely exercise their religious beliefs and the separation between church and state? How do your own religious views shape your opinion?

What is your reaction to the case of Kennedy v. Bremerton School District , which is now before the Supreme Court? What do you see as the most important facts in the case?

Do you think the Bremerton School District violated Mr. Kennedy’s First Amendment rights? Or was the board entitled to require that its employees refrain from public prayer if students were likely to feel coerced into participating? Which arguments presented in the article did you find most persuasive? Which less so? Why?

How would you rule if you were one of the nine Supreme Court justices? How do you think they will rule? What impact do you think the ruling will have on the role of religion in public schools?

What questions do you have about the case or the constitutional law around it?

For more information and resources on the question of prayer in public schools, see ProCon.org , the mission of which is to “promote civility, critical thinking, education and informed citizenship by presenting the pro and con arguments to debatable issues in a straightforward, nonpartisan, freely accessible way.”

Want more writing prompts? You can find all of our questions in our Student Opinion column . Teachers, check out this guide to learn how you can incorporate them into your classroom.

Students 13 and older in the United States and Britain, and 16 and older elsewhere, are invited to comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff, but please keep in mind that once your comment is accepted, it will be made public.

Jeremy Engle joined The Learning Network as a staff editor in 2018 after spending more than 20 years as a classroom humanities and documentary-making teacher, professional developer and curriculum designer working with students and teachers across the country. More about Jeremy Engle

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Religion in the Public Schools

More than 55 years after the Supreme Court issued its landmark ruling striking down school-sponsored prayer, Americans continue to fight over the place of religion in public schools. Questions about religion in the classroom no longer make quite as many headlines as they once did, but the issue remains an important battleground in the broader conflict over religion’s role in public life.

Some Americans are troubled by what they see as an effort on the part of federal courts and civil liberties advocates to exclude God and religious sentiment from public schools. Such an effort, these Americans believe, infringes on the First Amendment right to free exercise of religion.

Many civil libertarians and others, meanwhile, voice concern that conservative Christians and others are trying to impose their values on students. Federal courts, they point out, consistently have interpreted the First Amendment’s prohibition on the establishment of religion to forbid state sponsorship of prayer and most other religious activities in public schools.

This debate centers on public schools; very few people are arguing that religious doctrine cannot be taught at private schools or that teachers at such schools cannot lead students in prayer. And even in public institutions, there is little debate about the right of individual students, teachers and other school employees to practice their religion – by, say, praying before lunch or wearing religious clothing or symbols.

Moreover, as a 2019 survey of American teens shows some forms of religious expression are relatively common in public schools. For instance, about four-in-ten public school students say they routinely see other students praying before sporting events, according to the survey. And about half of U.S. teens in public schools (53%) say they often or sometimes see other students wearing jewelry or clothing with religious symbols.

About this report

This analysis, updated on Oct. 3, 2019, was originally published in 2007 as part of a larger series that explored different aspects of the complex and fluid relationship between government and religion. This report includes sections on school prayer, the pledge of allegiance, religion in school curricula, and the religious liberty rights of students and teachers.

The report does not  address questions of government funding for religious schools (that is, school vouchers and tax credits) because the schools in question are largely private, not public. For a discussion of vouchers and similar issues, see “ Shifting Boundaries: The Establishment Clause and Government Funding of Religious Schools and Other Faith-Based Organizations .” Because that analysis was published in 2009 and has not been updated, it does not include a discussion of more recent Supreme Court voucher rulings or upcoming cases .

Conflicts over religion in school are hardly new. In the 19th century, Protestants and Catholics frequently fought over Bible reading and prayer in public schools. The disputes then were over which Bible and which prayers were appropriate to use in the classroom. Some Catholics were troubled that the schools’ reading materials included the King James version of the Bible, which was favored by Protestants. In 1844, fighting broke out between Protestants and Catholics in Philadelphia; a number of people died in the violence and several Catholic churches were burned. Similar conflicts erupted during the 1850s in Boston and other parts of New England. In the early 20th century, liberal Protestants and their secular allies battled religious conservatives over whether students in biology classes should be taught Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution.

The Pillars of Church-State Law

The Legal Status of Religious Organizations in Civil Lawsuits March 2011 Are legal disputes involving churches and other religious institutions constitutionally different from those involving their secular counterparts, and if so, how?

Government Funding of Faith-Based Organizations May 2009 The debate over the meaning of the Establishment Clause.

Free Exercise and the Legislative and Executive Branches October 2008 A look at state and federal statutes that protect religious freedom.

Free Exercise and the Courts October 2007 The courts have grappled with the meaning of the Free Exercise Clause.

Religious Displays and the Courts June 2007 Government displays of religious symbols have sparked fierce battles.

The Supreme Court stepped into those controversies when it ruled, in  Cantwell v. Connecticut  (1940) and  Everson v. Board of Education of Ewing Township  (1947), that the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause and Free Exercise Clause applied to the states. The two clauses say, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Before those two court decisions, courts had applied the religion clauses only to actions of the federal government.

Soon after the Everson decision, the Supreme Court began specifically applying the religion clauses to activities in public schools. In its first such case ,  McCollum v. Board of Education  (1948), the high court invalidated the practice of having religious instructors from different denominations enter public schools to offer religious lessons during the school day to students whose parents requested them. A key factor in the court’s decision was that the lessons took place in the schools. Four years later, in  Zorach v. Clauson , the court upheld an arrangement by which public schools excused students during the school day so they could attend religious classes away from school property. (The new Pew Research Center survey finds that one-in-ten religiously affiliated teens in public school leave the school for religious activities.)

Beginning in the 1960s, the court handed religious conservatives a series of major defeats. It began with the landmark 1962 ruling, Engel v. Vitale , that school-sponsored prayer – even nonsectarian prayer – violated the Establishment Clause. Since then, the Supreme Court has pushed forward, from banning organized Bible reading for religious and moral instruction in 1963 to prohibiting school-sponsored prayers at high school football games in 2000. (The new survey finds that 8% of teens in public school have ever seen a teacher lead the class in prayer, and the same share have ever had a teacher read to the class from the Bible as an example of literature.)

In these and other decisions, the court has repeatedly stressed that the Constitution prohibits public schools from indoctrinating children in religion. But it is not always easy to determine exactly what constitutes indoctrination or school sponsorship of religious activities. For example, can a class on the Bible as literature be taught without a bias for or against the idea that the Bible is religious truth? Can students be compelled to participate in a Christmas-themed music program? Sometimes students themselves, rather than teachers, administrators or coaches, bring faith into school activities. For instance, when a student invokes gratitude to God in a valedictory address, or a high school football player offers a prayer in a huddle, is the school legally responsible for their religious expression?

The issues are complicated by other constitutional guarantees. For instance, the First Amendment also protects freedom of speech and freedom of association. Religious groups have cited those guarantees in support of student religious speech and in efforts to obtain school sponsorship and resources for student religious clubs.

The right of a student or student club to engage in religious speech or activities on school property may, however, conflict with other protections, such as the right of students to avoid harassment. In one case, for example, a federal appeals court approved a high school’s decision to prohibit a student from wearing a T-shirt containing a biblical passage condemning homosexuality. Because the student had graduated by the time the Supreme Court granted his appeal, the Supreme Court ordered the lower court to vacate its ruling and dismiss the case.

In another instance of conflict, some student religious groups want the right to exclude students who do not share the groups’ beliefs, specifically on questions of sexuality. For example, the Christian Legal Society (CLS), which has chapters in many law schools, requires those who serve in leadership positions to agree to a statement that renounces “unbiblical behaviors,” such as engaging in sexual relationships outside of heterosexual marriage. CLS sued a number of law schools after they denied the group official recognition because this leadership policy violated the schools’ nondiscrimination policies. In one of these cases, the Supreme Court ruled against CLS, stating that these nondiscrimination policies were constitutional so long as they were viewpoint neutral and fairly applied to all groups seeking recognition on campus.

