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Prayer has always appeared to me to be the most vulnerable point for attack on the panoply of religious ideology. Shown not to be efficacious, I reasoned, the practice of prayer would atrophy. I was therefore always an enemy of it. Yet I had other matters to which I had to attend: earning a living, rearing my children. Meanwhile, in the game-plan of theopolitics, there came to be a public display of prayer after World War II which was particularly annoying to me. Annoying - only that and nothing more.
In the midst of my life, however, I inadvertently stumbled upon a full-scale prayer fight which was to consume thirty years of my efforts. A Baltimore school board requirement was that a parent must accompany a child to school on the first day of attendance in order to register the child - and I had children. Wanting to transfer my older son from a private to a public school, I went with him one fateful day in 1959. I don’t know why we were late getting there. I don’t remember where we finally parked the car. I don’t know how we managed to enter by the wrong door. But walking down long corridors in Baltimore’s Woodbourne Junior High School, my son and I passed room after room from which we heard the echoes of the Lord’s Prayer being recited by the students.
When we finally gained the administrative offices, we were held up interminable by “paperwork” and finally by an enforced rule that it was necessary for a parent to discuss “a transfer” with the principal. What I had envisaged as taking a quarter of an hour dragged on to an hour or more. But, Finally, with it finished, I opened the door to leave. It was then that I remembered having heard the prayers, and I turned back to the principal to ask why prayers were being recited by the students in a public school.
It was thus that, as an Atheist, my unhappiness concerned with prayer culminated in a lawsuit. My complaint against those school prayers, begun in the fall of 1959, continued until the decision of Murray v Curlett was handed down - almost four years later - by the Supreme Court of the United States on June 17,1963.
Since I have been attacked, particularly by the so-called “liberal” left, as having “no part” in the prayer issue, it is time that there is a clarification of what actually happened. I am rather angry that “freethought,” “civil liberties,” “humanist,” and state/church separationist organizations and publications desire to read an Atheist out of history.
There is no “Lord’s Prayer” in the public schools of the United States because I, as an Atheist, challenged it specifically. I want that shown in the records of our culture as it is shown in the legal records of what went on “back then” in the early 1960s.
There is much brouhaha currently about “prayer” - and that term is used in a generic sense - in the public schools, any sort of prayer, but the real “hurt” to the Christians is that the prayer fashioned by their beloved J. C. is no longer permitted.
Each and every school day, in the public schools of Baltimore, my two sons were forced to hear passages from the King James Version of the Bible read to them and to recite the so-called Lord’s Prayer as given by Jesus Christ in the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 6: 9-13) in the New Testament. When I discovered that prayers had invaded the public schools, I could not countenance the exercise.
At first I tried to find an amicable settlement with the particular schools involved, then with the Baltimore Board of Education, and finally with the Board of School Commissioners of Baltimore. No administrative remedy was available, no matter what approach was
used. The ultimate decision which was handed down after a full year of effort was that my sons would “assume an attitude of reverence” while their classmates heard the Bible read, and that at the time of prayer would stand and “move their lips as if reciting the prayer” so that they would not “offend” the religious and prayerful students in the room.
After about fourteen months of fighting, I was able to force the school board to amend the requirement so that my sons could be excused from participating in the exercise, since it was both repugnant and offensive. This was not, however, available until the attorney general of the state of Maryland (at the request of the state superintendent of schools) issued an amendment to the school board rules on November 17, 1960. That amendment read:
Any child shall be excused from participating in the opening exercises or from attending the opening exercises upon written request of his parent or guardian.
Meanwhile, news of my revolt against recitation of the Lord’s Prayer had hit the media, and the reprisals against me began. When I insisted on pursuing the case legally, my employer, the City of Baltimore, through my immediate supervisor, Mrs. Lazarus, in the Department of Public Welfare, told me that I had “brought disgrace” to the city by my adamant confrontation with the public school system and that I was fired for misconduct in that the “disgrace” had redounded upon the city’s Department of Public Welfare.
I had no intention of tempering my resolve to remove the prayer from the public schools, come what may to me and mine. When the hostility, the reprisals, and the sanctions came, I factored them in as unavoidable.
