(LifeSiteNews) — President-elect Donald Trump pledged to “support bringing back prayer” to schools as part of a 10-point plan to reform America’s educational system.
In a video released in September, Trump enumerated this goal among nine others designed to increase the quality of education in the U.S. and better prepare students to “succeed in the world of work and in life.”
The first goals of his plan, listed on his campaign website as part of his Agenda47, include restoring parental rights in education, supporting the parental election of principals and school boards’ ability to fire poor principals and teachers, and focus on the essentials of education instead of “political indoctrination” such as critical race theory (CRT).
“We will support bringing back prayer to our schools,” said Trump, noting this is the fifth point in his plan, after encouraging love of country.
While the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1962 that state-sanctioned prayers in public schools are unconstitutional, Trump’s campaign site points out that the First Amendment continues to protect students’ right to pray in public schools. Updated guidance on religious freedom for students issued during Trump’s first term, in 2020, makes clear that “students can read religious texts or pray during recess and other non-instructional periods, organize prayer groups, and express their religious beliefs in their assignments.”
Despite the fact that this right is protected by the Constitution, schools have attempted to restrict and ban prayer in recent years, such as in Bremerton, Washington, where the school district fired a high school football coach in 2015 because he prayed with student players after games. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the right of this coach to pray at football games in June 2022.
After the Kennedy v. Bremerton decision, the U.S. Department of Education, under the Biden administration, issued further updated guidance on prayer and other religious expressions in public schools, clarifying that “Teachers, school administrators, and other school employees may not encourage or discourage private prayer or other religious activity.”
It is unclear whether Trump’s next administration will expand on this guidance.
Before Engel v. Vitale determined that it is unconstitutional for state officials to compose an official school prayer for public schools and encourage its recitation, it was common for teachers and principals to lead students in Christian prayer, especially across the South. Interestingly, Engel v. Vitale was a response to a complaint about a completely non-sectarian prayer, which only acknowledged dependence on “Almighty God” and begged for His “blessings upon us, our parents, our teachers, and our country.”
Many Christians, and even people of other religious traditions, maintain that excluding God and prayer from any domain — public schools included — signals to God that He is not wanted there, and therefore will lead to the withdrawal of His blessings upon that given endeavor. When God is removed from the educational system, the religious practice of society also suffers, according to Jewish philosopher Yoram Hazony.
Hazony recounted during a speech at the 2022 National Conservatism Conference (NatCon) how after World War II, liberal ideas emerged such as eliminating God, prayer, and the Bible from the government schools, which meant that kids spent this primary portion of their childhood “in an environment where all the people that they respect, the teachers and the principals … get through the day without ever mentioning God, without ever quoting the Bible and without ever saying a prayer.”
“And guess what? Christians do not emerge from that school system. Jews do not emerge from that school system. The framework is liberalism and the content is liberalism,” he explained, noting that the minimum things necessary for a flourishing society then disappear.
These things include what Hazony says have been lost: “God and Scripture, and nation and family, and man and woman, loyalty, honor, sanctity (etc.).”
Under liberalism, “freedom becomes everything. And the main thing that you’re free from is the past… from what previous generations thought,” lived, conserved, and transmitted, he said.
And while the U.S. is “at the very end of what decadence can sustain,” in “a moment where it is ‘do or die,’” it will be God who decides whether our nation is destroyed like Sodom and Gomorrah in Sacred Scripture or spared due to repentance as was Nineveh in the book of Jonah, Hazony said.