As these more recent controversies show, public schools remain a battlefield where the religious interests of parents, students, administrators and teachers often clash.  The conflicts affect many aspects of public education, including classroom curricula, high school football games, student clubs, graduation ceremonies.

Prayer and the Pledge

School prayer.

The most enduring and controversial issue related to school-sponsored religious activities is classroom prayer. In  Engel v. Vitale  (1962), the Supreme Court held that the Establishment Clause prohibited the recitation of a school-sponsored prayer in public schools. Engel involved a simple and seemingly nonsectarian prayer composed especially for use in New York’s public schools. In banning the prayer exercise entirely, the court did not rest its opinion on the grounds that unwilling students were coerced to pray; that would come much later. Rather, the court emphasized what it saw as the wrongs of having the government create and sponsor a religious activity.

The following year, the high court extended the principle outlined in  Engel  to a program of daily Bible reading. In  Abington School District v. Schempp , the court ruled broadly that school sponsorship of religious exercises violates the Constitution. Schempp became the source of the enduring constitutional doctrine that all government action must have a predominantly secular purpose – a requirement that, according to the court, the Bible-reading exercise clearly could not satisfy. By insisting that religious expression be excluded from the formal curriculum, the Supreme Court was assuring parents that public schools would be officially secular and would not compete with parents in their children’s religious upbringing.

With Engel and Schempp, the court outlined the constitutional standard for prohibiting school-sponsored religious expression, a doctrine the court has firmly maintained. In  Stone v. Graham  (1980), for instance, it found unconstitutional a Kentucky law requiring all public schools to post a copy of the Ten Commandments. And in  Wallace v. Jaffree  (1985), it overturned an Alabama law requiring public schools to set aside a moment each day for silent prayer or meditation. However, in a concurrent opinion in Wallace, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor  suggested that a moment of silence requirement might pass constitutional muster if it had a “secular purpose.” And in a subsequent 2009 case, Croft v. Perry , the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit upheld a Texas law mandating a moment of silence because it determined that, in passing the law, the state legislature had sufficiently articulated a secular purpose.

But while courts have given states some latitude in crafting moment of silence statutes, they have shown much less deference to laws or policies that involve actual prayer. In 2000, for instance, the Supreme Court ruled in  Santa Fe Independent School District v. Doe  that schools may not sponsor student-recited prayer at high school football games.

More sweeping in its consequences is  Lee v. Weisman  (1992), which invalidated a school-sponsored prayer led by an invited clergyman at a public school commencement in Providence, Rhode Island. The court’s 5-4 decision rested explicitly on the argument that graduating students were being forced to participate in a religious ceremony. The case effectively outlawed a practice that was customary in many communities across the country, thus fueling the conservative critique that the Supreme Court was inhospitable to public expressions of faith.

So far, lower appellate courts have not extended the principles of the school prayer decisions to university commencements (Chaudhuri v. Tennessee, 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, 1997; Tanford v. Brand, 7th Circuit, 1997). The 4th Circuit, however, found unconstitutional the practice of daily prayer at supper at the Virginia Military Institute. In that case, Mellen v. Bunting (2003), the appellate court reasoned that VMI’s military-like environment tended to coerce participation by cadets. The decision was similar to an earlier ruling by the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, which found unconstitutional a policy of the U.S. service academies that all cadets and midshipmen attend Protestant, Catholic or Jewish chapel services on Sunday (Anderson v. Laird, 1972). For the court, the key element was the service academies’ coercion of students to attend the religious activity.

Most recently, in 2019, the Supreme Court declined to review a 9th Circuit Court of Appeals decision upholding the firing of a football coach at a public high school for praying on the field with his players after games. However, in a statement accompanying the denial of review, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. (joined by fellow conservative justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh) indicated the high court would be open to reviewing other cases involving similar issues. Alito wrote that the court denied review in this case due to “important unresolved factual questions,” and that “the 9th Circuit’s understanding of free speech rights of public school teachers is troubling and may justify review in the future.”

The Pledge of Allegiance

In 1954, Congress revised the Pledge of Allegiance to refer to the nation as “under God,” a phrase that has since been recited by generations of schoolchildren. In 2000, Michael Newdow filed suit challenging the phrase on behalf of his daughter, a public school student in California. Newdow argued that the words “under God” violated the Establishment Clause because they transformed the pledge into a religious exercise.

The case,  Elk Grove Unified School District v. Newdow , reached the Supreme Court in 2004, but the justices did not ultimately decide whether the phrase was acceptable. Instead, the court ruled that Newdow lacked standing to bring the suit because he did not have legal custody of his daughter. In concurring opinions, however, four justices expressed the view that the Constitution permitted recitation of the pledge – with the phrase “under God” – in public schools.

While the issue never reached the Supreme Court again, it continued to be litigated in the lower courts. In Myers v. Loudoun County Public Schools (2005), the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld recitation of the pledge in Virginia, but a U.S. district court in California ruled the other way in another suit involving Michael Newdow and other parents. However, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 2010 reversed the district court decision, ruling that the recitation of the pledge did not constitute an establishment of religion.

School officials and student speech

The courts have drawn a sharp distinction between officially sponsored religious speech, such as a benediction by an invited clergyman at a commencement ceremony, and private religious speech by students. The Supreme Court made clear in Lee v. Weisman (1992) that a clergyman’s benediction at a public school event would violate the separation of church and state. Judges usually reach that same conclusion when school officials cooperate with students to produce student-delivered religious messages. But federal courts are more divided in cases involving students acting on their own to include a religious sentiment or prayer at a school commencement or a similar activity.

Some courts, particularly in the South, have upheld the constitutionality of student-initiated religious speech, emphasizing the private origins of this kind of religious expression. As long as school officials did not encourage or explicitly approve the contents, those courts have upheld religious content in student commencement speeches.

In Adler v. Duval County School Board (1996), for example, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals approved a system at a Florida high school in which the senior class, acting independently of school officials, selected a class member to deliver a commencement address. School officials neither influenced the choice of speaker nor screened the speech. Under those circumstances, the appeals court ruled that the school was not responsible for the religious content of the address.

Other courts, however, have invalidated school policies that permit student speakers to include religious sentiments in graduation addresses. One leading case is ACLU v. Black Horse Pike Regional Board of Education (1996), in which the senior class of a New Jersey public high school selected the student speaker by a vote without knowing in advance the contents of the student’s remarks. The 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals nevertheless ruled that the high school could not permit religious content in the commencement speech. The court reasoned that students attending the graduation ceremony were as coerced to acquiesce in a student-led prayer as they would be if the prayer were offered by a member of the clergy, the practice forbidden by Weisman in 1992. (Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., who was then a member of the appeals court, joined a dissenting opinion in the case, arguing that the graduating students’ rights to religious and expressive freedom should prevail over the Establishment Clause concerns.)

Similarly, in Bannon v. School District of Palm Beach County (2004), the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Florida school officials were right to order the removal of student-created religious messages and symbols from a school beautification project. The court reasoned that the project was not intended as a forum for the expression of students’ private views but rather as a school activity for which school officials would be held responsible.

Religion in the curriculum

The Supreme Court’s decisions about officially sponsored religious expression in schools consistently draw a distinction between religious activities such as worship or Bible reading, which are designed to inculcate religious sentiments and values, and “teaching about religion,” which is both constitutionally permissible and educationally appropriate. On several occasions, members of the court have suggested that public schools may teach “the Bible as literature,” include lessons about the role of religion and religious institutions in history or offer courses on comparative religion.

Creationism and evolution

Courts have long grappled with attempts by school boards and other official bodies to change the curriculum in ways that directly promote or denigrate a particular religious tradition. Best known among these curriculum disputes are those involving the conflict between proponents and opponents of Darwin’s theory of evolution , which explains the origin of species through evolution by means of natural selection. Opponents favor teaching some form of creationism, the idea that life came about as described in the biblical book of Genesis or evolved under the guidance of a supreme being. A recent alternative to Darwinism, intelligent design, asserts that life is too complex to have arisen without divine intervention.