When I hit the legendary stone wall in negotiations, I sued President John N. Curlett and all of the members of the Board, individually and constituting the Board of School Commissioners of Baltimore City, Maryland. Having hired a private attorney, I filed for a writ of mandamus from the Superior Court of the City of Baltimore. There was, at that time, a procedure for applying for such a writ. Mandamus was the name of an order which issued from a court of superior jurisdiction, directed to a municipal entity (such as the Board of School Commissioners of Baltimore City) commanding the performance of a particular act (rescinding the rule which provided for opening exercises in public schools which embraced Bible reading and prayer recitation) and directing the restoration of the rights of my sons not to be coerced into prayer (the right of which they had been illegally deprived). The one rule which I wanted to have rescinded was Sec. 6 of Article VI of the Rules of the Board of School Commissioners of Baltimore City, adopted in 1905, which read:
Section 6 - Opening Exercises. Each school, whether collectively or in classes, shall be opened by the reading, without comment, of a chapter in the Holy Bible and/or the use of the Lord’s Prayer. The Douay version may be used by those pupils who prefer it. Appropriate patriotic exercises should [also] be held as part of the general opening exercise of the school or class
Resistance from the left
The Maryland Civil Liberties Union absolutely refused to be involved in any manner in this suit, although I attempted to persuade it to do so over a period of many months. In fact, the attorney for the MCLU said to me,
What is the matter with prayer? A little prayer never hurt anyone. I went to the public schools here in Baltimore and said the Lord’s Prayer every day even though I am a Jew. That never hurt me.
I went over the head of the Maryland CLU to the national office of the ACLU in New York and to Ira
Glasser. The national ACLU also said “no way,” despite the fact that it now takes credit for the case.
The Emergency Civil Liberties Union, headed up and financed by Corliss Lamont, also refused to assist. Lamont, of course, was then and still is a primary financier of the American Humanist Association (AHA).* I also asked the American Humanist Association, through its headquarters in Yellow Springs, Ohio, and through its local groups in both Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, Maryland, to assist, and the answer was a flat “No way.” In fact, I won the animosity of the American Humanist Association for insisting that I go on with the case whether the AHA helped or not. As I look back on it now, I must have been quite mad, for I also petitioned diverse branches of the Ethical Culture Society (which was then largely Jewish) in New York, in New Jersey, in Pennsylvania, and in Baltimore to assist. Again, that assistance was declined. Finally, having persons come to me from the Unitarian church exalting the efforts of that religion toward “fairness” in our culture, I asked the Unitarian church both in Baltimore and in Boston if it would assist in the case. The answers from both were complete repudiations of my efforts.
There was an organization then known as Protestants and Other Americans United for Separation of Church and State, headquartered in Silver Spring, Maryland. Ostensibly it advocated state/church separation, but in actuality it was merely a Baptist-dominated, anti-Catholic group. I contacted it by making a personal trip to its headquarters and by talking to its principal officer, Glenn L. Archer, when he came to Baltimore to give a speech on the need for church and state separation. The organization refused to assist in any way whatsoever.
I mean to say that all of these organizations were both rude and
insulting. I telephoned. I wrote. I got in my automobile, drove to the cities in which they were located, and visited their headquarters. I talked to their officers. Not a one can say that they were not, in depth, notified and kept abreast of the developments of the case. Not a one can say that they encouraged what I was doing or that they helped in any manner whatsoever. For the most part, none of them even notified their members of what was happening. I think that I was primarily looking for intellectual support. I wanted one of those groups, or one of the officers in the groups, to agree with me that prayer was irrational. If they could not do that, I was asking for legal support, even by proclamation, to proceed against the school commission under the rubric of the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.
There were at the time several small “freethought” and “rationalist” groups in the United States. The Friendship Liberal League of Philadelphia, afraid to openly identify itself as Atheist, did put short informative articles about my squabble with the Baltimore public schools in its publication, The Liberal, from time to time. But the only real offer of the old men involved in that organization was to take over what I was doing since they were concerned that it was a woman who was attempting to challenge prayer. The other freethought groups were too involved in internecine warfare to unite behind any effort to mount a real campaign in behalf of the removal of prayer.
Charles Smith of the National Liberal League in New York gave a check for $5,000 to the attorney who drew up the Application for a Writ of Mandamus. That was the only actual financial help I ever obtained from any of the organizations. He also permitted me to write a small article on the case in one of the issues of his monthly magazine, The Truth Seeker.
