Supreme Court Cases

This idea of maintaining a separation between church and state is evident throughout the Supreme Court Case Engle v. Vitale. In a school in New Hyde Park, New York, each school day began with the spoken recitation of the words "Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon thee, and we beg thy blessings upon us, our parents, our teachers and our country" (Alley 32). Although the New York State Board of Regents, who wrote the prayer, claim it was meant to be non-denominational, parents were in opposition to their children reading it. When this case was posed to lower courts they found it to be constitutional as long as the students were not forced to recite it. The case did not stop here though. Parents still in opposition to the prayer took the case all the way to the Supreme Court. The United States Supreme Court ruled that "it is no part of the business of government to compose official prayers for any group of the American people to recite as a part of a religious program carried on by the government" (Alley, School 120). The Supreme Court’s decision to Engel v. Vitale, in 1962, ruled religious prayer during school unconstitutional.

A second case that furthered the discussion about School Prayer and its impact in our nation’s public schools was the Supreme Court Case, Lemon v. Kurtzman. After decades of hearing cases involving religion and schools, the Supreme Court decided to set guidelines for the lower courts to help them. The outcome of this case, which came to be known as the Lemon Test, established three criteria to be used in future cases brought before the lower courts. The Lemon Test states that government aid to religious schools would be accepted as constitutional if

(1) it had a secular purpose,

(2) its effect was neither to advance nor to inhibit religion,

(3) it did not entangle government and religious insitutions in each other’s affairs (Alley, Without 245).

These guidelines proved to be very useful in many following Supreme Court Cases, establishing consistency in all decisions of subsequent cases regarding public school prayer.

Introduction Separation of Church and State Supreme Court Cases Impact on Students Conclusion Bibliography Other Links