The Supreme Court entered the evolution debate in 1968, when it ruled, in  Epperson v. Arkansas , that Arkansas could not eliminate from the high school biology curriculum the teaching of “the theory that mankind descended from a lower order of animals.” Arkansas’ exclusion of that aspect of evolutionary theory, the court reasoned, was based on a preference for the account of creation in the book of Genesis and thus violated the state’s constitutional obligation of religious neutrality.

Almost 20 years later, in  Edwards v. Aguillard  (1987), the Supreme Court struck down a Louisiana law that required “balanced treatment” of evolution science and “creation science,” so that any biology teacher who taught one also had to teach the other. The court said the law’s purpose was to single out a particular religious belief – in this case, biblical creationism – and promote it as an alternative to accepted scientific theory. The court also pointed to evidence that the legislation’s sponsor hoped that the balanced treatment requirement would lead science teachers to abandon the teaching of evolution.

Lower courts consistently have followed the lead of Epperson and Edwards. As a result, school boards have lost virtually every fight over curriculum changes designed to challenge evolution, including disclaimers in biology textbooks. One of the most recent and notable of these cases, Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District (2005), involved a challenge to a Pennsylvania school district’s policy of informing high school science students about intelligent design as an alternative to evolution. After lengthy testimony from both proponents and opponents of intelligent design, a federal district court in Pennsylvania concluded that the policy violates the Establishment Clause because intelligent design is a religious, rather than scientific, theory.

Kitzmiller may have been the last major evolution case to make national headlines, but the debate over how to teach about the origins and development of life in public schools has continued in state legislatures, boards of education and other public bodies. In 2019, for instance, policies that could affect the way evolution is taught in public school (often by limiting discussion of “controversial issues”) were introduced and in some cases debated in several states, including Arizona, Florida, Maine, Oklahoma, South Dakota and Virginia.

Study of the Bible

Courts have also expended substantial time and energy considering public school programs that involve Bible study. Although the Supreme Court has occasionally referred to the permissibility of teaching the Bible as literature, some school districts have instituted Bible study programs that courts have found unconstitutional. Frequently, judges have concluded that these courses are thinly disguised efforts to teach a particular understanding of the New Testament.

In a number of these cases, school districts have brought in outside groups to run the Bible study program. The groups, in turn, hired their own teachers, in some cases Bible college students or members of the clergy who did not meet state accreditation standards.

Such Bible study programs have generally been held unconstitutional because, the courts conclude, they teach the Bible as religious truth or are designed to inculcate particular religious sentiments. For a public school class to study the Bible without violating constitutional limits, the class would have to include critical rather than devotional readings and allow open inquiry into the history and content of biblical passages.

Holiday programs

Christmas-themed music programs also have raised constitutional concerns. For a holiday music program to be constitutionally sound, the courts maintain, school officials must ensure the predominance of secular considerations, such as the program’s educational value or the musical qualities of the pieces. The schools also must be sensitive to the possibility that some students will feel coerced to participate in the program (Bauchman v. West High School, 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, 1997; Doe v. Duncanville Independent School District, 5th Circuit, 1995). Moreover, the courts have said, no student should be forced to sing or play music that offends their religious sensibilities. Therefore, schools must allow students the option not to participate.

Multiculturalism

Not all the cases involving religion in the curriculum concern the promotion of the beliefs of the majority. Indeed, challenges have come from Christian groups arguing that school policies discriminate against Christianity by promoting cultural pluralism.

In one example, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals considered a New York City Department of Education policy regulating the types of symbols displayed during the holiday seasons of various religions. The department allows the display of a menorah as a symbol for Hanukkah and a star and crescent to evoke Ramadan but permits the display of only secular symbols of Christmas, such as a Christmas tree; it explicitly forbids the display of a Christmas nativity scene in public schools.

Upholding the city’s policy, the Court of Appeals reasoned in Skoros v. Klein (2006) that city officials intended to promote cultural pluralism in the highly diverse setting of the New York City public schools. The court concluded that a “reasonable observer” would understand that the star and crescent combination and the menorah had secular as well as religious meanings. The judicial panel ruled that the policy, therefore, did not promote Judaism or Islam and did not denigrate Christianity.

In another high-profile case, Citizens for a Responsible Curriculum v. Montgomery County Public Schools (2005), a Maryland citizens’ group successfully challenged a health education curriculum that included discussion of sexual orientation. Ordinarily, opponents of homosexuality could not confidently cite the Establishment Clause as the basis for a complaint, because the curriculum typically would not advance a particular religious perspective. However, the Montgomery County curriculum included materials in teacher guides that disparaged some religious teachings on homosexuality as theologically flawed and contrasted those teachings with what the guide portrayed as the more acceptable and tolerant views of some other faiths. The district court concluded that the curriculum had both the purpose and effect of advancing certain faiths while denigrating the beliefs of others. The county rewrote these materials to exclude any reference to the views of particular faiths, making them more difficult to challenge successfully in court because the lessons did not condemn or praise any faith tradition.

Rights in and out of the classroom

At the time of its school prayer decisions in the early 1960s, the Supreme Court had never ruled on whether students have the right of free speech inside public schools. By the end of that decade, however, the court began to consider the question. And the results have made the rules for religious expression far more complex.

Rights of students

The leading Supreme Court decision on freedom of student speech is  Tinker v. Des Moines School District  (1969), , which upheld the right of students to wear armbands protesting the Vietnam War. The court ruled that school authorities may not suppress expression by students unless the expression significantly disrupts school discipline or invades the rights of others.

This endorsement of students’ freedom of speech did not entirely clarify things for school officials trying to determine students’ rights. Tinker supported student expression, but it did not attempt to reconcile that right of expression with the Supreme Court’s earlier decisions forbidding student participation in school-sponsored prayer and Bible reading. Some school officials responded to the mix of student liberties and restraints by forbidding certain forms of student-initiated religious expression such as the saying of grace before lunch in the school cafeteria, student-sponsored gatherings for prayer at designated spots on school property, or student proselytizing aimed at other students.

After years of uncertainty about these matters, several interest groups devoted to religious freedom and civil liberties drafted a set of guidelines, “Religious Expression in Public Schools,” which the U.S. Department of Education sent to every public school superintendent in 1995. The department revised the guidelines in 2003, placing somewhat greater emphasis on the rights of students to speak or associate for religious purposes. The guidelines highlight these four general principles:

• Students, acting on their own, have the same right to engage in religious activity and discussion as they do to engage in comparable secular activities.
• Students may offer a prayer or blessing before meals in school or assemble on school grounds for religious purposes to the same extent as other students who wish to express their personal views or assemble with others. (The new survey finds that 26% of religiously affiliated teens in public school say they often or sometimes pray before eating lunch.)
• Students may not engage in religious harassment of others or compel other students to participate in religious expression, and schools may control aggressive and unwanted proselytizing.
• Schools may neither favor nor disfavor students or groups on the basis of their religious identities.

A case decided by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals underscores the difficulties that school officials still can face when students exercise their right to religious expression on school property. In this case, gay and lesbian students in a California high school organized a Day of Silence, in which students promoting tolerance of differences in sexual orientation refrained from speaking in school. The following day, Tyler Harper, a student at the school, wore a T-shirt that on the front read, “Be Ashamed, Our School Has Embraced What God Has Condemned,” and on the back, “Homosexuality Is Shameful, Romans 1:27.” School officials asked him to remove the shirt and took him out of class while they attempted to persuade him to do so.

The Court of Appeals, in Harper v. Poway Unified School District (2006), rejected Harper’s claim that the school officials violated his First Amendment rights. Judge Stephen Reinhardt, writing for a 2- 1 majority and citing Tinker, argued that students’ constitutional rights may be limited to prevent harming the rights of other students. He concluded that the T-shirt could be seen as violating school policies against harassment based on sexual orientation.