I want to make it clear that my objections to prayer were based on
the logic of my Atheism. I will get to that, but first you must know what I tried to do legally.
I had no remedy at law. My only recourse was to rely on the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States. That is, that government is precluded from making a law “respecting an establishment of religion.” I had to prove, in court, that the prayer recitation and Bible reading did indeed “establish” religion in the public schools. However, had there been no “First Amendment,” I would have proceeded with my protest. The First Amendment only provided me with a possible legal stand, as differentiated from my intellectual stand. Even so, that provision was not adequate.
The First Amendment states:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
At the time that the Bill of Rights was written, sufficient documentation was not made in respect to the development of this amendment. Today we would simply shrug and say that “there was no paper trail.” Despite sophisticated guesses, there is really no evidence on which to make a case as to the exact intended definition of the “establishment” or “free exercise” phrase. In any event, since I was not a signatory to that instrument, or a citizen of the nation at the time that it was accepted as a governing document, I have never felt any real compulsion to swallow the Constitution whole. When all is said and done, it was written by slave owners, ignored any rights of women, catered to the propertied, counted a Black man as only three-fifths of a human being, and created the equivalent of the House of Lords in the US Senate. It certainly did not protect the Atheist.
“Your petitioners are Atheists...”
From the very beginning, the lawyers of the City of Baltimore treated me in a very cavalier way. The comments made to the newspapers were derogatory and insulting. None of those persons knew me or my children. There was no reason for deliberate untruths to be spread throughout the media. And when my Application for a Writ of Mandamus was filed, their ultimate insult was to not even reply to it. Instead, the attorneys for the city filed what is called a “demurrer.” This was a statement to the effect that, even admitting that everything I had said in my complaint was true as they were set forth in my papers to the court, they were insufficient for me to proceed on them. They boldly stated that the legal consequences of the acts of which I complained (even if they were true) were not of such significance that they should be put to the necessity of answering them in a court of law - or anywhere else.
Well, when a party in a lawsuit files a demurrer, that does admit every fact well pleaded. And included in what I had pleaded for myself and my sons was the statement that the rule which required Bible reading and the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer:
threatens our religious liberty by placing a premium on belief as against non-belief and subjects our freedom of conscience to the rule of the majority; it pronounces belief in God as the source of all moral and spiritual values, equating these values with religious values, and thereby renders sinister, alien and suspect our beliefs and ideals, promoting doubt and question on our morality, good citizenship, and good faith
I further pleaded that since my sons had been excluded from the exercise, they had been subjected to reproach and insult, that the practice had a tendency to destroy the equality of the pupils, and placed my sons in a disadvantageous position with respect to other pupils.
Additionally, I particularized what Atheists held:
Your petitioners are Atheists and they define their life-style as follows. An Atheist loves himself and his fellowman instead of a god. An Atheist knows that heaven is something for which we should work now - here on earth - for all men together to enjoy. An Atheist thinks that he can get no help through prayer but that he must find in himself the inner conviction and strength to meet life, or grapple with it, to subdue, and enjoy it. An Atheist thinks that only in a knowledge of himself and a knowledge of his fellowman can he find the understanding that will help to a life of fulfillment.
Therefore, he seeks to know himself and his fellowman rather than to know a god. An Atheist knows that a hospital should be built instead of a church. An Atheist knows that a deed must be done instead of a prayer said. An Atheist strives for involvement in life and not escape into death.
He wants disease conquered, poverty vanquished, war eliminated. He wants man to understand and love man. He wants an ethical way of life. He knows that we cannot rely on a god nor channel action into prayer nor hope for an end of troubles in a hereafter. He knows that we are our brothers' keepers and keepers of our lives; that we are responsible persons, that the job is here and the time is now.
The Superior Court of Baltimore City rendered a decision for the school board on April 27, 1961, stating that the demurrer to the writ of mandamus was sustained. This was based on two grounds: (1) that I had not stated a good “cause of action” since the school board was acting in its discretion by requiring the Bible reading and prayer recitation. And
(2) that I had not “spelled out any violation” of our constitutional right which I professed to have for myself and my sons.
