One further note from this decision: a concurring Justice observed that, through this ruling, the Court was now assuming “the role of a super board of education for every school district in the nation” an ominous prediction of what has now become the norm. Engel v. Vitale, 1962
For fourteen years following the McCollum case, the Court not only ceased to strike down voluntary religious activities for students, it actually upheld them, retreating significantly from its inflexible concept of “separation” introduced in 1947 in Everson see Zorach v. Clauson, 1952 21. However, in the Engel case, the Court reverted to its Everson position; it attacked the long-standing tradition of school prayer and struck down this simple 22-word prayer from New York schools:
Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon Thee, and we beg Thy blessings upon us, our parents, our teachers and our Country. Contemporary reviewers often claim that the “real” issue in this prayer case was coercion since it involved a state approved prayer. Yet this is a misportrayal; there was no coercion; even the Court conceded that the schools did not compel any pupil to join in the prayer over his or her parents’ objection.
New York had taken great pains to provide that participation in these prayers be completely voluntary. Furthermore, in an attempt to be as inoffensive as possible, the prayer’s wording was simply a nonsectarian acknowledgment of God. In fact, that acknowledgment was so bland that a later court described it “as a ‘to-whom-it-may-concern’ prayer.” Since the prayer was both voluntary and nondenominational, it should have been upheld; yet the Court explained why it must be struck down: Neither the fact that the prayer may be denominationally neutral nor the fact that its observance on the part of the students is voluntary can serve to free it from the limitations of the Establishment Clause, as it might from the Free Exercise Clause, of the First Amendment. It ignores the essential nature of the program’s constitutional defects. Prayer in its public school system breaches the constitutional wall of separation between Church and State.
David Barton said because of the way He communicated. People hung on every word.
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