Engel v. Vitale

Engel v. Vitale
Supreme Court of the United States
Argued April 3, 1962 Decided June 25, 1962
Full case name	Steven I. Engel, et al. v. William J. Vitale, Jr., et al.'
Citations	370 U.S. 421 (more) 82 S. Ct. 1261; 8 L. Ed. 2d 601; 1962 U.S. LEXIS 847; 20 Ohio Op. 2d 328; 86 A.L.R.2d 1285
Argument	Oral argument
Case history
Prior	191 N.Y.S.2d 453 (Sup. Ct. 1959), aff'd, 206 N.Y.S.2d 183 (App. Div. 1960), aff'd, 176 N.E.2d 579 (N.Y. 1961); cert. granted, 368 U.S. 924 (1961).
Subsequent	186 N.E.2d 124 (N.Y. 1962)
Holding
Recitation of a government-written prayer in public schools violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, even if the prayer is denominationally neutral and students may remain silent or be excused from the classroom during its recitation.
Court membership
Chief Justice Earl Warren Associate Justices Hugo Black · Felix Frankfurter William O. Douglas · Tom C. Clark John M. Harlan II · William J. Brennan Jr. Potter Stewart · Byron White
Case opinions
Majority	Black, joined by Warren, Douglas, Clark, Harlan, Brennan
Concurrence	Douglas
Dissent	Stewart
Frankfurter and White took no part in the consideration or decision of the case.
Laws applied
U.S. Const. amend. I

Engel v. Vitale, 370 U.S. 421 (1962), was a landmark United States Supreme Court case in which the Court ruled that it is unconstitutional for state officials to compose an official school prayer and encourage its recitation in public schools, due to violation of the First Amendment. The ruling has been the subject of intense debate.

Background

In November 1951 the Board of Regents of New York proposed that public schools start the day with a non-denominational prayer. School boards were authorized but not required to to adopt the recommendation. It became known as the The Regents' prayer because it was written by the New York State Board of Regents. The prayer was twenty-two words that went as follows:

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

The proposal was adopted by the Herricks Union Free School District in July 1958. Students could opt-out with a parent's signature. Five parents of public school students attending Herricks High School in New Hyde Park sued the school board president William J. Vitale, Jr challenging the constitutionality of the Regents Prayer. Two of the plaintiffs were Jewish, one was an atheist, one was Unitarian church member, and one was a member of the New York Society for Ethical Culture. Steven I. Engel, a Jewish man, became the named plaintiff.

The plaintiffs argued that opening the school day with such a prayer violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution as applied to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment. The governments of twenty-two states submitted an amicus curiae brief to the Supreme Court urging affirmance of the New York Court of Appeals decision that upheld the constitutionality of the prayer. The American Jewish Committee, the Synagogue Council of America, and the American Ethical Union each submitted briefs urging the Court to instead reverse and rule that the prayer was unconstitutional.

Lower court history

After losing in the state courts, the parents filed a federal appeal, which they lost. The divided New York Court of Appeals agreed with the lower state courts that the Regents' prayer could be read in public schools without violating the Establishment Clause as long as student participation was voluntary. The courts said the prayer was constitutional because of the the opt-out provision.

Supreme Court of the United States

In a 6–1 decision, the Supreme Court held that reciting government-written prayers in public schools was unconstitutional, violating the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.

Relevant precedents were Everson v. Board of Education of Ewing Township (1947), McCollum v. Board of Education (1948) and Zorach v. Clauson (1952). These cases had developed the "wall of separation" interpretation of the Establishment clause.

Majority opinion

Writing for the majority, Justice Hugo Black wrote that recitation of a government-written prayer by school children was "a practice wholly inconsistent with the Establishment Clause" that breached the "Constitutional wall of separation between Church and State" even though the prayer is "non-denominational" and voluntary.

The opinion included a lengthy history of religious freedom, concluding:

It is a matter of history that this practice of establishing governmentally composed prayers for religious services was one of the reasons which caused many of our early colonists to leave England and seek religious freedom in America.

One point of contention was the broadness of holding that a showing of coercion was not required to demonstrate an Establishment Clause violation. Justice Black wrote the following to explain this point:

When the power, prestige and financial support of government is placed behind a particular religious belief, the indirect coercive pressure upon religious minorities to conform to the prevailing officially approved religion is plain. But the purposes underlying the Establishment Clause go much further than that. Its first and most immediate purpose rested on the belief that a union of government and religion tends to destroy government and to degrade religion. The history of governmentally established religion, both in England and this country, showed that whatever government had allied itself with one particular religion, the inevitable result had been that it had incurred the hatred, disrespect, and even contempt of those who held contrary beliefs.

Douglas concurrence

In a concurring opinion, Justice Douglas argued that the Establishment Clause is also violated when the government grants financial aid to religious schools. He stated a view of the First Amendment that required the government to be neutral in religious matters:

The philsophy is that the atheist or agnostic—the non-believer—is entitled to go his own way. The philosophy is that if government interferes in matters spiritual, it will be a divisive force.