At the time of the filing of the suit, there was still much argument in the courts over what is called “standing to sue” - something which a mere taxpayer did not have. However, I had filed the suit as a resident of Maryland, a taxpayer, and I recited that I was a mother with two children who were in compulsory attendance at the public schools of Baltimore. That, I felt, should give me “standing to sue.” In the course of the suit, the Superior Court simply assumed, without deciding it, that I had such standing.
When the decision of the Superior Court of Baltimore City was against me, the attitude of all of the above organizations was “We told you so.” The religious and the media gloated. I realize that now the Baptists, and the Methodists, and the Presbyterians, and the Episcopalians, and all other main-line Protestant religions, repeat and repeat that they were against prayer in school, that they were happy when it was found to be inappropriate. But “I was there, Charlie” when it all happened, and they are damned liars.
Now, recently, there is much ado about the case of Engel v Vitale, but that case had not as yet been decided at the time my case was being fought out in Baltimore, Maryland. Also, that case concerned New York’s voluntarily recited so-called Regents’ prayer in public schools. That is, the Regents of the Board of Education of the State of New York had composed a twenty-two-word “non-denominational” prayer - with no reference at all to J. C. - which they felt was innocuous enough to pass muster, even with Jews:
Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon Thee, and we beg Thy blessing upon us, our parents, our teachers and our Country. Amen.
In respect to my Baltimore case, what was repeated in the public schools was the Lord’s Prayer, that is, the Prayer of Jesus Christ, given by J. C. in the Sermon on the Mount, in the New Testament (King James Version) to wit:
Our Father which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name;
Thy Kingdom come; Thy Will be done in earth as in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.
And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil:
For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever. Amen. (Matt. 6:9-13)
The Roman Catholics and the Jews were both opposed to this prayer. The Roman Catholic version given in the Douay Version of the Bible is, of course, different by omission of everything after the word evil:
Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed by thy name.
Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our supersubstantial bread.
And forgive our debts, as we also forgive our debtors.
And lead us not into temptation. But deliver us from evil. Amen. (Matt. 6:9-13 - Douay)
Across the nation in laws, codes, and regulations in thousands of school districts, it was the Lord’s Prayer (not just prayer) that was ordered to be recited. The religious hated me for attacking that hallowed prayer. They hated me with a vengeance, and across Baltimore I was the subject of many sermons, from many religious podiums, in many churches. I know because persons who were angry over those sermons in their churches contacted me and told me what was going on. I was particularly maligned in the Roman Catholic churches of the city.
The “liberal” elements of the nation, all of whom refused to be of assistance, were furious because I based my dissent to prayer in
Atheism. One and all, they advised me, I had no right to go outside of the framework of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the Constitution. Prayer was to be questioned, if it was questioned at all, on the basis that “different religions would want different prayers,” but that there was nothing inherently wrong with prayer itself. This was a totally and wholly dishonest approach. What was at issue were the prayers to Jesus Christ which Jews found offensive, and the King James Version of the New Testament which the Roman Catholics found offensive. Like it or not, Jews are powerful in politics, finance, and communications in the country. Jews dominate the liberal factions of politics. The Regents’ prayer in New York was deliberately fashioned to eliminate the reference to Jesus Christ so as to maintain religious expression, but not to insult the Jews. Then, so as not to either annoy or insult the Christians, the Regents’ prayer was not addressed to Yahweh, Jehovah, or the “I Am That I Am” of the Jews. The bland “god” which covered the denominational disagreements was utilized instead. One must remember that both Baltimore and New York had heavy Roman Catholic populations.
Meanwhile, I - as an Atheist - insisted that the prayers were inappropriate because there was no god to whom they could be addressed.
Climbing the ladder of appeals
Therefore, I appealed my lost case to the Court of Appeals of Maryland, for the September 1961 term of that court, still working only with a private attorney who represented me and my sons, the students involved. Please remember that I had graduated from law school in 1952, and the work on the case was mainly my own, with my hired attorney having little or no time to handle the case himself.
The case was argued twice before the Court of Appeals of Maryland. The initial hearing was
before five judges, and the questions presented were two:
- whether the mandamus was a proper action with which to test the constitutionality of the school board rule, and
-
whether the provisions of the regulation under attack violated a constitutional right my sons and I had as Atheists.
Naturally, we lost on that first try in 1961.
Then the Court of Appeals agreed to hear oral arguments again. The second arguments were heard before seven judges, and these were restricted to the constitutional issue.
