The education committee of the Kentucky Senate is currently considering a bill for a "day of prayer" in the state's schools. The bill known as HB 40 was already passed by the Kentucky House of Representatives.



As a scholar who has studied school prayer this bill raises the ghosts of history. As far back as the early 19th century, Catholic students and other religious groups were sometimes whipped, beaten and worse, for not participating in prayer and Bible reading in the common schools, a predecessor to the public schools.

School prayer and the Supreme Court Before looking at this history in more depth, it is important to understand the Supreme Court's decisions about school prayer. The First Amendment's Establishment Clause requires that government not favor or endorse one religion over others or religion over nonreligion. One thing to bear in mind is that even if a law is found constitutional, the way it is applied in individual schools may be unconstitutional.

In two landmark judgments in 1962 and 1963, the U.S. Supreme Court declared organized public school prayer to be unconstitutional. Some commentators have interpreted these decisions to mean that the court took prayer out of the public schools. But what the court said was that it is unconstitutional for public schools to promote prayer.

Later U.S. Supreme Court decisions clarified that promoting prayer includes endorsing or creating policies that allow for organized prayer under the guise of being "student-initiated."

In my view, a more accurate way of looking at the Supreme Court's school prayer decisions is that they have left prayer to individual students during the school day. Students can pray on their own or say grace before meals with friends and others, but they cannot impose prayer on others. Nor can the school itself.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Discrimination against Catholics In the 1840s and throughout much of the 19th century, school prayer and Bible reading were used in an attempt to discriminate against Catholics and other religious groups.