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The New York State Board of Regents in 1951 drafted a prayer to be read in the state’s public schools. The final prayer was adopted unanimously after consultation with priests, ministers, and rabbis. It read as follows:

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

If local school boards approved the prayer, it would be recited daily in the district’s public schools before classes began. 

The prayer was uncontroversial. America was predominantly Christian. Even its non-Christians wanted their children to believe in God. 

And New York was not alone. By 1949, at least 37 states had one or more public schools where morning prayers were recited. Richard Dierenfield’s analysis from 1960 found that nearly 88 percent of U.S. public schools held Christmas celebrations, more than 40 percent read the Bible, and one in three recited a school prayer in homeroom.

But Supreme Court rulings had put these practices in jeopardy. In Cantwell v. Connecticut (1940), the Court applied the First Amendment’s free-exercise clause to the states. In Everson v. Board of Education (1947), it applied the establishment clause to the states and erected a “wall of separation” between church and state, prohibiting state governments from passing laws that “aid one religion, aid all religions, or prefer one religion over another.” 

Such an application of the First Amendment would have been unthinkable in the founding generation. It nevertheless set the stage for future litigation against public bodies whose actions could be construed as promoting religion.

The New York Regents board thought its prayer was compatible with the Court’s recent rulings. It noted that “students whose conscience forbids them to participate” were not required to recite the prayer. What is more, they argued, the prayer was a necessary response to “concentrated attacks by an atheistic way of life upon our world.” This was a reference to the Soviet Union. The board soon found itself subject to “concentrated attacks” not from Soviet apparatchiks but secularists within its own state.

Lawrence Roth moved to Long Island’s New Hyde Park neighborhood a few years before School District Number 9 announced its adoption of the Regents prayer in 1958. Participation in the prayer was voluntary. Children were free to leave the classroom and return at the prayer’s conclusion or stand in silence as their peers read the prayer aloud. Roth, a non-practicing Jew and committed civil libertarian, objected, and sued the school district.

Roth contacted the ACLU and sent a letter to parents soliciting their participation in a prospective lawsuit against the school district. More than 50 parents responded, but only five joined as plaintiffs—two Jews, one Unitarian, one atheist, and one member of the “New York Society for Ethical Culture.” The prayer, which had been recited without incident at schools throughout the state for eight years, was now in jeopardy.

The plaintiffs charged that the school district, by reciting a voluntary ecumenical prayer at the beginning of the school day, was establishing a church in the state of New York. This argument was initially handled with the contempt it deserved. The Court of Appeals of New York, the state’s highest court, joined lower courts in finding on the side of the defendants. Chief Judge Charles S. Desmond said that to hold that the prayer was a violation of the First Amendment “would be in defiance of all American history” and “destroy a part of the essential foundation of the American governmental structure.” 

“That the First Amendment was ever intended to forbid as an ‘establishment of religion’ a simple declaration of belief in God is so contrary to history as to be impossible of acceptance,” Desmond wrote.

Roth and the other plaintiffs appealed the verdict. Their case, Engel v. Vitale—Steven Engel had been named lead plaintiff given his surname’s alphabetic priority, and Vitale was the surname of the district superintendent—reached the United States Supreme Court in 1962. 

In a 6–1 decision, the Court found that reading an officially sanctioned ecumenical prayer in a public school was “wholly inconsistent with the Establishment Clause.” While Justice Hugo Black for the majority conceded the “unfortunate fact of history” that previous generations of Americans had established state-level churches and adopted official prayers, he nevertheless concluded that governments have no “power to prescribe by law any particular form of prayer.”

In his concurrence, Justice William Douglas claimed that school prayers and other forms of state-sponsored piety exert “divisive influence into our communities.” Whether five activist parents in a New York school district’s using the court system to nullify a school prayer across the United States was “divisive” was left unconsidered. 

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The prayer was declared unconstitutional. A slate of similar rulings that followed—Lee v. Weisman and Sante Fe School District v. Doe—all but excised religion from public schools.

Prayer in public schools has proven no less “divisive” since Engel was handed down. A 2014 Gallup poll found that 61 percent of Americans favored allowing daily spoken prayer in the classroom. Seventy-five percent favored allowing students to pray as part of their graduation ceremonies. In 2005, more than three in four Americans favored passing a constitutional amendment to allow voluntary prayer in public schools. School prayer’s enduring popularity vindicates Justice Potter Stewart’s objection in his dissent that “the history of the religious traditions of our people” is “reflected in countless practices of the institutions and officials of our government.” 

The Engel plaintiffs never doubted the righteousness of their cause. Decades later, Lawrence Roth said he decided to launch the suit because he feared that “if the state could tell us what to pray and how to pray, there was no stopping.” The same could be said in reverse. If the nation’s highest court can prevent entire communities from acknowledging God in their public institutions by adopting a twisted interpretation of a constitutional clause never intended to apply to the states, there truly are no limits to the Court’s authority.