The Court of Appeals finally held on April 1, 1962 (three years after our initial complaints), that the First Amendment “was not intended to stifle all rapport between religion and government.” This was a twenty-two-page decision in which the lower case decisions upholding the constitutionality of prayer and Bible reading were approved. The court recited many precedents for its decision beginning from 1854 and forward, those cases being from Texas, Colorado, Maine, Iowa, Michigan, Kansas, Kentucky, Georgia, Minnesota, and New York. In each instance, prayers had been held to be appropriate.
Seeking equal protection
We had also pleaded the Fourteenth Amendment, in that my sons had been denied equal protection of the laws. The Court of Appeals in essence laughed at this, holding that “the self-exile” of my sons from the Bible/prayer exercises could have had a deleterious effect on relationships with other students, but that the Fourteenth Amendment could not and did not provide protection from embarrassment or psychological discontent arising out of nonconformance with the mores of the majority.
The Court of Appeals of Maryland therefore affirmed the lower court decision on April 2, 1962. At that time, the Supreme Court had not as yet ruled on the New York Regents’ prayer in the Engel v Vitale case. I had sixty days to appeal and I filed with the Supreme Court before June 2,1962.
That court handed down its decision on the New York Regents’ prayer case three weeks later on June 25, 1962, and then granted certiorari (review) of our case on October 8, 1962, just a little over four months later. Our case was put on the Supreme Court docket as No. 119.
In the case of Engel v Vitale, the New York Court of Appeals had upheld the use of an officially composed Regents’ prayer, after indicating that objecting students should be permitted to remain silent or be excused from the exercises, that is, that there be no compulsion or coercion. Only the teacher (on the public payroll) who led the prayer was under any coercion - and not one teacher in the entire city of New York had complained. The prayer was adjudged to be “denominationally neutral” at the time of its composition, but the New York court found that it did not conform to all of the tenets of the Jewish, Unitarian, and Ethical Culture groups.
The sanctity of religion
The Supreme Court found that prayer itself was a religious exercise, despite the contention of the State of New York that it was simply a short averment based on the spiritual heritage of the nation. Reviewing the denominational arguments concerned with types and wordings of prayer over a period of several centuries, the Court then declaimed that religion “is too personal, too sacred, and too holy to permit its ‘unhallowed perversion’ by civil magistrate.” The actual kernel of the Supreme Court ruling was short:
[w]e think that the constitutional prohibition against laws respecting an establishment of religion must at least mean that in this country it is no part of the business of government to compose official prayers for any group of the American people to recite as a part of a religious program carried on by government. [Engel, 370 US at 425]
That is all that there was concerning prayer in that twenty-nine-page decision. Only that statement, and nothing more. As one reads it now, there is still nothing regarding the nature of prayer in the decision.
And there was I saying that there was nothing “too personal, too sacred or too holy” about prayer that it could not be junked. I wanted to go to the substance, the nature of prayer. I was challenging it in every radio appearance that I made. Migawd how they all hated me. My position was one of upsetting the apple cart. I think, at that time, the liberals, civil libertarians, and do-gooders hated me much more vehemently than did the mainline churches or run-of-the-mill theists.
The word of the lord in Pennsylvania
When the decision in our own case had finally been handed down by the Maryland Court of Appeals in April 1962, we discovered that a related case was also being fought in Pennsylvania. This had been brought by the Schempp family, who lived near Philadelphia. In that case the family had attempted, in a federal court, to enjoin enforcement of a Pennsylvania statute providing for the reading without comment of ten verses from the Bible, daily, in public schools.
The questions before the Pennsylvania Court of Appeals were hardly germane:
- Was there a substantial federal question?
-
Was the doctrine of abstention applicable? That is, must the federal courts abstain from taking jurisdiction of the case because it properly belonged in a state court?
-
Did the parents have “standing to sue?” Did they, as guardians,
have “an immediate and direct interest in the spiritual and religious development of their children?”
This, of course, is how the federal courts get rid of persons who want to challenge the status quo. The courts never get to the real issues involved. Instead, they deal with what are called “procedural issues,” a sample of which is indicated by the above. Many substantive cases have died through the “abstention” issue, the state courts being notoriously difficult in which to gain any win. Among others of the cases which have been killed in this manner are the cases where federal abstention was practiced in which blacks tried to get justice in Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, or Arkansas.