Writing in dissent, Judge Alex Kozinski asserted that the school’s sexual harassment policy was far too vague and sweeping to support a restriction on all anti-gay speech. He also argued that the school district had unlawfully discriminated against Harper’s freedom of speech. By permitting the Gay and Lesbian Alliance to conduct the Day of Silence, Kozinski said, the district was choosing sides on a controversial social issue and stifling religiously motivated speech on one side of the issue.

Harper petitioned the Supreme Court to review the appeals court decision. But Harper graduated from high school, and the case took a different turn. The Supreme Court, in early 2007, ordered the lower court to vacate its ruling and dismiss the case on the grounds that it had become moot.

Harper highlighted a tension – one that may yet recur – between the rights of students to engage in religious expression and the rights of other students to be educated in a non-hostile environment. The Supreme Court eventually may clarify school officials’ power to suppress speech as a means of protecting the rights of other students. For now, cases like Harper illustrate the difficulties for school officials in regulating student expression.

Rights of parents

Parents sometimes complain that secular practices at school inhibit their right to direct the religious upbringing of their children. These complaints typically rest on both the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment and the 14th Amendment’s Due Process Clause, which forbids the state to deprive any person of “life, liberty or property without due process of law.” The Supreme Court has interpreted them as protecting the right of parents to shape and control the education of their children. When they object to certain school practices, the parents often seek permission for their children to skip the offending lesson or class – to opt out – rather than try to end the practice schoolwide.

The first decision by the Supreme Court on parents’ rights to control their children’s education came in  Pierce v. Society of Sisters  (1925), which guarantees to parents the right to enroll their children in private rather than public schools, whether the private schools are religious or secular. In  West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette  (1943), the court upheld the right of public school students who were Jehovah’s Witnesses to refuse to salute the American flag. The students said the flag represented a graven image and that their religion forbade them from recognizing it. The court’s decision rested on the right of all students, not just those who are religiously motivated, to resist compulsory recitation of official orthodoxy, political or otherwise.

Of all the Supreme Court rulings supporting religious opt-outs, perhaps the most significant came in  Wisconsin v. Yoder  (1972), which upheld the right of members of the Old Order Amish to withdraw their children from formal education at the age of 14. The court determined that a state law requiring children to attend school until the age of 16 burdened the free exercise of their families’ religion. The Amish community had a well-established record as hardworking and law-abiding, the court noted, and Amish teens would receive home-based training. The worldly influences present in the school experience of teenagers, the court said, would undercut the continuity of agrarian life in the Amish community.

In later decisions, lower courts recognized religious opt-outs in other relatively narrow circumstances. Parents successfully cited religious grounds to win the right to remove their children from otherwise compulsory military training (Spence v. Bailey, 1972) and from a coeducational physical education class in which students had to dress in “immodest apparel” (Moody v. Cronin, 1979). In Menora v. Illinois High School Association (1982), the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the Illinois High School Association was constitutionally obliged to accommodate Orthodox Jewish basketball players who wanted to wear a head covering, despite an association rule forbidding headgear. The Menora case involves a narrow exception from the dress code, rather than a broader right to opt out of a curriculum requirement.

A great many school districts, meanwhile, have recognized the force of parents’ religious or moral concerns on issues of sexuality and reproduction and have voluntarily provided opt-outs from classes devoted to those topics. Under these opt-out programs, parents do not have to explain their objection, religious or otherwise, to participation by their children. On other occasions, however, parental claims that the Constitution entitles them to remove their children from part or all of a public school curriculum have fared rather poorly.

The issue of home schooling is a good example. Before state legislatures passed laws allowing home schooling, parents seeking to educate their children at home were often unsuccessful in the courts. Many judges distinguished these home schooling cases from Yoder on the grounds that Yoder involved teenagers rather than young children. The judges also noted that Yoder was concerned with the survival of an entire religious community – the Old Order Amish – rather than the impact of education on a single family. Indeed, in virtually all the cases decided over the past 25 years, courts have found that the challenged curriculum requirement did not unconstitutionally burden parents’ religious choices.

The most famous of the cases is Mozert v. Hawkins County Board of Education (1987), in which a group of Tennessee parents complained that references to mental telepathy, evolution, secular humanism, feminism, pacifism and magic in a series of books in the reading curriculum offended the families’ Christian beliefs. The school board originally allowed children to choose alternative reading materials but then eliminated that option.

The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in the county’s favor on the grounds that students were not being asked to do anything in conflict with their religious obligations. Furthermore, the court said, the school board had a strong interest in exposing children to a variety of ideas and images and in using a uniform series of books for all children. Because the books did not explicitly adopt or denigrate particular religious beliefs, the court concluded, the parents could insist neither on the removal of the books from the schools nor on their children opting out.

The 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reached a similar conclusion in a case involving a public high school in Massachusetts that held a mandatory assembly devoted to AIDS and sex education. In that case, Brown v. Hot, Sexy, and Safer Productions (1995), the court rejected a complaint brought by parents who alleged that exposure to sexually explicit material infringed on their rights to religious freedom and control of the upbringing of their children. The court concluded that this one-time exposure to the material would not substantially burden the parents’ freedom to rear their children and that the school authorities had strong reasons to inform high school students about “safe sex.”

More recently, parents and students have, on religious liberty and other grounds, sued school districts that accommodate transgender students by allowing them to use bathroom and locker facilities that match their current gender identity rather than their sex at birth. Some parents and students argue that the new arrangements violate their religious liberty rights because the school policy forces them to accommodate a set of moral and religious beliefs they disagree with.

So far, however, federal courts have sided with school districts that have accommodated transgender students. For instance, in Parents for Privacy v. Dallas School District No. 2, a federal district court dismissed a suit against Oregon’s Dallas school district, stating that accommodating transgender students does not impinge on the religious rights of other students or their parents. And in 2019, the Supreme Court declined to review Doe v. Boyertown Area School District, letting stand a 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling upholding a Pennsylvania school district’s policy to accommodate transgender students.

Rights of teachers and administrators

Without question, public school employees retain their rights to free exercise of religion. When off duty, school employees are free to engage in worship, proselytizing or any other lawful faith-based activity. When they are acting as representatives of a public school system, however, courts have said their rights are constrained by the Establishment Clause.

This limitation on religious expression raises difficult questions. The first is what limits school systems may impose on the ordinary and incidental expression of religious identity by teachers in the classroom. Most school systems permit teachers to wear religious clothing or jewelry. Similarly, teachers may disclose their religious identity; for instance, they need not refuse to answer when a student asks, “Do you celebrate Christmas or Hanukkah?” or “Did I see you at the Islamic center yesterday morning?”

At times, however, teachers act in an uninvited and overtly religious manner toward students and are asked by school administrators to refrain. When those requests have led to litigation, administrators invariably have prevailed on the grounds that they are obliged (for constitutional and pedagogical reasons) to be sensitive to a teacher’s coercive potential.

In Bishop v. Aronov (1991), for example, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a set of restrictions imposed by the University of Alabama on a professor of exercise physiology. Professor Phillip Bishop had been speaking regularly to his class about the role of his Christian beliefs in his work and had scheduled an optional class in which he offered a “Christian perspective” on human physiology. The court recognized the university’s general authority to control the way in which instruction took place, noting that Bishop’s academic freedom was not jeopardized since he retained the right to express his religious views in his published writing and elsewhere.

In Roberts v. Madigan (1990), a federal district court similarly upheld the authority of a public school principal in Colorado to order a fifth-grade teacher to take down a religious poster from the classroom wall and to remove books titled “The Bible in Pictures” and “The Life of Jesus” from the classroom library. The court also backed the principal’s order that the teacher remove the Bible from his desktop and refrain from silently reading the Bible during instructional time. The court emphasized that school principals need such authority to prevent potential violations of the Establishment Clause and to protect students against a religiously coercive atmosphere.

That much is clear. What is less clear is how public school systems should draw the line between teachers’ official duties and their own time. That was the key question in Wigg v. Sioux Falls School District (8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, 2004), in which a teacher sued the South Dakota school district for refusing to allow her to serve as an instructor in the Good News Club (an evangelical Christian group) that met after school hours at various public elementary schools in the district.

