A federal appeals court ruling on legislative prayer has alarmed secular activists who say the decision privileges people who believe in God and treats nontheists like “second-class citizens.” The 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Friday that it’s constitutional for the Pennsylvania House of Representatives to ban guest chaplains who don’t believe in God or a higher power from delivering opening invocations at its meetings. A group of atheists, agnostics, freethinkers and humanists sued members of the Pennsylvania House in 2016 over its theists-only policy for guest chaplains, arguing that it violates the Constitution’s establishment clause, which prohibits the government from promoting specific religious beliefs. Judge Thomas L. Ambro, who wrote Friday’s 2-1 majority opinion, claimed that because prayer presupposes a higher power, “only theistic invocations can achieve all the purposes of legislative prayer.” “As a matter of traditional practice, a petition to human wisdom and the power of science does not capture the full sense of ‘prayer,’ historically understood,” Ambro wrote. “Because [nontheists] do not proclaim the existence of a higher power, they cannot offer religious prayer in the historical sense.” Americans United for Separation of Church and State, an advocacy group that argued the case for the plaintiffs, called Friday’s ruling discriminatory and “disturbing.” The majority opinion shows a preference for people who believe in God while “sending a message of exclusion and even scorn to non-theists,” said Rob Boston, a senior adviser for the group. “It’s yet another in a problematic line of recent decisions that allow government entities to endorse and promote religion (just about always Christianity) as long as it’s being done for ‘historic’ purposes,” Boston wrote in a blog on Monday, pointing to the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in June that allowed a 40-foot-tall cross to continue to stand on public land in Maryland.

Certain groups of powerful people literally still get to define, in this country, whose philosophy of life gets to qualify as moral, as ethical, as worthy of endorsement by our legislative bodies. Greg Epstein, humanist chaplain at Harvard University

Between 2008 and 2016, over 85% of the Pennsylvania House’s legislative sessions began with a prayer, according to the 3rd Circuit majority opinion. About 90% of the 265 guest chaplains who delivered prayers were Christian. A few of the chaplains were Jewish, Muslim or Sikh. The plaintiffs in the case wanted to offer their own nontheistic prayers touching on themes such as equality, unity, hope, tolerance and justice. But because they didn’t believe in a higher power, they were turned away. Last year, a district judge sided with the plaintiffs and ruled that the House’s restrictions were unconstitutional. After that ruling, House Speaker Mike Turzai started assigning the prayers to members of the House. The appeals court’s decision on Friday reversed the lower court’s decision. Judge L. Felipe Restrepo, who wrote a dissenting opinion, argued that the Pennsylvania House’s policy violates the establishment clause by “instituting a religious orthodoxy” and “controlling the content” of legislative prayer. Restrepo suggested that his colleagues’ opinion that only theistic invocations fulfill the goals of legislative prayer skirted a dangerous line. “This line of reasoning by necessity involves answering sensitive questions about what constitutes the ‘divine’ and what words must be strung together for a speech to constitute a ‘prayer,’ which, in my view, are precisely the type of questions that the Establishment Clause forbids the government—including courts—from answering,” Restrepo said. Americans United told HuffPost it is still reviewing the court’s decision with its clients and has not yet made a decision about whether to appeal.

Mark Makela via Getty Images Prayer in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives on Dec. 19, 2016.