The Schempp case was concerned with 24 Pa. Stat. §15-1516, as amended, Pub. Law 1928 (Supp. 1960) Dec. 17,1959:
At least ten verses from the Holy Bible shall be read, or caused to be read, without comment, at the opening of each public school on each school day by the teacher in charge.
The schools in Pennsylvania utilized the Protestant King James Version of the Bible, the Roman Catholic Douay, the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, and the Jewish Holy Scriptures.
The complaint in the case indicated that there was also a unison recitation by students and teachers of the Lord’s Prayer. Such recitation was not covered by the challenged statue. The two religious exercises were then followed by students’ recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance - against which no complaint was made. One of the Schempp children, Ellory, contested the Bible reading, refused to stand during the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer, and finally requested that he be permitted to leave the room. In court, he testified that he did not believe in the divinity of Christ, the Immaculate Conception, the concepts of an anthropomorphic god or the Trinity, but
that all of these doctrines were read to him during the course of his instruction at Abington High School.
At the hearing, however, the family gave evidence that they were religious (“of the Unitarian faith”) and members of the Unitarian Church in Germantown, Pennsylvania, where they regularly attended church.
Naturally, they immediately had all of the help they needed. The American Civil Liberties Union provided attorneys for the case. The American Jewish Congress filed an amicus curiæ, as did the Pennsylvania State Education Association.
The Schempps appeared in court to testify that the “doctrines” purveyed by a literal reading of the Bible were “contrary to the religious beliefs which they held and to their familial (religious) teaching.” The three-judge statutory United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania rendered a judgment for the Schempp family holding that the statute requiring the practice of Bible reading was unconstitutional under both the Establishment and the Free Exercise clauses. In a related “Finding of Fact,” it held that
The practice of the daily reading of ten verses of the Bible together with the daily recitation of the Lord’s Prayer in the public schools of Abington Township is a religious ceremony
And in a “Conclusion of Law,” the district court held that the combined practice “constituted an establishment of religion and an interference with the free exercise of religion.” On November 12, 1959, the school district took a direct appeal to the Supreme Court of the United States.
Opting out of prayer
But the State of Pennsylvania got busy immediately. The legislators thought that they could save the exercise of Bible reading by passing an amendment to the statute. Legislative bodies can move
with extraordinary alacrity when they so desire. The amendment to the law was:
Any child shall be excused from such Bible reading, or attending such Bible reading, upon the written request of his parent or guardian.
The amended statute, passed at the Pennsylvania Congressional Session of 1959, was approved by the governor of the Commonwealth on December 17, 1960, vacated the judgment of the lower court and remanded the case to the federal district court “for such further proceedings as may be appropriate” in light of the statute amendment. The same three-judge court then granted a motion to amend the pleading, to include the amendment to the statute. However, Ed Schempp decided “after careful consideration” that he could not have his children excused from the morning ceremonies for fear that they would be labeled as oddballs or Atheists. He thought that their classmates might “lump all particular religious difference [s] or religious objections [together] as ‘Atheism’.” He opined that at the time of the hearing the word atheism was often connected with “atheistic communism,” and had “very bad” connotations such as “un-American” or “Red,” with “overtones of possible immorality.”
That testimony certainly helped us, as Atheists, a helluva lot in our Maryland case.
At this point, the Jewish Community Relations Counsel of Greater Philadelphia assisted the Schempps with an amicus curiæ. The case itself had expanded to the Schempp v the School District of Abington Township, the Principal of the Abington Senior High School and The Principal of the Huntingdon Junior High School in Abington Township. Ellory had graduated from high school and was out of the case, but the younger Schempp children, Roger and Donna, were still in school. The Superintendent of Public Instruction of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania was permitted to intervene as a party defendant.
In the revised case, it was represented that the Bible reading was conducted in the school buildings, by and under the authority of the local school authorities, and during school session.
A hearing was subsequently held on the amended complaint, and judgment was rendered on February 1, 1962. The court held that the doctrine of abstention did not apply and that the federal court could make the decision in regard to the family’s complaint. Also, the family had “standing to sue” and could challenge the Pennsylvania statute requiring Bible reading in public schools. Further, the statute requiring the Bible reading violated the Establishment Clause as applied to the states by the Fourteenth Amendment, notwithstanding the provision in the statute for excusing a child from the reading.
