Jessica Ahlquist, an 11th grader at Cranston High School West in Rhode Island, has endured verbal abuse because, as an atheist, she objected to the “School Prayer” that has been on the school’s auditorium wall since 1963. It is now covered with a tarp after Judge Ronald Lagueux of Federal District Court in Providence properly ruled last month that displaying it violated the First Amendment’s prohibition against “establishment of religion.”

The anger and hatred directed at Ms. Ahlquist — she was called “an evil little thing” on talk radio by a Cranston state representative — helps explain why the judge, responding to her brave lawsuit, did his duty under the Constitution and ordered immediate removal of the prayer, which begins “Our Heavenly Father” and concludes “Amen” and was visible throughout the auditorium.

Dozens of speakers at school committee meetings agreed it is a Christian prayer. As Judge Lagueux wrote, “The guiding principle of Establishment Clause jurisprudence has been government neutrality,” and the prayer fails all tests of neutrality set by the Supreme Court. It was “clearly religious in nature” when installed. While the school committee’s 4-to-3 vote last March to keep it was based partly on its importance to the school’s “history and tradition,” “no amount” of either “can cure a constitutional infraction,” the judge wrote. Recent meetings in Cranston about the prayer involved the kind of “excessive entanglement with religion” the court has warned against, with prayer backers reading from the Bible. The meetings showed why what believers consider a harmless request to respect a prayer can feel like coercion to nonbelievers.

As Ms. Ahlquist explained to The Times about her response to the prayer: “It seemed like it was saying, every time I saw it, ‘You don’t belong here.’ ” The kindness, friendship and other values the prayer champions are universal, but a statement of religious belief has no place in a public high school auditorium.