Joe Kennedy, an assistant high school football coach in Washington state, has accepted a $1,775,000 settlement package from the school district that fired him over his post-game prayer ritual after a court found the move unconstitutional.
“We are thrilled that Bremerton and Coach Kennedy are back together and we hope they go undefeated,” an executive general counsel at First Liberty Institute, a legal organization that represented Kennedy, told the Seattle Times in a statement.
Kennedy first began praying on the 50-yard line after football games in 2008. Over the coming years, Kennedy’s postgame ritual grew to include athletes and students with inspirational talks featuring religious references. The informal ritual was never made mandatory for any students, athletes, or coaches.
Citing concerns that Kennedy’s actions might prompt parents to sue the Bremerton school district for violating students’ rights, the Bremerton school board placed the assistant coach on administrative leave in 2015 and recommended against renewing his contract the following year.
The football coach later sued the school board on the grounds that his post-game ritual was protected under the First Amendment and the case made it all the way to the Supreme Court, which found in his favor.
In June 2022, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Kennedy defending his right to pray in a 6-3 decision. “Kennedy’s private religious exercise did not come close to crossing any line one might imagine separating protected private expression from impermissible government coercion,” Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote for the majority in June of last year.
“Learning how to tolerate speech or prayer of all kinds is ‘part of learning how to live in a pluralistic society,’ a trait of character essential to ‘a tolerant citizenry,’” Gorsuch added, before admonishing the district for giving preference to “secular activity.”
Justice Sonya Sotomayor, writing for the minority, alluded to the “longstanding concerns surrounding government endorsement of religion.”
“It elevates one individual’s interest in personal religious exercise, in the exact time and place of that individual’s choosing, over society’s interest in protecting the separation between church and state, eroding the protections for religious liberty for all,” Sotomayor wrote in her dissent.
In October 2022, a U.S. District Court in Tacoma, Wash., ruled that Kennedy should be compensated for “reasonable attorneys’ fees” and reinstated prior to March 15, 2023.
According to a spokesperson for the coach, Kennedy was reinstated to his old job in early March and will return to return to campus when the football season restarts in a few months.