Abington School District v. Schempp

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1963 U.S. Supreme Court case ending required prayer and Bible reading in public schools

1963 United States Supreme Court case

Abington School District v. Schempp, 374 U.S. 203 (1963), was a landmark United States Supreme Court case in which the Court decided 8–1 in favor of the respondent, Edward Schempp, on behalf of his son Ellery Schempp , and declared that school-sponsored Bible reading and the recitation of the Lord's Prayer in public schools in the United States was unconstitutional.

Background

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Public schools in Pennsylvania had been required to start the school day by reading Bible verses since 1949. By the 1960s, four more states had passed similar laws requiring daily Bible reading. Twenty-five states had laws allowing "optional" Bible reading, with the remainder of the states having no laws supporting or rejecting Bible reading. In eleven of those states with laws supportive of Bible reading or state-sponsored prayer, state courts had declared the laws to be unconstitutional.

The Supreme Court had already applied the Establishment Clause to the states in _Everson v. Board of Education _ (1947) by a process called incorporation .

Edward Schempp, a Unitarian Universalist , sued the Abington School District in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania challenging the Pennsylvania law under the First and Fourteenth Amendments .

Lower court history

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During the first trial in federal district court , Schempp and his children testified as to specific religious doctrines "which were contrary to the religious beliefs which they held and to their familial teaching".

The children testified that all of the doctrines to which they referred were read to them at various times as part of the exercises. In November 1956, Ellery Schempp decided that he would read the Quran during the daily Bible reading and informed school personnel that he would no longer stand for the recitation of the Lord's Prayer because he felt it was unconstitutional.

The district court ruled in Schempp's favor and struck down the Pennsylvania statute. The school district appealed. While that appeal was pending, the Pennsylvania legislature amended the statute to allow children to be excused from the exercises upon the written request of their parents. After the law changed, the Supreme Court vacated the first ruling and remanded the case back to the district court. Schempp believed that, even with the change to allow students to leave the classroom, his children's relationships with their teachers and classmates would be adversely affected. The district court again ruled for Schempp. The school district appealed to the Supreme Court again, and, on appeal, the case was consolidated with a similar Maryland case, Murray v. Curlett.

The Supreme Court granted _certiorari _ to settle the persistent and vigorous protests resulting from its previous decision in _Engel v. Vitale _ regarding religion in schools. Henry W. Sawyer argued the case for Schempp.

Supreme Court of the United States

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Majority opinion

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The Supreme Court upheld the District Court's decision and found the Pennsylvania prayer statute unconstitutional. Writing for the Court's majority, Justice Tom C. Clark stated, "This Court has decisively settled that the First Amendment's mandate [in the Establishment Clause
] has been made wholly applicable to the States by the Fourteenth Amendment ... in a series of cases since Cantwell.

The Court explicitly upheld Engel v. Vitale , in which the Court ruled that a school's sanctioning of a prayer violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution , which states, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion." The Abington court held that in organizing Bible reading, the school was conducting "a religious exercise," and "that cannot be done without violating the 'neutrality' required of the State by the balance of power between individual, church, and state that has been struck by the First Amendment" (374 U.S. 203 (1963)).

What was unexpected, however, were the ideas expressed in the second portion of Justice Clark's opinion written for the majority. The Court's recognition of religious ideals as valuable to the culture of the United States in that opinion are generally not cited much by either side of the church-state debate when discussing the case and the effect it had on the United States.[_citation needed
_] His opening thoughts explicitly spelled out that view in past jurisprudence with cases similar to Abington v. Schempp.

Clark continued that the Court was of the feeling that regardless of the religious nature of the citizenry, the government at all levels, as required by the Constitution, must remain neutral in matters of religion "while protecting all, prefer[ring] none, and disparag[ing] none." The Court had rejected "the contention by many that the Establishment Clause forbade only governmental preference of one faith over another."

Citing _Torcaso v. Watkins _, Justice Clark added, "We repeat and again reaffirm that neither a State nor the Federal Government can constitutionally force a person 'to profess a belief or disbelief in any religion.' Neither can it constitutionally pass laws or impose requirements which aid all religions as against non-believers, and neither can it aid those religions based on a belief in the existence of God as against those religions founded on different beliefs." Such prohibited behavior was self-evident in the Pennsylvania law requiring Bible reading (and allowing recitation of the Lord's Prayer) in its public schools. The Court recognized the value of such ideal neutrality from lessons of history when government and religion were either fully fused or cooperative with one another and religious liberty was nonexistent or seriously curtailed.

Brennan's concurrence

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Justice Brennan filed a concurrence more than seventy pages long which reviewed the history of the First Amendment and the relevant judicial and legislative history. Brennan argued that an originalist approach would be "misdirected", giving several reasons including the ambiguity of the historical record

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