Jonathan Zimmerman
Director, History of Education Program
New York University
"The Other Massive Resistance: School Prayer and the Conservative Revolution, 1962-1984"
January 25, 2001

Jonathan Zimmerman: On July 27, 1962, a newspaper reporter interrupted Martin Luther King, Jr.’s kneel-in protest in Albany, Georgia to ask King about a different kind of worship — school prayer. King was pleading to local officials to end racial segregation in public facilities. Later that day for the third time in 8 months, Albany authorities would jail him. But King drew a sharp distinction between prayerful protests against discrimination and teacher-led devotion in public schools, which the U.S. Supreme Court had struck down several weeks earlier in Engel versus Vitale. On his knees awaiting arrest, King gave his full support to the Court. "Its prayer decision was sound and good," King declared, "reaffirming something that is basic in our Constitution, namely separation of church and state."

Coupled with King’s defense of the Supreme Court however, Wallace’s comments heralded a critical shift in the politics of public school religious instruction. During the 1940s and 1950s, a strong consensus undergirded the concept, if not the content, of school-based religious education. Liberals stressed what they called the social teachings of the gospel and conservatives emphasized its message of personal salvation in Christ. But both camps agreed upon the overall need for religious instruction in public schools.

The Supreme Court’s prayer rulings brought a sudden and bitter end to this long-standing accord. Lest they jeopardize the Court’s precarious authority on racial questions, most white liberals, although as we’ll see not all Black ones, backed the Court’s prayer and Bible reading bents. "Meanwhile, segregationist southern gentlemen, such as Wallace, led the battle to retain religious exercises," as one caustic Minnesotan noted. "Gleefully defying the Court, they seized the prayer issue to stoke their broader vendetta against Brown v. Board of Education and the Black freedom struggle in general," the same Minnesota observer complained.

When George Wallace came north to campaign for the presidency in 1964 however, crowds applauded his attack upon the God-less Supreme Court as loudly as they cheered his censure of civil rights reforms. Indeed popular rejection of the Court’s prayer decisions, like massive resistance of its racial dicta, transcended regional as well as religious boundaries. Concentrated largely in the urban north, Catholics villafied the prayer bans as atheistic or even communistic. At least one American bishop directed that all masses ask God to forgive the Supreme Court. School prayer also awakened fundamentalist voters, who had traditionally eschewed politics in favor of converting each conscience to Christ. The prayer issue demanded social action on behalf of individual goals, thereby bridging the historic chasm. Within mainline churches finally, the issue became a bone of contention, rather than a force for unity. Although denominational spokesmen stood firmly behind the Court, local ministers as well as laity rallied against it and increasingly against church leaders. In Indiana a prayer supporter scored the "hollow hypocritical hallelujah’s" rising from certain doctors of divinity, the men of turncoat cloth who turned away from God in His moment of need. Six years later a Maine observer linked this apostasy to a much wider array of ails. "The lack of prayers and Bible readings in the public schools and the flood of lewd and obscene shows and films, photographs, literature in the state of Maine is the major factor for the rising rate of juvenile delinquency, for crime, for violence, for demonstrations, for racial riots, for disrespect of law and order and of common decency. Almighty God must be restored to his proper place."

To its critics indeed, the ban on school prayer reflected an overall pattern of cultural decay in the 1960s. As a host of scholars recently reminded us, the 1960s were a very polarized era rather than the radical one. From fashion and the arts to sexuality and race relations, many Americans celebrated a new spirit of openness and experimentation. Outside of the universities and other cosmopolitan locales however, other citizens lamented these trends and laid the groundwork for the conservative revolution that would ensue. The struggle over school prayer echoes as well as extends this interpretation, underscoring not just the general cultural divisions of the 60s but also their specifically religious dimension. Indeed critics of the "Godless Supreme Court" often attributed pornography, crime, and racial unrest near the end of the era to the prayer decisions at its inception. For many of the Court’s foes, especially fundamentalist Christians, the ban upon school prayer served as both a lightning rod and a rationale for their broader perceptions of national decline. It also sparked their entry into a fresh brand of right-wing politics focused less upon economic issues than upon so-called social ones, i.e. crime, abortion, and especially education.

