- by Jack Ryan
Legal & Liability Risk Management Institute

The United States Supreme Court’s most recent pronouncement on prayer in the public school setting came in June of 2000 when the Court decided Santa Fe Independent School Dist. v. Jane Doe.ⁱ

Two distinct events were at issue in the case.  The first involved the offering of an invocation and a benediction at high-school graduation.  The second involved a pre-game prayer at football games.  The school district attempted to buffer itself from creating a school policy that would run afoul of the Establishment Clause of the United States Constitution.  The buffer, in both circumstances involved an initial student vote on whether the majority wished to have a prayer at all.  The second involved the election of a student who would offer the prayer.

The United States Supreme Court concluded that in both instances, graduation ceremony (involuntary participation) and football games (voluntary participation), the schools involvement in creating the election scheme encouraged religious participation and as such, ran afoul of the Establishment Clause.  The Court concluded: “Even if we regard every student’s decision to attend a home football game as purely voluntary, we are nevertheless persuaded that the delivery of the pregame prayer has the improper effect of coercing those present to participate in an act of religious worship. For ‘the government may no more use social pressure to enforce orthodoxy than it may use more direct means’…”