Why Engel v. Vitale Redefined Faith And Public Schools

A 22-word morning prayer, written by New York’s Board of Regents, ignited one of the most significant constitutional rulings of the last century. We sit down with Professor Katskee to unpack Engel v. Vitale and the First Amendment principles it cemented: government cannot compose or sponsor official prayers, and genuine religious liberty flourishes when the state steps back. From the text of the establishment and free exercise clauses to the human realities inside classrooms, we explore what neutrality actually means for students, teachers, and families.

We walk through the case’s path to the Supreme Court, why “non-denominational” does not solve the problem, and how the Court grounded its reasoning in history. England’s established church and the Book of Common Prayer show what happens when politics and piety fuse: factions battle for control, dissent is punished, and faith bends toward power. Drawing on Madison and Roger Williams, we show why a union of government and religion degrades both, and how neutrality protects devout believers, minority traditions, and nonbelievers alike.

The conversation then turns to today’s legal landscape. Recent rulings often treat free exercise and establishment as if they sit on a seesaw, elevating one by pushing down the other. We break down why that framing risks privileging majority faith practices while narrowing the Establishment Clause to a shadow of its former self. Instead, Engel points to a durable balance: protect student religious expression without letting public institutions script worship. For parents, educators, and citizens, the takeaway is clear—schools can be open to personal faith while remaining officially neutral. If this conversation challenged your assumptions or clarified the stakes, follow the show, share it with a friend, and leave a review to keep these deep dives coming.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Meet The Case And Guest
• 2:54 New York’s Classroom Prayer
• 5:02 The First Amendment’s Two Clauses
• 6:53 Engel’s Core Ruling Explained
• 8:58 History Behind Church And State
• 11:41 Misunderstandings About Separation
• 13:48 From Engel To Today’s Court
• 15:46 Minority Faiths And Silent Christians
• 17:46 Closing Thoughts

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 1:44

He has before the US Supreme Court, liberal department of an American amendment for separation and state. He is often on a constitutional law and offense at Harvard and American University. Professor Kensky, thank you so much for being here today. We were talking about a case that I find interesting. It's often known as the School of Prayer case, Engel versus Vitel. Can you tell us a little bit about this case?

SPEAKER_01: 2:16

Sure. And it is. It's a wonderfully interesting case. It's a case from 1962. And what it was about is this the state of New York, it's this the New York Board of Regents, which is like most states have, state boards of education, what they call it in New York is the Board of Regents. The Board of Regents wrote a prayer and and and required the saying or told school districts to require the saying of it in all their schools and all their classes. The prayer went like this: Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon thee, and we beg thy blessings upon us, our parents, our teachers, and our country. And the idea was that each each school day, at the start of the day, the teacher would say the prayer, the students would join in, and that's what the state required. Ten families, I believe it was, challenged the prayer. And they challenged it in two different ways. They said that that government isn't supposed to be in the business of writing prayers, and government isn't supposed to be supposed to be having religious ceremonies or or uh making our kids say prayers. The case went through the state courts and eventually got up to the U.S. Supreme Court. And what the U.S. Supreme Court uh in in excuse me, in the lower courts, in the lower state courts, the state courts had said, well, you can't force any kids to say the prayer. So the state kind of revised its procedures and they made it so that kids who who's who, or really it was whose parents said, we don't want our children to say the prayer, could be exempted from it. Wasn't clear exactly how that worked, whether they just sat there or stood there or walked out of the room. But by the time it got to the Supreme Court, it was uh presented as nobody is required to do this prayer, but here's the prayer that goes on in every classroom. The Supreme Court considered the case and and decided that it was impermissible, a violation of the First Amendment for the required prayer and for the government to have written the prayer. The First Amendment has two religion clauses to it. Uh, the First Amendment starts out this way it's Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. The first bit of that, the establishment clause, is is the bar on government creating a church or holding religious ceremonies or doing things in basically involving itself in religion. And the second part of it, the free exercise clause, is designed to protect the rights of individuals to practice their faith. These two things are supposed to work together, even though the Supreme Court often these days talks about them as not working together. They're supposed to work together in this sense. I get to practice my faith or not, according to the dictates of conscience, according to what I believe. That's my free exercise right. And the government doesn't get to interfere with that, doesn't get to put a thumb on the scale one way or the other, doesn't get to encourage or pressure me to practice, to practice a preferred faith or not to practice mine. And that is, and that is the establishment clause. What the court did when it looked at this, it looked at the the state of New York both putting it, both writing a prayer and saying this is a prayer that everybody should deliver and should should be fine with. Everybody should be happy, it's sort of neutral, it's non-denominational, and then said it should be said in all the schools. The court looked at this and said that, and said this. We think that the constitutional prohibition against laws respecting an establishment of religion must at least mean that in this country it is no part of the business of government to compose official prayers for any group of the American people to recite as part of a religious program carried by on carried on by government. In other words, that's not the government's business. Religion, the court said, is too precious and too holy and too personal to be left up to the government. That's for people to decide in their families and in their houses of worship and in their own hearts and minds. And the government is supposed to get out of that business because that's how we make sure that we all get to practice our faith. And in fact, the court did more than that. It went through and it talked about the history of how we came to have those clauses of the Constitution. And they said that they said that the colonists who came here originally came to this country in part to get away from the government's official writing of prayers and imposition of prayers. What the court said is that in England there was the established Church of England, the Anglican Church, and there was the established Book of Common Prayer, which specifies all the rituals and prayers that people are supposed to say. That was what was required. Everybody was supposed to follow it and practice it. And not only did that mean that if you were not following those rules, you were in trouble. That was that was a criminal offense. It also meant that churches, religious denominations were fighting for control to try to get their preferred theology, their preferred prayers into the Book of Common Prayers to have that be the rule. And so what would happen is the big denominations would fight and exercise political control for a while, and they would get their prayers to be the official thing and their rituals, and then the politics would change and somebody else would be in control, and that and that majority would be uh would impose its prayers. And meanwhile, not only were all these fierce political battles, but also the the poor people whose whose faiths and whose churches and and denominations were never big enough to play to fight that game very effectively, they had to leave if they were going to practice their faith. So they came here to the to America. That was the basis for a lot of the early settlement of this country and the basic understanding of what our fundamental freedoms are. So the court said that was what went on in putting the protections for religious freedom into the First Amendment, is to make sure that government isn't going to be putting its stamp of approval on particular religions or to particular prayers, or wasn't going to be drafting prayers and telling us this is what you should say, wasn't going to be telling us what we should believe. In fact, what the what the court did was uh drawing on something that James Madison said, the court said that we've always recognized that an establishment of religion leads to this problem, the court said. A union of government and religion tends to destroy government and to degrade religion. James Madison said that it actually came out of the theology of Roger Williams, who was the founder of Rhode Island and was uh was one of the early Baptist theologians. He thought that if government gets involved with religion, even just to give a little tiny nod of approval to one faith or one religious activity as opposed to others, it distorted religion in two different ways. He he said, and he taught that for us as believers, it is uh it is creating incentives to believe what the government wants to think instead of coming to it as a matter of our own faith and our own hearts. And he said for the religious denominations themselves, when the government is giving out goodies to religion, even if it's just that little nod of approval, much less if it's money or anything else or any sort of support, what happens is that religions are kind of they're gonna kind of skew their theology, skew their teachings, skew their practices to make them a little more palatable to the government officials who were giving out the goodies. And he thought that that was devastating to religion. Well, our founders, our framers of our constitution understood that. That's what they were doing. What the Supreme Court said in angle is this prayer by the New York State Board of Regents, the Board of Education, was having precisely those devastating consequences for religious freedom for everybody.