The concurrence was highly criticized. Douglas argued that all religious exercise in public settings was unconstitutional, foreshadowing the Court's decision in Abington v. Schempp the following year which took a neutrality view of Establishment: "In the relationship between man and religion, the State is firmly committed to a position of neutrality".

Stewart dissent

In his dissenting opinion, Justice Stewart contended that the Establishment Clause was originally written to abolish the idea of a state-sponsored church, and not to stop a non-mandatory "brief non-denominational prayer".

Reactions

Further information: School Prayer Amendment

The negative reaction of Congress was overwhelming. Only John Lindsay and Emanuel Celler supported the decision. Frank J. Becker called it "the most tragic decision in the history of the United States" and introduced a proposed constitutional amendment to allow religious exercises in public schools. There was already a lot of anger towards the Warren Court, especially among white Protestants in the South and Midwest, for its school desegregation decision in Brown v. Board of Education. After the Engel decision, some members of Congress, like George Andrews of Alabama and James Eastland of Mississippi, made references to both desegregation and prayer in schools in their attacks on the Warren Court.

The Christian Century was critical of the southern polticians who opposed the ruling, accusing them of weaponizing the school prayer controversy "to whip the court for its desegregation of public schools". New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis wrote that politicians were trying to show "how equally wrong the Court had been to outlaw segregation".

The Senate Judiciary Committee headed by James Eastland held hearings on five measures to overturn the Engel decision. Bishop James Pike, a prominent religious moderate and lawyer, opposed the Court's broad interpretation of the Establishment Clause because it prohibited non-denominational prayer. He testified in support of a constitutional amendment that would limit establishment of religion to "the recognition as an Established Church or any denomination, sect, or organized religious association".

While internal debate continued within the Jewish community about the role of religion in the public square, the American Jewish Congress called the case "a great milestone", and the decision was celebrated by most American Jewish groups.

The National Association of Evangelicals, the National Council of Churches and The Christian Century opposed proposals to overturn Engel by amendment. Supportive of the decision, The Christian Century noted that Engel had not decided the question of prayer in public schools because its holding was limited to a government-drafted prayer. Justice Clark's public statements distancing the majority opinion from Douglas' concurrence initially gave supporters of school prayer some hope that the Court would decline to issue a broad ruling in upcoming school prayer cases, but recitation of The Lord's Prayer in public school was ruled unconstitutional in Schempp the following year.

Subsequent developments

Engel has been the basis for several subsequent decisions limiting government-directed prayer in school. In Wallace v. Jaffree (1985), the Supreme Court ruled Alabama's law permitting one minute for prayer or meditation was unconstitutional. In Lee v. Weisman (1992), the court prohibited clergy-led prayer at middle school graduation ceremonies. Lee v. Weisman, in turn, was a basis for Santa Fe ISD v. Doe (2000), in which the Court extended the ban to school-organized student-led prayer at high school football games in which a majority of students voted in favor of the prayer.

A year after the 1962 ruling the Court decided in Abington School District v. Schempp that recitation of the Lord's prayer and Bible reading in school were unconstitutional under the Establishment Clause.

See also

• List of United States Supreme Court cases, volume 370
• List of United States Supreme Court cases
• Separation of church and state in the United States
• West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette (1943)
• Everson v. Board of Education (1947)
• Abington School District v. Schempp (1963)
• Lemon v. Kurtzman (1971)
• Wallace v. Jaffree (1985)
• Kennedy v. Bremerton School District (2022)
• Herricks Union Free School District

Further reading

• Dierenfield, Bruce J. (2007). The battle over school prayer: how Engel v. Vitale changed America. University Press of Kansas. ISBN 978-0-7006-1525-4. Retrieved July 5, 2012.
• Kurland, Philip B. (1961). "Of Church and State and the Supreme Court". University of Chicago Law Review. 29 (1): 1–96. doi:10.2307/1598520. JSTOR 1598520. S2CID 152318442..
• Laats, Adam. "Our schools, our country: American evangelicals, public schools, and the Supreme Court decisions of 1962 and 1963." Journal of religious history 36.3 (2012): 319-334.
• Schwarz, Alan (1968). "No Imposition of Religion: The Establishment Clause Value". Yale Law Journal. 77 (4): 692–737. doi:10.2307/795008. JSTOR 795008..
• Sutherland, Arthur E. Jr. (1962). "Establishment According to Engel". Harvard Law Review. 76 (1): 25–52. doi:10.2307/1338663. JSTOR 1338663..

External links

• Works related to Engel v. Vitale at Wikisource
• Text of Engel v. Vitale, 370 U.S. 421 (1962) is available from: Cornell CourtListener Findlaw Google Scholar Justia Library of Congress Oyez (oral argument audio)
• Government case review