What Wall?

AS the renewed debate over prayer in the public schools suggests, the cultural conflict of the modem era finds vivid and enduring focus in the legal dispute about the place of religion in the civic order. Here the battle is overt, relentless, and pervasive—with traditional belief and custom retreating before a secularist onslaught in our courts and other public institutions.

During the past three decades, the U.S. Supreme Court has handed down a series of rulings that decree a “wall of separation” between affairs of state and the precepts of religion. In the most controverted of these cases, in 1962, the Court said an officially sponsored prayer recited in the New York public schools was an abridgement of our freedoms. This prayer read, in its entirety: “Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence on Thee, and we beg Thy blessings upon us, our parents, our teachers, and our country.” In the Court’s opinion, this supplication triggered the First Amendment ban against an “establishment of religion,” logic that was later extended to reading the Bible and reciting the Lord’s Prayer in the classroom.

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M. Stanton Evans

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AS the renewed debate over prayer in the public schools suggests, the cultural conflict of the modem era finds vivid and enduring focus in the legal dispute about the place of religion in the civic order. Here the battle is overt, relentless, and pervasive—with traditional belief and custom retreating before a secularist onslaught in our courts and other public institutions.

During the past three decades, the U.S. Supreme Court has handed down a series of rulings that decree a “wall of separation” between affairs of state and the precepts of religion. In the most controverted of these cases, in 1962, the Court said an officially sponsored prayer recited in the New York public schools was an abridgement of our freedoms. This prayer read, in its entirety: “Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence on Thee, and we beg Thy blessings upon us, our parents, our teachers, and our country.” In the Court’s opinion, this supplication triggered the First Amendment ban against an “establishment of religion,” logic that was later extended to reading the Bible and reciting the Lord’s Prayer in the classroom.