A federal district court ruled that the teacher, Barbara Wigg, should be free to participate in the club but said the school district could insist that the teacher not participate at the school where she was employed. The appellate court affirmed the decision but went further in protecting the teacher’s rights, concluding that the school district could not exclude her from the program at her own school. The court reasoned that once the school day ended, Wigg became a private citizen, leaving her free to be a Good News Club instructor at any school, including the one where she worked. The court ruled that no reasonable observer would perceive Wigg’s after-school role as being carried out on behalf of the school district, even though the club met on school property.

In general, then, the courts have ruled that public schools have substantial discretion to regulate the religious expression of teachers during instructional hours, especially when students are required to be present. The courts have also ruled, however, that attempts by schools to extend that control into non-instructional hours constitute an overly broad intrusion on the teachers’ religious freedom.

Religious activities and the principle of equal access

Over the past 20 years, evangelical Christians and others have advanced the rights of religious organizations to have equal access to meeting space and other forms of recognition provided by public schools to students. These organizations have consistently succeeded in securing the same privileges provided by public schools to secular groups.

Their victories have not been based on a claim that religious groups have a right to official recognition simply because they want to practice or preach their religion; instead, these cases have been won on free-speech grounds.

Whenever public schools recognize student extracurricular activities (for example, a student Republican club or an animal rights group), the schools are deemed to have created a forum for student expression. The constitutional rules governing the forum concept are complicated, but one consistent theme is that the state may not discriminate against a person or group seeking access to the forum based on that person’s or group’s viewpoint. In a now-lengthy line of decisions, the Supreme Court has ruled consistently that religious groups represent a particular viewpoint on the subjects they address and that officials may not exclude that viewpoint from a government-created forum for expression or association.

The first major decision in this area was  Widmar v. Vincent   (1981), , in which the Supreme Court ruled that the University of Missouri could not exclude from campus facilities a student group that wanted to use the school’s buildings for worship and Bible study. The university had refused the group access, asserting that the Establishment Clause forbade the use of a public university’s facilities for worship. The court rejected this defense, ruling that the university had allowed other student groups to use university property and that the complaining group could not be excluded on the basis of its religious viewpoint.

The Supreme Court later extended Widmar’s notion of equal access to nonstudent groups. They, too, should have access to public space, the court said. Despite the decision in Widmar, however, some public high schools continued to refuse access to student religious groups. Those schools took the view that prayer and Bible reading in public schools were constitutionally impermissible, even if wholly student initiated. At least one court of appeals has upheld that argument.

Congress responded by passing the Equal Access Act of 1984. As a condition for receiving federal financial aid, the law required that public secondary schools not discriminate on the basis of religion or political viewpoint in recognizing and supporting extracurricular activities. This law has benefited a variety of student organizations, from gay and lesbian groups to evangelical Christian clubs.

In 1985, a year after Congress passed the equal access law, school officials in Omaha, Nebraska, refused a student request for permission to form a Christian club at a public high school. The club’s activities included reading and discussing the Bible and engaging in prayer. The students filed suit under the Equal Access Act, and the school officials responded that allowing such a club in a public school would violate the Establishment Clause.

In the court case, Board of Education v. Mergens (1990), the Supreme Court upheld the Equal Access Act. The 8-1 majority reasoned that high schools were indistinguishable from universities for purposes of equal access to public facilities. Because there were many student groups devoted to different and frequently opposing causes, the court determined that no reasonable observer would see the school’s recognition of a religious group as an official endorsement of the group’s religious views.

The limits of  Widmar  and  Mergens  were later put to the test in  Rosenberger v. University of Virginia  (1995) and  Good News Club v. Milford Central School District  (2001). In Rosenberger, the Supreme Court held 5-4 that the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment required a state university to grant the same printing subsidy to an evangelical journal that it made available to all other student journals. The dissenters argued, unsuccessfully, that state financial support for a proselytizing journal violated the Establishment Clause. In Good News Club, a 6-3 majority held that the Free Speech Clause prohibited an elementary school from excluding an evangelical Christian program for children from the list of accepted after-school activities.

These equal access decisions have led to new controversies in the lower courts. In Child Evangelism Fellowship of Maryland v. Montgomery County Public Schools (2006), for instance, a federal appellate court extended the equal access principle to fliers that schools distributed to students to take home for the purpose of informing parents about after-school activities. For years the county had distributed fliers for children’s sports leagues and activities like the Boy Scouts. But it refused to distribute fliers for the after-school programs of the Child Evangelism Fellowship of Maryland, which are not held on school property. The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals held that the county’s flier distribution policy was unconstitutionally discriminatory.

The presence of student religious groups in public schools has raised one additional issue. At times these groups insist that their officers make specific religious commitments, such as accepting Jesus Christ as savior and maintaining sexual abstinence outside of heterosexual marriage. As a result, some students are excluded from joining the group or from its leadership ranks. In Hsu v. Roslyn Union Free School District No. 3 (1996), the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals held that the federal Equal Access Act gave students in an evangelical Christian group the right to maintain religious criteria for office. The court said the school’s policy against religious discrimination by student groups was unenforceable in this instance.

The issue arrived at the Supreme Court in 2010 in a case involving a public law school’s decision to deny official recognition to the Christian Legal Society (CLS), a nationwide, nondenominational organization of Christian lawyers, judges and law students. Although the case, Christian Legal Society v. Martinez, involved just one law school (the University of California, Hastings College of Law), other law schools around the country also had been sued by the organization for similar reasons. By the time the Supreme Court agreed to hear Martinez, lower federal courts in different cases had ruled both for and against the organization.

The case centered on Hastings’ policies toward student organizations. Student groups that are officially recognized by Hastings enjoy certain privileges, including access to school facilities and funding. But CLS membership requirements effectively bar non-Christians from becoming voting members and non-celibate gays and lesbians from assuming leadership positions, which conflicts with the law school’s stated policy of requiring registered student groups to accept any students as members. After Hastings refused to exempt CLS from the policy – known as the “all-comers” policy – the group sued, claiming the policy violated its First and 14th Amendment rights to free speech, expressive association and freedom of religious expression. A federal district court and the Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit sided with Hastings, and CLS appealed to the Supreme Court.

The case was widely viewed as a contest between the right of free association and nondiscrimination policies. In its ruling, however, the court did not resolve any broad questions raised by this conflict. Instead, the 5-4 majority handed down a narrowly tailored decision that upheld the specific policy of Hastings Law School – the “all-comers” policy – as long as it is applied in an evenhanded manner.

Writing for the high court’s majority, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said that Hastings’ policy requiring officially registered student groups to allow anyone to join does not unconstitutionally discriminate against groups with particular viewpoints or missions. Quite the contrary, she wrote, the policy is completely neutral since it requires all organizations to open their membership and leadership to all students. Ginsburg argued that it is CLS that wants an exemption from the policy and thus threatens its neutrality. Moreover, she wrote, an “all-comers” policy is reasonable for an educational institution because it encourages all groups to accept and interact with students who hold diverse views. Finally, Ginsburg noted that even though the Christian Legal Society has been denied official recognition by the law school, the group can, and still does, freely operate on campus and is even allowed to use school facilities to hold meetings.

Writing for the dissent, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. argued that by affirming Hastings’ policy, the majority sacrificed core First Amendment principles in favor of political correctness and armed “public educational institutions with a handy weapon for suppressing the speech of unpopular groups.” In addition, Alito asserted, the majority overlooked certain evidence demonstrating that Hastings had singled out CLS because of its beliefs. Prior to the lawsuit, he said, many officially recognized groups on the Hastings campus – not just CLS – had membership requirements written into their bylaws that were discriminatory. Justice Alito also disputed the majority’s contention that CLS, even without official recognition, can still effectively operate on campus, noting that the administration has ignored requests by the group to secure rooms for meetings and tables at campus events.

