“With all respect, I think the Court has misapplied a great constitutional principle. I cannot see how an ‘official religion’ is established by letting those who want to say a prayer say it. On the contrary, I think that to deny the wish of these school children to join in reciting this prayer is to deny them the opportunity of sharing in the spiritual heritage of our Nation.”

I was driving home from Owensboro one night about 10 years ago, saw a lit-up tent by the roadside and decided to stop in. A full-blown, old-fashioned Holiness revival was going on. Old women who looked like they had walked right out of a Dorothea Lange or Walker Evans photo — long braids and plain dresses, weathered skin drawn tightly over thin faces — danced ecstatically by the front of the altar. The preacher, adding a sort of grunting extra syllable to every phrase in his lengthy sermon, merged his calls for revival with a complaint about the lack of official sanction for religion: “They took prayer out of schools-uh, and they put evolution in-uh.”

That was a tight summary of the conservative Christian complaint against courts that insistently have disallowed religious expressions in schools. Today marks the 50th anniversary of one of the landmarks in that case law — Engel v. Vitale, in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that school-sponsored prayer in a New York school district amounted an unconstitutional establishment of religion.

The prayer said:

“Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon Thee, and we beg Thy blessings upon us, our parents, our teachers and our country. Amen.”

A year later, there followed the decision (in which famed atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair was involved) banning school-sponsored devotional readings of Scripture. Later court precedents kept curtailing publicly endorsed expressions — including more recent ones banning student-led prayers at football games, Ten Commandments postings and the teaching of creationism as science. At the same time, such precedents have allowed students to meet voluntarily in Bible clubs and have “See You At the Pole”-type prayer activities.

The Engel precedent has been debated in more recent Kentucky court cases as well, including whether the state can give credit to “Almighty God” for its homeland security. (The Court of Appeals says yes.) Wouldn’t it be fitting if the Affordable Care Act gets a ruling on the anniversary of Engel — giving conservatives two reasons to see June 25 as a red-letter date?  (Editor’s Note – yes, that would have been fitting; however……)

Read Note [Editor’s note: the original URL (link) referenced is no longer valid, so the link has been removed.]