SPEAKER_00: 11:20

What do you think that people most often misunderstand about this ruling and about the establishment clause more broadly?

SPEAKER_01: 11:30

So one thing that people often misunderstand, and that the court in Engel spoke to directly, is they often think that the idea of separation of religion and government is anti-religious. They think that it's hostility toward religion. Why can't you just let us have our thing? Our thing being being our faith in public life and in public institutions. And what the court said is essentially, now this I'm paraphrasing, but said if you think that that's anti-religious, you've got it exactly backwards. It is the way that we respect religion, we treat it as something too important to be corrupted by government. It's the way that we treat it as too important that you be able to practice your faith, and that we all do, and that we don't have any of those distorting influences. So the court did a really careful job of explaining why that's the wrong way to think about things, and yet, and yet we regularly, regularly hear people complain about the establishment clause, complain about these protections, complain about cases like Engle Against Vitali as being as being government being hostile to religion, and a a reading of our constitution is hostile to religion. It is absolutely the opposite, and the court recognized that.

SPEAKER_00: 12:56

Oh, since 1962, the court's approach to religion in public schools has shifted several times. How did this case shape later cases? And where do you see the court's current trajectory on school prayer and religious expression heading?

SPEAKER_01: 13:10

Well, you asked a big question or several big questions there. The first thing is that this case, angle, is one of the centerpieces and has been of our constitutional jurisprudence for well, it's well over half a century, it's 70 years or something like that. Things are changing now, and I'll get to that in a second. But the idea that we make sure the government is not putting its thumb on the scale in favor of any faith because otherwise we're not respecting the religious freedom of everybody. That's been one of the very most important constitutional principles defining defining the cases and our culture. It's it it defined our culture since the very beginning, and it defined the case law, the jurisprudence of the Supreme Court and of the lower courts since the time of Engel, since 1962. Today we have a Supreme Court or a majority of the Supreme Court that instead of viewing the religion clauses, the establishment and free exercise clauses as working hand in hand, treats them as at odds with each other. Now it doesn't always say that. In fact, in one recent case by Justice Borsich, the court said the said, use the right language in saying that the clauses are supposed to work hand in hand. But the way that the court has done that in recent years is to really treat the two clauses as though there's a seesaw, a teeter-totter. And on one side is the free exercise clause and the other side is the establishment clause. And if you want to raise one of them, you have to smash one down. And what they've done is they've treated free exercise or a particular version of free exercise as the preeminent constitutional right, as more important than probably everything else. That's the direction that I think the Supreme Court is going. And in doing so, it has whittled away at what the establishment clause means, this central protection for religious freedom since the very beginning. And it's done this in a way, I said it was a particular view of free exercise. It actually isn't the view, I don't think, that we all get to practice our faith and get to be respected in practicing our faith or not, according to, according to our beliefs. It's to give priority to the majority faith at the expense of minorities. When what the Supreme Court understood and explained in angle and what the founders understood, but that I do not think the majority of the Supreme Court currently understands or believes, is that protecting religious freedom means protecting religious freedom for everybody. And that thing I was talking about before, when government puts its thumb on the scale or it it builds up or supports one faith, it does so at the expense of the rest of us. It does so at the expense of minority faiths, it does so at the expense of non-believers. It does so even at the expense of, so the minority, majority faith in this country is Christianity. It does so even at the expense of Christians who take seriously what Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount about not making a show of your prayers, prayers between you and God personally, and not to be a show. People who take that belief seriously, Christians who take that belief seriously, are also under threat when the when the courts allow government to be in the business of supporting and promoting particular religious views.

SPEAKER_00: 17:05

You know, a version that is easily digestible. We greatly appreciate your expertise.

SPEAKER_01: 17:11

Oh, it's my pleasure. I love this series.