This report was written by Ira C. Lupu, F. Elwood and Eleanor Davis  Professor Emeritus of Law at George Washington University Law School; David Masci, Senior Writer/Editor at Pew Research Center; and Robert W. Tuttle, David R. and Sherry Kirschner Berz Research Professor of Law & Religion at George Washington University Law School.

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July 7, 2020

The power of intentional prayer in the classroom.

Many ask the question, what’s the biggest draw to Santa Fe Christian? According to SFC parents, it’s the unique community of believers. Every day, the teachers have the opportunity to connect with their students. As Christian role models, they embrace the ability to pray in the classroom.

A strong emphasis on mentorship

In Middle School, it’s a time of immense growth for most students. They begin to ask tough questions, wrestle with their faith, and deal with challenges they’ve never faced before. The teachers at Santa Fe Christian consider mentorship of utmost importance.

Getting to know their students

As the saying goes, “They don’t care what you know until they know that you care,” and at Santa Fe Christian teachers approach their students with an attitude that shows that they genuinely care. As a result, teachers are able to connect at a deeper level with their students, creating meaningful relationships that positively impact the learning environment.

Providing faith-based opportunities and conversations

SFC teachers are able to pour into students and get them thinking about their faith. It’s not just about modeling prayer. Instead, the teachers view it as a way to encourage students to genuinely think about their faith: to think about why prayer is important, why to pray, and even how to pray.  Seventh- and eighth- grade Bible teacher Mark Andriany shares, “I actually made a point to stop praying in my classes. First of all, I wanted to see how long it would take them to notice that we stopped, which was way longer than you would hope.”

Mr. Andriany had a purpose for that experiment: he wanted to help his students understand the purpose of prayer. He explains that in many cases, students are praying for things that will make their lives easier: an A on a test they didn’t study for, or the rain to stop, or a specific outcome they’re hoping will come true. In those cases, he says, it’s like “rubbing some magical genie lamp to make sure God answers our prayers the way that we want him to answer them.”

That, Mr. Andriany insists, is missing the whole point. Instead, he is working to reintroduce prayer to his classes in a way that encourages them to pray more for God’s kingdom and less for their own specific needs and wants. Ultimately, he hopes to help guide his students toward a more mature relationship with Christ and a prayer model that focuses on building the Kingdom.

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Modeling prayer

Prayer is one way for teachers to model authentic faith to their students. SFC teachers provide students with a model of how to pray while weaving faith into everyday lessons. Teaching through a Christian lens , and incorporating prayer in the classrooms, demonstrates to students the truth that God desires to be a part of every aspect of their lives whether that’s in school, in sports, or one day, in their future careers. By building an early foundation, students discover how faith and learning go hand-in-hand and become part of their everyday lives.

Role models with a love for Christ

In today’s society, it can be a challenge for young people to find a godly role model. Movie and television stars, popular vloggers, even social media influencers are often the main voices kids are hearing. That’s the beauty of education at SFC – students have complete access to a myriad of mentors, positive role models, including teachers, faculty, coaches –those they come in contact with on a daily basis.

“I think the Holy Spirit is really evident here at Santa Fe,” says Jackie Lewis, 5th-grade science and social studies teacher, “it’s really just in every interaction. In everything we do, we are worshiping God. I’m teaching them…and I get to show the evidence of Christ’s joy through that – so it’s pretty cool to just weave everything we do into a worship of God.” Ms. Lewis considers it an incredible blessing to have that faith connection with her students–one that allows her to deliver instruction through a biblical lens while bringing out a love of learning in her students.

Other teachers, including Jessica Martin, 5th-grade teacher, agree. “Our role has shifted from bringing information for students to learn, to cultivating who they are, how to learn and be excited about learning. I think that’s why I love Christian education! Because my passion for Jesus and ministry, and my passion for education and children, collide perfectly right here in the classroom.”

Students’ freedom to discuss their faith in school

In a public school classroom, students may be dissuaded from talking about their faith . At SFC, on the other hand, students aren’t just allowed to share their faith. Rather, they are encouraged to talk about it, engage with their teachers, and ask the tough questions that are weighing on their minds. For many students, this is a perfect way to grow in their faith.

At SFC, helping students deepen their faith is just as important as providing them with a great education. Mrs. Martin emphasizes, “More than anything, I want a student to leave this classroom remembering Mrs. Martin loved Jesus, and I wanted to learn more because of her.” With that kind of outlook, she strongly believes students are more likely to leave the classroom with greater knowledge and understanding of what they learned while growing into the person God has called them to be.

SFC parents convey a deep sense of comfort knowing that their children are getting a faith-based education every day. Just as teachers are able to nurture and encourage students in a love of learning, they’re able to provide the tools students need to access their gifts, learn more about who they are in Christ, and grow in their faith in incredible ways. The power of prayer has the opportunity to transform lives, and at SFC, it’s an essential part of the daily culture.

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Arguments for Prayer in School

• In banning school prayer, the U.S. Supreme Court has misinterpreted the Establishment Clause of the Constitution. A simple and voluntary school prayer does not amount to the government establishing a religion, any more than do other practices common in the U.S. such as the employment of Congressional chaplains, government recognition of holidays with religious significance such as Christmas or the proclamation of National Days of Prayer.
• In banning school prayer the U.S. Supreme Court has mistaken the principle of “freedom of religion,” guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, for freedom from religion and any observance of it.
• School prayer would allow religious students the freedom to observe their religious beliefs during the school day. The U.S. Supreme Court has urged school cooperation with religious authorities for “it then respects the religious nature of our people and accommodates the public service to their spiritual needs.”
• Our country was founded by people who believed in freedom to practice one’s religion openly and who used their religious beliefs to create the backbone of this nation. Our children should be able to participate openly in this great heritage, seeking help, strength, and endurance from God as did their forefathers.
• Our system of education also has a rich spiritual heritage. Of the first 108 universities founded in America, 106 were distinctly Christian, including the first, Harvard University, chartered in 1636. In the original Harvard Student Handbook, rule number 1 was that students seeking entrance must know Latin and Greek so that they could study the Scriptures: "Let every student be plainly instructed and earnestly pressed to consider well, the main end of his life and studies is, to know God and Jesus Christ, which is eternal life, (John 17:3); and therefore to lay Jesus Christ as the only foundation of all sound knowledge and learning."
• School prayer would instill moral values. Schools must do more than train children’s minds academically. They must also nurture their souls and reinforce the values taught at home and in the community. Founding father Samuel Adams said, "Let divines and philosophers, statesmen and patriots, unite their endeavors to renovate the age by impressing the minds of men with the importance of educating their little boys and girls, inculcating in the minds of youth the fear and love of the Deity. . .and leading them in the study and practice of the exalted virtues of the Christian system."
• The public school system is tragically disintegrating as evidenced by the rise in school shootings, increasing drug use, alcoholism, teen pregnancy, and HIV transmission. School prayer can help combat these issues and is desperately needed to protect our children.
• School prayer could lead to increased tolerance and less bullying in school since it can instill a sense of right and wrong and a love for others above oneself.
• School prayer will promote good citizenship. Founding father John Adams said, "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." The founding fathers believed this should be taught in school. George Washington stated, "What students would learn in American schools above all is the religion of Jesus Christ."
• School prayer may cause students to acknowledge a power greater than themselves on which they can rely for comfort and help in times of trouble. This will lead to decreased reliance on drugs, alcohol, sex, and dangerous amusements as well as decreased suicides.

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19 Big Pros and Cons of Prayer in Schools

Although some people think otherwise, the Supreme Court of the United States has never outlawed the ability of students to pray in school. Each student is free to pray alone or in a group of other kids. The only stipulations are that the actions cannot be disruptive or infringe upon the rights of others who wish to conduct themselves in other ways. It is a right to engage in a voluntary prayer that doesn’t force others to be a captive audience or compel participation.

