“The Supreme Court has again affirmed that Americans are free to pray,” said ADF Senior Counsel David Cortman. “In America, we tolerate a diversity of opinions and beliefs; we don’t silence people or try to separate what they say from what they believe. Opening public meetings with prayer is a cherished freedom that the authors of the Constitution themselves practiced. Speech censors should have no power to silence volunteers who pray for their communities just as the Founders did.”
“As a practice that has long endured, legislative prayer has become part of our heritage and tradition, part of our expressive idiom, similar to the Pledge of Allegiance, inaugural prayer, or the recitation of ‘God save the United States and this honorable Court’ at the opening of this Court’s sessions…,” the court’s opinion states. “That a prayer is given in the name of Jesus, Allah, or Jehovah, or that it makes passing references to religious doctrines, does not remove it from that tradition.”
Although the case centers on a New York town’s prayer practice, the court’s decision has ramifications upon other similar cases still in progress in lower courts. ADF attorneys will seek to resolve those cases in light of the decision, and they plan a nationwide campaign to inform governmental bodies at all levels that they are free to include prayer in their public meetings.
“You shouldn’t be forced to forfeit your freedom to appease someone who doesn’t like what you say or believe,” said ADF Senior Counsel Brett Harvey. “Opponents of prayer want to use government to attack our freedom, but the Constitution established our government to protect our freedom.”
Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council in Washington D.C., also celebrates this decision saying that the SCOTUS rightfully affirms First Amendment freedoms:
The Court has rejected the idea that as citizens we must check our faith at the entrance to the public square. We applaud the majority on the court for getting that right. This is an historic victory for all Americans of faith and for the common-sense reading of the Constitution itself. The Court’s affirmation of the right of Americans to practice their faith in public life and the public square is a major win for the religious liberty we have always cherished.
If the lower court ruling were correct, then Congress would have been violating the Constitution for more than two centuries. The Supreme Court majority recognized the absurdity of a ruling that would have even found the Constitution’s authors in violation of their own document. This welcome decision is very helpful in putting the brakes on the efforts of militant secularists to rid the public square of any religious expression.
ADDITIONAL EXCERPTS FROM THE COURT’S DECISION:
- “The tradition reflected in Marsh [the primary existing Supreme Court precedent regarding prayer before public bodies] permits chaplains to ask their own God for blessings of peace, justice, and freedom that find appreciation among people of all faiths. That a prayer is given in the name of Jesus, Allah, or Jehovah, or that it makes passing references to religious doctrines, does not remove it from that tradition.”
- Plaintiffs are asking that federal courts “act as supervisors and censor of religious speech, a rule that would involve government in religious matters to a far greater degree than is the case under the town’s current practice….”
- “Marsh nowhere suggested that the constitutionality of legislative prayer turns on the neutrality of its content.”
- “Our tradition assumes that adult citizens, firm in their own beliefs, can tolerate and perhaps appreciate a ceremonial prayer delivered by a person of a different faith.”
- “Respondents argue, in effect, that legislative prayer maybe addressed only to a generic God.”
- “Marsh, indeed, requires an inquiry into the prayer opportunity as a whole, rather than into the contents of a single prayer.”
- “That nearly all of the congregations in town turned out to be Christian does not reflect an aversion or bias on the part of town leaders against minority faiths.”
While it is right and good to thank God for this victory, it should not be lost on anyone that the margin of victory was one vote from a further narrowing of religious liberty.
“Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty; power is ever stealing from the many to the few. The manna of popular liberty must be gathered each day or it is rotten. The living sap of today outgrows the dead rind of yesterday. The hand entrusted with power becomes, either form human depravity or esprit de corps, the necessary enemy of the people. Only by continued oversight can the democrat in office be prevented from hardening into a despot; only by unintermitted agitation can a people be sufficiently awake to principle not to let liberty be smothered in material prosperity.” ~Wendell Phillips (American Abolitionist)
*Alliance Defending Freedom is an alliance-building, non-profit legal organization that advocates for the right of people to freely live out their faith.