Now we go into the first part of the talk in the chapter, which is called "When Should the Majority Rule?: School Prayer and Civil Rights". And I’ll be referring to this little packet of cartoons, which came out very poorly. I wasn’t expecting such a large audience so I fear I didn’t have enough of them. You can, I used to say when I was in high school teacher, visit with your neighbor.

In 1962, New York’s leading Black newspaper published a fiery column supporting the Supreme Court’s prayer ban and most of all attacking the Court’s white critics. "Among the loudest complainants were Senators Talmage of Georgia and Eastland of Mississippi," wrote James Hicks in the Amsterdam News, citing two of Congress’s most vehement segregationists. "Do I need to say any more? Although the Court’s 1954 anti-segregation ruling was molded in the image of Jesus Christ," Hick’s noted, "men like Talmadge and Eastland had refused to abide by it. Now these same racists insisted that the Court’s prayer decision was preventing them from living like Christ." An accompanying cartoon, which is the first one here, depicted a pair of white church bigots carrying Bibles and a sign that pleaded, "Supreme Court unfair. We need prayer." The prayer protesters were trampling upon two other demonstrators — one black and one white — whose sign demanded equal rights for all. Like Hick’s column, the sign scorned white hypocrites who seized upon the prayer issue to clock the black freedom struggle. The cartoon’s caption, which by the way you can’t see because it’s on the top, said, "Standing in the way" and it contained a second implication - any black who supported school prayer would also assist the racist foe. Several weeks later however, a black reader of the Amsterdam News took sharp issue with these claims. "If blacks’ quest for justice truly embodied a Christian spirit," Fannie Ledbetter wrote the News, "their struggle would require more prayer, not less. In these times of disquietude, we should all pray for guidance each day, and schools are not exception."

Here she was echoed by a wide range of civil rights supporters, white as well as black. "In my mind, I keep seeing a public school with doors open wide and children of all races and colors entering," one Michigan woman wrote her Congressman in 1963. "Over the door of the school is a big sign that says, ‘Any Town Public School: All Races Welcome; Jesus Keep Out’, and I see him read the sign and slowly and sadly turn away." In Indiana likewise, and here we are going to go to the next cartoon, newspapers publish a cartoon of a Supreme Court judge who looks a whole lot like Earl Warren, standing in the school house door like George Wallace. Jesus appears of the steps seeking to enter the school but the Judge rebuffs him, "Sorry, this school is segregated," the cartoon’s caption read.

Together these two cartoons reflected an important truth - whereas segregationists stood united behind school prayer, the issue divided America’s civil rights community. Like James Hicks, civil rights supporters often backed the prayer ban on the simple principle of ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’. Since so many segregationists attacked Engel and Schempp (those are the Supreme Court decisions), integration is needed to come to the Court’s defense. Others went on the attack, savaging racists who violated Christ’s teaching of love, but who also tried to inscribe them in the schools. To still other civil rights activists, however, this very message of love made classroom prayer integral, not antithetical, to the freedom struggle. Since God’s word inspired the campaign for racial equality, school prayer could only further this larger sacred cause.

Nowhere were these divisions sharper than among African-Americans, frequently splitting leaders from the rank and file. From the start, most prominent black figures in organizations backed the Supreme Court’s prayer rulings. Meeting just a few days after Engel, the NAACP praised the decision. Martin Luther King Jr. did the same. So did the Chicago defender and the Pittsburgh Courier and other influential Black newspapers. "Ever since the memorable decision of Brown, a small cadre of Southern anti-negro stalwarts has committed itself to discrediting the Supreme Court," declared Philadelphia columnist Gordon R. Hancock. "To heckle and abuse and disparage the Supreme Court has become the South’s second great cause, akin to that of perpetuating slavery. Lest they abet the segregationist in me," Hancock concluded, "Blacks should rally behind the Court’s prayer decision." Across the country, however, Blacks proved reluctant to do so. In Hancock’s native Philadelphia, a June 1962 survey of 6 black pastors found that all but one supported school prayer. One minister said that religious exercises enhanced school discipline. Another black minister feared that the prayer ruling would undermine moral standards in society. A third demanded a Constitutional amendment to overturn it.