When we look at the prayer in school debate, the Supreme Court has set the precedent that organized or sponsored activities in this manner by a public school are not permitted. This stance remains in effect even if the prayer is delivered by a student. There are four separate cases that date to 1962 that impact this perspective. Any school officials asking for or requiring compliance, or students acting in that regard, cannot pray over a public address system, at high school football games, or during graduation.

It is also essential to remember that many of the advocates seeking prayer in schools are in favor of Christian prayer only. They do not wish to have other faiths or perspectives offer a similar experience, which would be the logical outcome if the Supreme Court would overturn over 50 years of precedent.

List of the Pros of Prayer in School

1. Prayer sets a standard of personal conduct for people to follow. Proponents of the idea of organized prayer in schools feel that it has been operating outside of the idea that there is something supernatural that impacts us all. “Humanism assumes that the supernatural does not exist and that reality must be discovered purely from man’s reasoning,” writes Eric Hovind for Creation today. By returning prayer to schools, the idea would be that it sets a standard of personal conduct.

Prayer tells people that they are more than just an animal or a collection of energy and chemicals that occupy space. It is an action that proclaims the importance of all life and shows that there is a destiny for everyone if they are willing to take it. It also helps to guide students toward better choices throughout the year.

2. Having prayer in schools could boost the morality seen in the classroom. Proponents of having prayer in schools say that its removal in the 1960s was a trigger that may have caused SAT scores to drop, teenage suicide rates to increase, and divorce rates to rise since there is no longer a public acknowledgment of God’s existence in the classroom. When people are not given the option to pray, then there is a severe threat of spiritual decline that enters our communities. The individuals in charge of teaching children already have the responsibility to offer balanced learning options. How can they do so if they are forbidden from teaching prayer, but they can also decide to show students ideas like evolution while promoting personal perspectives on life?

3. It gives students an opportunity to come together. When students are of the same faith, then having prayer in schools gives them an opportunity to come together in the spirit of unity. This advantage applies to those who have a different spiritual perspective as well. Although critics would point out that this action excludes non-religious people, there is power in prayer to bring people together in ways that go beyond what anyone can expect.

General Dwight D. Eisenhower even offered what could be considered a short encouragement for prayer in the 1940s on the eve of D-Day. “Good luck!” he wrote in conclusion. “And let us all beseech the blessing of Almighty God upon this great and noble undertaking.” Having prayer in school isn’t about forcing compliance. It is a simple acknowledgment that there is a desire to seek blessings in this life that may fall outside of human perception.

4. Prayer is more of a personal expression than a religious requirement. Prayer is an action that is just like a song, speech, or mantra of positive affirmation that public schools would likely allow from an organized standpoint. Bringing it back to schools would allow each student to openly or privately pray when they feel the need to do so. Some would take this opportunity to convey their love of God to other people, while others might use this option to focus, prepare for a test, or manage a negative emotional response to a situation they encountered during the day.

5. It would allow students to receive exposure to other religions. Although there are some supporters of prayer in schools that are adamant about it only including Christian beliefs, modern America does welcome all religions and faiths with open arms into its society. You can practice Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism, or any other religion because it is part of who you are. If we were to allow prayer in schools, then everyone would have the right to practice their faith in a way that best suits the needs of their faith. This would help today’s children become more aware of different cultures in personal ways that may not occur otherwise in society.

6. Having prayer in schools would promote tolerance and understanding. When people of any age are exposed to other religions, it tears down the stereotypes that people build about those who follow certain practices. You would have a very different idea of someone who practices Islam by getting to know them and their prayer habits compared to what you see on the news or read online. The same is true for different Christian denominations and other cultures. This advantage provides each community with an opportunity for everyone to promote acceptance and religious tolerance instead of separation and anxiety.

7. It would give more respect to religions that require more time for prayer. If you were to practice Islam, then you must have salat time each day. This ritualistic prayer occurs five times daily, and it is an integral component of how one practices their faith. There are specific religious practices in other spiritual approaches that require certain actions or responses as well. When we make prayer in schools a formal and inclusive approach, then we’re giving more respect to the faiths that require this time daily. Without this option, students must secure hall passes or request formal permission to be excused during the day when they have religious practices to complete.

8. It allows students to understand how to manage conflict. One of the unusual advantages of having prayer in schools is that it creates a polarizing debate. Teachers who are passionate about their faith often choose institutions that permit prayer because it allows them to incorporate their spiritual life into their work. This emotional reaction adds value to the classroom that makes a positive difference in a student’s life because it pushes people to become better.

There will always be the occasional person who tries to leverage their influence in unhealthy ways. A small group of teachers and coaches each year are caught having inappropriate relationships with their students. Showing kids what the outcomes of life can be with prayer is certainly healthy, especially if it shows them how to manage conflict.

9. Prayer in school might help students apply to more institutions of higher learning. There are more than 1,000 different institutions of higher learning that take a Christian approach to education, yet they also accept applicants no matter what their religious beliefs happen to be. It is not unusual for a degree that comes from a school that allows prayer to hold more weight with employers than one that comes from a public institution that does not. Retention means stability in the life of an individual, and it is evidence that someone knows how to manage challenging situations in successful ways.

10. It gives us an opportunity to reach across the generation gap. For the generation born on or after 1980, over 25% of individuals in the United States do not affiliate themselves with a specific religion. When we have prayer in schools, then there are opportunities to discuss the individual core beliefs that makeup who we are. Knowing what these differences are creates diversity in the classroom, offering more strength to the educational process. Even when people say that they are unaffiliated with their faith, a majority of students still share a majority of their parent’s perspectives on morality, death, heaven, and hell.

11. A personal prayer doesn’t need to be a specific message to God. The act of prayer has specific, positive psychological benefits to those who participate in this activity. Even if you substitute the term for “meditation” or “personal reflection,” the benefits remain. Although organizations and critics might claim that a specific prayer can lead to one religion being promoted over all others, the answer to most freedom of speech actions is usually to offer more choices instead of fewer of them. If schools want to offer prayers under any name, then giving them the go-ahead to do so while offering a reasonable alternative could widen our perspectives of life.

List of the Cons of Prayer in School

1. The Supreme Court ruled that involuntary school prayer violates the Establishment Clause. The First Amendment is often looked at as the piece in American government that offers everyone the right to free speech, religion, and press. What some people do not realize is that there is also a component about government-established religion in this addition to the Constitution called the Bill of Rights.

The First Amendment begins by saying, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion…” which is the reference to the Establishment Clause. If a public school, a government-run institution, requires students to follow prayer from one specific religion, then the Supreme Court believes that such an action violates this right.

2. Requiring prayer in schools would violate the separation of church and state. The separation of church and state in the United States is a jurisprudential and philosophic concept that defines the relationship between government entities and religious organizations. Although this phrase is not in the Constitution, it did begin to appear in a series of cases in the 1940s. The decision in Everson v. Board of Education incorporated the Establishment Cause, determining that it applied to all states. The Supreme Court has mentioned it more than 25 times, sometimes embracing the principle more than others. Requiring prayer from a specific religion would qualify as an issue here too.

3. It could change the purpose of going to school for some students. Voluntary prayer is already legal if the action occurs in a non-disruptive way. One could argue that formal school prayers are therefore unnecessary because this action never left in the first place. When institutions are given the right to perform the duties of a religion, then the purpose of their presence changes. Would kids be going to their classroom to learn about reading, writing, and arithmetic, or does prayer in school create opportunities for institutional proselytization?

Critics of the idea of having organized prayer in schools would say that children should go to the classroom for educational purposes instead of religious observance. Religious private schools offer an alternative environment if parents wish to use them for their family’s needs.

4. Forced school prayer could lead to an environment of intolerance. The public school system in the United States was created to provide an educational benefit to all students and families. It receives financial support from all taxpayers in each community in one way or another. That’s why there is an emphasis on having the institution remain neutral from a religious standpoint since there will be issues where people will have differing opinions.

When groups of people find themselves at odds with others on crucial moral issues consistently, then it can lead to an atmosphere of intolerance. Prayer in schools would highlight the various religions differences that families have of which many students would be unaware of. It could even lead to the bullying or ostracization of those who refuse to participate in such an activity.

