School District of Abington Township v. Schempp

School District of Abington Township v. Schempp, legal case in which the U.S. Supreme Court on June 17, 1963, ruled (8–1) that legally or officially mandated Bible reading or prayer in public schools is unconstitutional. Whether required by state laws or by rules adopted by local school boards, such practices, the court held, violate the establishment clause of the First Amendment, which prohibits Congress from making any law “respecting an establishment of religion.” (The various provisions of the First Amendment, including the establishment clause, were gradually incorporated, or made binding on the states, by the Supreme Court in the first half of the 20th century through the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.)

Background

The case arose in 1958, when Edward Lewis Schempp, his wife, and two of their children, who attended public schools in Pennsylvania, filed suit in U.S. district court in Philadelphia, alleging that their religious rights under the First Amendment had been violated by a state law that required public schools to begin each school day with a reading of at least 10 passages from the Bible. The Schempps, who were Unitarians, claimed that the law was an unconstitutional establishment of religion and that it interfered with the free exercise of their religious faith, in violation of the First Amendment’s free-exercise clause (“Congress shall make no law…prohibiting the free exercise of [religion]”). They asked the court for declaratory and injunctive relief (i.e., to declare the law unconstitutional and to issue an injunction against its enforcement) and to strike down the school district’s additional requirement that students recite the Lord’s Prayer at the beginning of each school day.

After the district court found in favour of the Schempps, the school district and the state’s superintendent of schools appealed to the Supreme Court. Before the case was heard, however, the Pennsylvania General Assembly amended the law to permit students to be excused from Bible readings upon the written request of a parent. The Supreme Court then vacated and remanded the district court’s judgment for further consideration in light of the amended law. After the district court held that the law remained in violation of the establishment clause, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a new appeal, consolidating it with a similar case that had arisen in Baltimore, Maryland, Murray v. Curlett, in which the lower court had found that Bible reading in public schools is constitutional. Oral arguments were heard on February 27–28, 1963.

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Majority opinion

In an opinion for an 8–1 majority written by Justice Tom C. Clark, the court noted and reaffirmed the Supreme Court’s incorporation of the establishment clause in Cantwell v. Connecticut (1940). It also endorsed the view, supported in numerous precedents, that the establishment clause was not intended merely to prohibit Congress from aiding or preferring one religion at the expense of others but also to ensure that it does not promote all religions, or religion generally. The court noted with approval the dissenting opinion of Justice Robert H. Jackson in the Supreme Court’s decision in Everson v. Board of Education of the Township of Ewing (1947), in which he wrote that “the effect of the religious freedom Amendment to our Constitution was to take every form of propagation of religion out of the realm of things which could directly or indirectly be made public business, and thereby be supported in whole or in part at taxpayers’ expense.” The court likewise cited Justice Wiley B. Rutledge’s dissent in Everson, according to which “the [First] Amendment’s purpose was not to strike merely at the official establishment of a single sect, creed or religion…[but] to create a complete and permanent separation of the spheres of religious activity and civil authority by comprehensively forbidding every form of public aid or support for religion.” Those principles, the court noted in Schempp, “have been long established, recognized and consistently reaffirmed.”

However, just as the government may not promote any or all religions, it is also prohibited from inhibiting or interfering with religion, as the free-exercise clause of the First Amendment establishes. The court again cited Rutledge’s dissent in Everson, among other precedents, to support that point: “Our constitutional policy…does not deny the value or the necessity for religious training, teaching or observance.” Taken together, therefore, the two religion clauses of the First Amendment require the state to be neutral not only as between different groups of religious believers but also as between religious believers and nonbelievers.

On the basis of that conclusion, the court in Schempp devised a test to determine whether a given statute is in violation of the establishment clause:

The test may be stated as follows: what are the purpose and the primary effect of the enactment? If either is the advancement or inhibition of religion, then the enactment exceeds the scope of legislative power as circumscribed by the Constitution. That is to say that, to withstand the strictures of the Establishment Clause, there must be a secular legislative purpose and a primary effect that neither advances nor inhibits religion.

That test foreshadowed the Supreme Court’s “Lemon test” for consistency with the establishment clause, which it fashioned in 1971 in Lemon v. Kurtzman.

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Examining the circumstances of the Bible readings and prayers in the schools in Pennsylvania and Maryland, the court found that they constituted religious exercises and were therefore unconstitutional under the establishment clause. The court dismissed as unconvincing the argument that the exercises and the laws requiring them served the secular purpose of “nonreligious moral inspiration.” Nor was it pertinent that students could be excused from the exercises upon the request of a parent, “for that fact furnishes no defense to a claim of unconstitutionality under the Establishment Clause,” as the Supreme Court had held in Engel v. Vitale (1962). Finally, the court denied that its finding amounted to an establishment of a “religion of secularism” or that by failing to uphold the exercises it was interfering in the free-exercise rights of religious students and their parents. “While the Free Exercise Clause clearly prohibits the use of state action to deny the rights of free exercise to anyone,” the court declared, “it has never meant that a majority could use the machinery of the State to practice its beliefs.”

Concurring opinions were filed by Justice Arthur J. Goldberg, joined by Justice John Marshall Harlan, and by Justices William J. Brennan, Jr., and William O. Douglas. Justice Potter Stewart filed a dissenting opinion in which he argued that the record before the court was insufficiently developed to allow it to conclude that the students were coerced into participating in the exercises in violation of the establishment clause.