Shortly after that, a council of local black Baptist clergymen voiced profound disagreement with the Supreme Court. "As a rule," the council secretary noted, "court should not interfere with our greatest institutions — homes, churches, and schools." Strong proponents of judicial intervention on questions of race and segregation, many African-Americans demanded judicial restraint when it came to school prayer.

Similarly, black prayer supporters often seemed to discover a new solicitude for majoritarian rule. Most black civil rights claims were phrased in terms of timeless verities, not of vote totals. "Whatever the white majority might desire," activists said, "both the Constitution and the Bible mandated freedom and equality for African-Americans." During the school prayer debate however, Blacks frequently argued that the popular will should trump all other principles. "It’s undemocratic to deny the majority influence of a country for the opinion of the minority," declared a group of African Methodist Episcopal Zion pastors blasting the Supreme Court. Likewise, a Black letter-writer in Virginia expressed surprise that a supposedly Christian country would bar public school devotionals. "As it is a ‘free’ country in the majority rule, I think prayer should prevail," he argued, "But in order to be equitable, they could let the minority place their fingers in their ears and keep silent." By bracketing the term "free" as a free country, the author signaled that a majority white American society had not yet granted racial justice to its Black minority. In the same breath, however, he insisted that schools should privilege the majority Christian perspective, regardless of the sentiments of non-Christian minorities.

By contrast, the White civil rights establishment generally backed the Court on race as well as prayer, often drawing an explicit link between them. In 1966 for example, the Washington Post blasted Senate minority leader Everett Dirkson for proposing twin Constitutional amendments to override Court decisions on race and on prayer. "In his screens against the Court’s one-man, one-vote rulings," the Post noted, "Dirkson championed the rights of rural and typically white minorities." But in pleading for school prayer, the Illinois Senator suddenly became a staunch proponent of majority rule. Later that year, Dirkson would lead a two-week filibuster to kill an open housing measure barring racial discrimination in the real estate industry. (Now we are going to go to the next cartoon.) A cartoonist for the liberal St. Louis Globe Democrat pictured Dirkson in prayer, hands clasped, standing atop a prostate man who bore the label, "Civil Rights Bill". Lest anyone miss the point, the caption declared, "Nearer my God to thee." "Even as he demanded Christianity in schools," critics claimed, "Dirkson’s recalcitrance on civil rights contradicted the most basic elements of that faith — charity, equality, and love.

In both civil rights and school prayer, meanwhile, Dirkson’s anti-Court leadership also symbolized the northward thrust, indeed the nationalizing thrust, of massive resistance. A close friend of Lyndon Johnson, Dirkson had played an integral role in breaking the filibuster against the 1964 Civil Rights Act and ensuring passage of the 1965 Voter Rights Act. Yet as Martin Luther King Jr. brought black protest above the Mason Dixon Line, especially into Dirkson’s home state of Illinois, the Senator’s order for civil rights cooled considerably. Invoking the sanctity of property rights, Dirkson denounced the 1966 Open Housing Bill. Shortly thereafter the measure died. Then he turned to the battle against school prayer, linking Engel and Schempp to the Supreme Court’s race related decisions. In all of these cases, Dirkson argued, judicial arrogance had eroded individual freedom. "I’m not going to let 9 men say to 190 million people, including children, when and where they can utter their prayers," Dirkson declared.

Although school prayer activists never won a prayer amendment in the 1960s, an almost ceaseless stream of proposals kept the issue alive. Just 10 weeks after the Supreme Court’s 1962 Engel decision, 49 amendment bills had been introduced in Congress. By 1964 the total had swelled to 144. Across the country a bumper crop of grassroot organizations arose to support these measures. The most diligent group was Project America, a Christian youth organization that collected more than one million signatures for a prayer amendment during a seven-month span in 1963 and 64. Meanwhile dozens of film stars lent their names and often their dollars to Project Prayer, which organized huge petition drives of its own. "Not all of Hollywood’s motion picture stars are aligned with liberals seeking to change the American way of life," a Louisiana newspaper gushed. "In these days when movie stars are being linked to civil rights demonstrations on the part of lawless trespassers, it’s good to know that there are representatives of the film industry that seek to preserve our constitutional freedoms." A more skeptical columnist quipped that Project Prayer’s roster of celebrities, including John Wayne, Ginger Rogers, and Ronald Wilson Reagan, seemed "more versed in marital infidelity than religious fundamentalism. Nevertheless," he acknowledged, "the campaign had helped whip thousands of fundamentalist Protestants into a letter writing frenzy on behalf of the prayer amendment."

