In a 6–3 decision authored by Justice Neil Gorsuch, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Joe Kennedy, an assistant football coach for a Washington State high school who was fired by his district for praying on the field after games.
“Kennedy’s private religious exercise did not come close to crossing any line one might imagine separating protected private expression from impermissible government coercion,” wrote Gorsuch. Kennedy did not require his players to join him in his brief postgame prayers, although he did allow them to do so.
“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,'” continued Gorsuch in the opinion, before going on to admonish the district for having given preference to “secular activity.”
Kennedy’s case has garnered significant attention from religious-liberty and progressive activists alike, with the latter accusing Kennedy of breaching the “separation of church and state.” Justice Sonia Sotomayor penned the dissent — joined only by Justices Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan — to Gorsuch’s opinion.
In that dissent, Sotomayor accuses the majority of rejecting “longstanding concerns surrounding government endorsement of religion” and using a “nearly toothless coercion analysis” to determine whether Kennedy’s public prayers were inherently coercive.
“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,” continued Sotomayor.
The majority opinion establishes a new framework for interpreting the establishment clause of the First Amendment, providing a less generous definition of what government “coercion” on behalf of a particular religion constitutes, and further strengthens the amendment’s free-exercise clause.