5. It creates a coercive set of circumstances for students. Even if we set aside the issue of religious differences, schools provide an authoritarian relationship for students. Teachers and administrators are in charge, and the students are in a position to follow the expectations of the adults in the room. That means an adult with an agenda would have the ability to coerce the kids they’re charged with overseeing to a specific point of view under the threat of poor grades, discipline, or other adverse outcomes. This issue is why the Supreme Court allows for individual students or groups to pray together on their own time or quietly while in class instead of having the institution’s officials lead it.

No one can stop a student from quietly praying in their mind when sitting in a classroom. Most people wouldn’t even know that is what the student was doing at that moment. One could even argue that this principle follows the ideas presented by Jesus in Matthew 6. “But when you pray,” the Bible says, “go into your inner room, shut your door, and pray to your Father, who is unseen. And your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.”

6. There is not a formal prayer that can honor every tenet of each religion practiced by students. Even if there was an effort to only include Christian prayer in U.S. classrooms, this debate would still occur because of the differences that exist between the different denominations. Should the school pray in a way that Catholics would find suitable, or should it follow the principles taught in Protestant churches? Then you might have differences that separate Baptists from Methodists. The reality of prayer is that it is a component of faith, which is an individual experience first and a group experience second. That’s why this action is better left in the home or in a religious setting instead of at the local public school.

7. Students still need to have role models to have morality. A student needs to see the people in their life living by example to understand the difference between right and wrong. Although individuals can figure out their moral compass independent of this process, it is imperative that we have role models in our schools who can show kids what it means to make positive choices. Parochial students often commit crime or use drugs at a higher rate than those in the public school system because they lack access to leadership. Depending on prayer as a way to enforce discipline is like sending positive thoughts to someone who was the victim of gun violence. It excuses personal responsibility because there is a dependence placed upon God to do something about what is happening in society.

8. No one stops teachers from praying by themselves either. A former kindergarten teacher named Alicia told a website called Teachers Who Pray that many teachers are dealing with high levels of fatigue. “Too many teachers are emotionally, physically, and spiritually exhausted,” she wrote. “Prayer for teachers, as well as students, will make a huge difference in the whole school.” It should be noted that the same rules that students follow will also apply to teachers – with the exception that a group of adults cannot lead a group of students in this activity.

The current laws regarding the existence of prayer in school encourage kids to take the initiative in this area. Worries about eroding morality or the decline of the separation of church and state are both slippery slope arguments. If you don’t push people for compliance, then the activity is not banned in U.S. schools. You can also attend a private school where you can pray openly in the classroom without an issue if you prefer.

Should We Promote Having Prayer in School?

The pros and cons of prayer in school can become a contentious debate. It can seem like there is no common ground on this issue. Gallup consistently finds that more than 60% of Americans like the idea of having organized prayer during the school day, while over 75% have said that a Constitutional amendment addressing this idea is one worth pursuing.

It is essential to remember that prayer hasn’t been banned from school. Teachers, principals, coaches, and other staff are not permitted to initiate it. Your child can start a school club to connect with others who share a similar faith. Then they can meet, pray, and discuss their spirituality during or after school assuming that the actions don’t infringe on the rights of others.

Students are less impressionable than most people realize. Only 4% of children raised without religious affiliation later start joining the practices of a specific faith. It is the influence of the family that is most important in this debate. If parents spend time talking candidly about their personal beliefs, that activity will have a significantly positive impact on a child’s life.

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Importance of the Youth voices and opinion in Improving the Quality…

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The entire human race may be oblivious to the exact commencement of prayer and whether or not we actually try to reach any spiritual force in that way, in the absence of proof of the activity’s establishment, but scientists have not completely ruled out on its ineffectualness or even potential. Research has thrown hints on what makes prayer measurably useful to human beings, especially in the present era where whims and impulsiveness come at the cost of mental peace. Engrained in the heart of spiritualty, prayer is the progression to deeper values in life. Its dimensions set the way for self-reflection and also understanding of bigger things in life. Hence, prayer when done with right attitude and intent can bring a lot to the plate for people, especially for youth whose intellectual capacity is hinged on their ability to embrace reality.

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Prayer is a kind of behavior which is often allied with religion and can be advantageous if practiced in school assemblies.

Prayer is meditation in disguise. Meditation is the best thing to happen if practiced by students. Praying doesn’t necessarily mean calling out to God but it can be perceived as reaching out to each individual’s faith. When that becomes sincere, what comes next is optimism. When students pray before starting their day it is necessary they look forward to the day. Few minutes’ of prayer can bring that sort of energy which helps people contemplate life and balance what comes forth. Students are constantly under pressure and their young minds need to deal with it positively. Praying in silence helps to gain the confidence to deal with any negativity of life.

Being thankful is equally important. Praying gives a few moments’ of silence to students for appreciating the good things in life. A sense of gratitude is important because we need to remember that life comes with a lot of surprises and its unpredictability is its truest essence. When situations are not in our favour we tend to easily adopt a scathing attitude to life. This is unhealthy for our mental balance. Understanding that problems are doors to only the good things are what make us wise and being grateful for that is a sign of wisdom.

Prayer is a way to calm the mind. Human beings have tendencies to be impulsive. And students are more imprudent due to lack of maturity. The way one handles a crisis talks a lot about a person. Praying is that form of meditation that helps students gather up for every adventure they’re going to take up, have the persistence to rationalize before plunging into a decision and stop themselves from harming someone. In short, prayer is a guide in disguise for students who go through a lot each day.

Focus and concentration is the most vital outcome of prayer. Standing straight, folding hands, joined feet and closed eyes – everyone aligned to one rhythm – this is the greatest form of concentration. In a whole day of millions of thoughts crossing our minds and the on and off juggling of emotions are a way lot harmful than we imagine. Hence trying to invest our thoughts into discrete thinking is the best way to cool the nerves and uphold normalcy in life.

Obviously when these are the best things that prayer or meditation bring, we have room for becoming a better version of ourselves. In today’s world of madness and instability, a slight sense of tolerance, confidence and forgiving attitude is not bad a picture. A child’s base is first established when s/he is a student and summoning them towards this way of life is only confirming they grow up as good human beings.

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Essay On Prayer

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He prayeth best, who loveth best, All things both great and small For the dear God who loveth us, He made and loveth all.

Prayer is a symbol of the supremacy of humans. It establishes a close relationship between man and God. Every religion gives importance to prayer . All religions, all saints, holy books emphasize prayer. It is believed that prayers are a door to salvation. Prayer means praising and thanking God, asking for his help or guidance, wishing good for others. It can be done quietly, loudly, or in any other way. It can be done alone or with others. It can be done in the form of meditation or by reading a holy book .

Chanting Hymns, worshipping, playing music are some of the ways of praying to God. However, prayer can also be done without taking the help of any such medium. We can use any method. All the methods are excellent. Prayer is nothing but communication between the devotee and God. In it, a devotee clarifies his state to God. He does not hide anything from God.

The more truthful and devoted prayer is the more effective it will be. Prayer does not have restrictions on time or place. It can be done anywhere, anytime. It is better if the place is clean, calm, open, and beautiful so that we can concentrate fully. That is why temples, churches, mosques are considered to be the best places for praying.

Prayers give us strength, faith, inspiration, hope, and proper guidance. It removes bad qualities and develops qualities like sympathy, nonviolence, compassion, tolerance, helping others, pity, simplicity, etc. Prayer gives us the confidence to come out of difficult situations. It removes sorrow. It shows light in the darkness. Prayers have psychological importance too. It is a good method to calm down, concentrate and gain confidence. This is a spiritual activity that gives us courage, energy, and purity. Saints and devotees have made impossible things possible with the help of prayers.

Mahatma Gandhi used to spend a lot of time in prayer. He understood the importance of prayer very well. He organized group prayers every evening. He believed that prayers make one realize how small one is and thus make one polite. Prayer is searching one’s, own heart.

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