In truth many, perhaps most, of the letter writers were not fundamentalists or even Protestants. In fact, they were Catholics. For most of their history, American Catholics were the country’s foremost champions of church - state separation. After the courts ruled against school prayer, however, Catholics made a "complete reversal and became the most vigorous defender of religious practices in the public schools," as one critic ruefully reported. Nearly every leading Catholic cleric condemned the Engel and Schempp decisions while several Catholic newspapers warned that, "litigious minorities would face violent retribution if they continued to resist school prayer." (And by the way, litigious minorities is code for people with names like "Jonathan Zimmerman".) Long persecuted minorities themselves, Catholics, like African-Americans, discovered a new affinity for pejoratarian politics when it came to school prayer. "Catholics do have short memories," wrote one Jewish spokesman. "They seem to have forgotten their own struggles against the Protestants to prevent Bible reading and prayer recitation in the public schools, presumably because they weren’t Catholic enough."

To Catholic spokesmen, by contrast, the church’s position remained consistent throughout. During the Bible riots that swept cities in the 1840s, Catholics "did not ask that prayer in the schools be discontinued," as a Philadelphia newspaper argued. "Instead," a New Mexico paper added, "Catholics objected only to ‘forced’ participation in Protestant practices, especially reading from the King James Bible." "Now the Court proposed to strick all religious practices from the school, thereby enshrining ‘secular humanism’ as a ‘state-sponsored religion’," as one Catholic bishop complained. Here Catholics indeed began to echo the rhetoric of fundamentalist Christians who slowly entered the political arena to fight for school prayer. "The Catholic church, properly led, could have great impact if it would but ecumenicize with the real Protestants — the fundamentalists," a leading Catholic litigator argued. "There are vast areas for common action with these people." (By the way, if you find the notes of a lawyer in one of these cases…I mean except for my marriage and the birth of my two children, that was the highlight of my life, which might suggest that I actually don’t have a life.)

Writing in 1973, the litigator noted the steady growth of fundamentalist activism since Engel and Schempp. To be sure, many fundamentalists still eschewed politics. In 1965, for example, future moral majority founder, Jerry Falwell, insisted that their only task was to lead each American conscience to Christ. "Preachers are not called to be politicians, but soul winners," Falwell declared. "We must get off the streets and back into the pulpits."

In school prayer, fundamentalist Christians discovered a social issue that directly concerned individual souls. Sanctioned by Caesar but rendered unto God, it spanned the historic gap between political action in this world and personal salvation in the next one. Hence the prayer issue also brought thousands of fundamentalists into politics, where they linked the Court’s ban on prayer to a growing maelstrom of social perils. "Like Sodom and Gomorrah, like Rome, America is rotting from within," one angry prayer advocate wrote in the typical Jeremiah. "Immorality is flourishing and premarital sex is being condoned. Juvenile delinquency is on the rise. America is in an advanced state of moral decline."

Nor did this burgeoning right-wing movement hesitate to identify the cause of America’s moral decline — liberals and liberalism. To some critics, especially fundamentalist Christians, these despised liberals were quite literally agents of Satan. And if you just want to get a sense of the spirit of that attack, look at the next cartoon, which is an attack on the National Council of Churches which ran in the Christian Beacon which was a fundamentalist newspaper. Satan isn’t in there, but pretty much everything else is. We’ve got some apostasy, we’ve got some infidelity, and even a Zimmerman-esque looking CIO figure doing bad things. To some critics, while the liberals were agents of Satan… others identified liberalism with loose convictions, as one Californian wrote, noting an overall erosion of courage and backbone, that is of moral standards in the body politic.

At the same time, however, prayer supporters frequently borrowed tactics and even language from their hated liberal foes. Even as they skewered liberals for fomenting social agitation in God’s name, for example, prayer activists frequently invoked scripture to justify their own forms of civil disobedience. Citing Daniel’s refusal to obey Darius’ ban upon prayer for example, one rural New York minister argued that the Bible actually mandated resistance to Engel and Schempp. "A Christian surely cannot let her mouth be stopped by state directives," the minister declared. "If opening her class with prayer were to cost her, her job, it would not be the first time that a Christian suffered because of convictions."

