New York town's prayers test church-state separation

Richard Wolf | USA TODAY

GREECE, N.Y. — The Rev. Lou Sirianni opened the most recent monthly meeting of the Greece Town Board with a prayer that reached back 239 years.

"Be thou present, O God of wisdom, and direct the councils of this honorable assembly," he began, quoting from the Rev. Jacob Duché's invocation before the first Continental Congress in 1774. The prayer ended, "All this we ask in the name and through the merits of Jesus Christ, Thy Son and our Savior."

Not everyone in Greece — not even everyone at the sparsely attended town board sessions — prays to Jesus or believes in his saving powers. Some don't pray at all. Many more don't see a place for it at government meetings.

A 6-year-old legal tussle over prayer in this Upstate New York community outside Rochester will come before the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday, and the result could have implications for governments from Congress to the nation's smallest towns and villages.

"We've been through this before — a couple hundred years ago," says Sirianni, who selected the passage from 1774 to drive home the point. "If they do not allow it, well, then they've got to be looking at every other place where it's been done."

The Supreme Court thought it had settled this age-old dispute in 1983, when it upheld the Nebraska Legislature's funding of a chaplain who delivered daily prayers. Chief Justice Warren Burger ruled in Marsh v. Chambers that such prayers had become "part of the fabric of our society."

Whether that fabric includes the prayers delivered under Greece Town Supervisor John Auberger's anything-goes policy remains to be seen. Since switching from a moment of silence in 1999, the board meetings in this heavily Christian town of nearly 100,000 often begin with references to Jesus, Christ or the Holy Spirit. Through 2007, all the prayer-givers were Christian.

"Who wants to listen to this stuff?" says Linda Stephens, 70, an avowed atheist and one of two women who took the town to court in 2008 for favoring Christian prayer-givers and permitting sectarian prayers. "It's just inappropriate."

STREET SIGNS AND SEWERS

Greece is an unlikely testing ground for the separation of church and state. Most residents have been more wrapped up in Tuesday's local elections, including a race to replace the term-limited Auberger. Voting remains open for the theme of the town hall's Christmas tree.

When the board meets Thursday, a day after the historic oral arguments at the Supreme Court, its agenda will be dominated by street signs and sewer easements, plans for snow season and appointments to the Town of Greece Tree Council.

Those are the types of things that got Stephens and her fellow litigant, Susan Galloway, involved in local government in the first place. For Stephens, it was a town-sponsored Frisbee golf course that crisscrossed her favorite bike path.

As the two women began to attend more town board meetings, their focus turned to the opening prayers. Once the lawsuit was filed, the town imported a Jewish layman, a man of the Baha'i faith and a Wiccan priestess who prayed to Athena and Apollo.

That wasn't all that happened. Stephens, a widow, awoke one morning to find her mailbox on top of her car. Part of a fire hydrant turned up in her swimming pool. And an anonymous letter urged her to "be careful ... lawsuits can be detrimental."

The women lost in federal district court but won their appeal when Circuit Court Judge Guido Calabresi, a former Yale Law School dean, ruled the town's procedures "virtually ensured a Christian viewpoint" and featured a "steady drumbeat of often specifically sectarian Christian prayers."

Lawyers for the town board say its policy is hands-off. To get involved in censoring prayers, they argue, would further mix church and state. "We do not control the content of the prayer," Auberger has said.

If it was good enough for the Constitution's framers – and is still good enough for both houses of Congress, most state legislatures and many local governments – the pastors and politicians of Greece reason they're on solid historical ground.

"Our founding fathers did not say freedom from religion," Sirianni says. "They said freedom of religion."

PRECEDENTS ON TOWN'S SIDE

The case hinges on these words from the First Amendment: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." That has come to be known as the Establishment Clause.

The House and Senate have had chaplains on staff since 1789. But the prayers delivered these days by Senate Chaplain Barry Black and House Chaplain Patrick Conroy are far less sectarian than those heard in churches, temples and synagogues.

Most state legislatures open their sessions with a prayer, nearly half of them with guidelines. Many county legislatures open meetings with a prayer, according to an informal survey by the National Association of Counties. National data on prayer practices at the city, town and village levels do not exist.

The Supreme Court cracked down on prayer in schools in the 1960s, ruling against Bible readings, the Lord's Prayer or an official state prayer.

In Lemon v. Kurtzman, a 1971 case involving religion in legislation, the high court devised what became known as the "Lemon test." Government action, it said, should have a secular purpose, cannot advance or inhibit religion and must avoid too much government entanglement with religion.

Then came Marsh, in which the court gave a green light to legislative prayer that does not advance or disparage any faith. The Nebraska Legislature's chaplain at the time, the Rev. Robert Palmer, filed a brief in this year's case arguing that if the lower court decision stands, it "will unjustifiably chill constitutionally protected legislative prayer."

State Sen. Ernie Chambers, who challenged the state in that case, says government bodies should "deal with legislation, not salvation." He recommends that religious leaders "stay in their temples, in their synagogues, in their churches."

The two women contend that the prayers in Greece are unconstitutional because they pressure those in attendance to participate. They note that unlike federal and state government sessions, town board meetings are frequented by residents who must appear for everything from business permits to zoning changes.

The Obama administration forcefully defends the use of prayer. In an interview with Scotusblog, a website that focuses on the Supreme Court, Solicitor General Donald Verrilli said the government's position was dictated by Congress' tradition.

'A SLIPPERY SLOPE'

In Greece, several pastors who have led invocations defend the practice, even when their prayers come with pulpit-like passion.

"Do I want everybody to be a Christian? Of course I do," says Pastor Vince DiPaola of Lakeshore Community Church, one of seven prayer-givers who filed a brief in the case. He says residents who complain about the invocations need to "grow some thicker skin."

His views aren't shared by those of other faiths in the Rochester area.

Rabbi Debbi Till, director of community relations for the Jewish Federation of Greater Rochester, says sectarian prayers "are not what you're expecting to walk into" at a government meeting. "I think it's a slippery slope," she says.

Muhammad Shafiq, executive director of the Hickey Center for Interfaith Studies and Dialogue at Nazareth College, says prayer-givers should be inclusive and avoid evangelizing. "This type of generic prayer is very much according to the dream of the founding fathers," he says.

The Rev. Harmon Stockdale, pastor of Mount Vernon Missionary Baptist Church in Rochester, knows what that type of prayer is like. Giving the invocation to open the House of Representatives one day in September, he addressed "heavenly Father" and ended with "in your Son's name we pray." That type of prayer should be acceptable to believers and non-believers alike, he says.

"The purpose of prayer," he says, "should be unification."

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