Other activists praised student protests against the prayer ban, which themselves echoed the rhythm and rhetoric of civil rights demonstrations. In Newport, Kentucky students posted Ban the Bible Ban signs in their high school. When school officials removed the signs, 90 pupils affixed similar messages to their shirts and dresses. Like the civil rights movements meanwhile, prayer advocates used jokes to critique perceived injustices and to rally the troops against them. One favorite tale involved a teacher who comes upon a group of boys kneeling in the school hallway. "What are you doing on your knees?’ she inquires. "Shooting craps," comes the quick reply. "Thank God," the teacher says, "I thought you were praying."

Prayer supporters even engage in forms of what leftists would call guerilla theatre, brief humorous acts designed to shock viewer’s consciences. In New Jersey, for example, anonymous activists papered school fences with the following notice: In case of atomic attack, the federal ruling against prayer in schools will be temporarily suspended.

Despite their jabs at liberals finally, prayer activists in the 1960s also mimicked their enemy’s emphasis upon "rights". In Michigan, one activist claimed flatly that the Christian is being discriminated against. In Maryland, another argued that the Court had removed her religious freedom. And in Indiana, a third prayer supporter likened this oppression to the passion of Christ himself. "The same bigotry that persecuted him and his followers then, continues today," the Indianan declared. "It seems to me, this is no longer a democracy where the majortiy rules or tolerance unites us. It is instead an era that has upheld the so-called rights of the individual, but has ignored the rights of the majority." The final comment highlighted a key difference that still separated prayer activists from their liberal counterparts. Whereas the left often defended embattled minorities, prayer supporters claimed to speak for a majority of Americans. By the early 1980s, however, the school prayer movement would fully embrace the status and the politics of a suffering minority. Even as a new conservative president endorsed their aims, school prayer supporters veered ever closer to the liberal dogma they purportedly despised.

Now I am going to go into the coda, the conclusion, skipping way ahead as one does, which is called "School Prayer and a New Christian Right: 1979-1984". In 1982, leaders of the so-called new Christian right convened a three-day family forum in Buffalo, New York. Speakers included Moral Majority founder Jerry Falwell and Eagle Forum leader Phyllis Schafley, along with the nation’s top-ranking educational official, US Secretary of Education T. H. Bell. Reviewing several school-related issues - sex education, "obscene" text books, and school prayer — Bell remarked that a single theme bound them together — parental control. "Education is a family matter," Bell declared, praising the forum’s efforts. "The parent is the foremost teacher, the home is the most influential classroom, and the school should exist to support the home." On controversial subjects like prayer, other speakers added, a parent’s wishes should trump every other concern, including the popular majority’s. No matter how many Americans wanted to bar classroom prayer, schools would have to provide it to the families that still desired it.

Bell’s comments illuminate what was truly new about the new Christian Right and its battle for school prayer. First, media savvy groups like the moral majority provided publicity and focus for a prayer movement that had often lacked national direction or organization. Second, as Bell’s praise showed, the movement finally won the approval and support of national political leaders, including the conservative president who Bell served, Ronald Reagan. Last, and most importantly, despite titles like Moral Majority, the new Right developed a re-fashioned gospel of minority rights in its campaign for school prayer. Less and less would activists invoke the "Virtues of America", (read large), or the need to correct wayward families. The very term, Christian Right, came to connote not just a new right-wing Christianity, but a new consciousness of Christian rights. Especially in the South, this rights talk helped buttress the continued disobedience of Supreme Court doctrine on school prayer. Under the old majoritarian argument, supporters would need to relinquish prayer once a sufficient number of voters turned against it. Under the new nomenclature of rights by contrast, activists could claim an a priority, an unassailable freedom, to worship in schools. "I’d rather be right with God than with the Supreme Court," declared a self-described Bayou rebel in Louisiana, after the school re-instituted prayer in 1982.

Word to media organizations - we have school prayer. It exists. It may not be legal, and you may not like it, but we have it.