After the second hearing, the court issued a final decree:
The defendants (school board) are perpetually enjoined and restrained from reading and causing to be read, or permitting anyone subject to their control and direction to read, to students in the Abington Senior High School, Abington Township, Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, any work or book known as the Holy Bible as directed by Section 1516 of the Pennsylvania Public School Code of March 10, 1949, P.L. 30, as amended, in conjunction with, or not in conjunction with, the saying, the reciting, or the reading of the Lord’s Prayer; provided, that nothing herein shall be construed as interfering with or prohibiting the use of any books or works as educational, source, or reference material.
The School District of Abington Township, Pennsylvania, appealed the case, and the Schempp case was put on the Supreme Court docket as No. 142.
The Murray case was put on the Supreme Court docket as No. 119. The Schempp case was No. 142. Despite the priority of the Murray case, the Supreme Court decided to subsume the Murray case under the Schempp case, with the result that the landmark decision is indexed and referred to as the “Abington School District v Schempp” instead of “Murray v Curlett.” It is hard to believe this was done for any reason other than disdain for Atheists.
The great moral value of the Bible
Several experts were brought into the Pennsylvania case at the first hearing (177 F. Supp. 398) to evaluate the Bible, and the decision noted that the experts held that:
the Bible was of great moral, historical, and literary value. This is conceded by all the parties and is also the view of the court.
The trial court finally found, particularly as related to the Jewish Holy Scriptures, that the Pennsylvania statute required the reading of a Christian document (the Bible) and preferred the Christian religion.
The decision was rendered narrowly in regard to the Pennsylvania law requiring Bible reading because that was the issue before the court.
The Schempp case was seen as concerning Bible reading in the public schools; the Murray case concerned recitation of the Lord’s Prayer in public schools.
The Schempp family (husband, wife, and three children) permitted themselves to be photographed in their home, reading from the Bible and portraying themselves as devoutly religious. They continued to claim to be of the Unitarian “faith” and to be in regular attendance at the Unitarian church in German-town, Philadelphia, where they and their children regularly attended religious services. Without equivocation, they declared that they faithfully read the Bible at home, and had sought only to discontinue its use in the public schools.
I confronted the media with the information that (1) I did not accept the Bible at all, either in school or at home and that (2) prayer was not efficacious since there was no god to whom anyone could pray.
In the Murray case, I was attempting to prevent the schools from enforcing a rule made pursuant to Art. 77, §202 of the Annotated Code of Maryland. During my administrative battles with the school, the rule had been amended so that dissenting children could be excused from the religious exercises upon request of their parents. By the time that rule got to the Supreme Court of the United States it read:
Opening Exercises. Each school, either collectively or in classes, shall be opened by the reading, without comment, of a chapter in the Holy Bible and/or the use of the Lord’s Prayer. The Douay version may be used by those pupils who prefer it. Appropriate patriotic exercises should be held as a part of the general opening exercise of the school or class. Any child shall be excused from participating in the opening exercises or from attending the opening exercises upon the written request of his parent or guardian.
In my case, I particularized my Atheist ideas and stated that the rule, as practiced, violated Atheists’ rights. The state of Maryland had admitted that both Bible reading and the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer (version above indicated) were mandatory in the public schools. Despite this admission of facts, four judges of the Maryland Court of Appeals, with three judges dissenting, affirmed the ruling of the lower court.
The Supreme Court intervenes
The Supreme Court then heard arguments on the combined cases on February 27 and 28, 1963, and rendered a decision on June 17, 1963. The Supreme Court affirmed the judgment of the lower court in No. 142 and reversed and remanded, with directions, case No. 119. Mr. Justice dark wrote the majority 8-1 decision, and Mr. Justice Stewart dissented.
The decision written by Mr. Justice Clark was just twelve pages long.
Mr. Justice Douglas wrote a two-page concurring opinion.
Mr. Justice Brennan wrote a thirty-nine page concurring opinion.
Messrs. Justices Goldberg and Harland wrote a two-page concurring opinion.
Mr. Justice Stewart wrote a five-page dissent.
As I read that Supreme Court decision in order to write this article, I was surprised to find that in all of those sixty pages there is little or nothing said of prayer in general or of the Lord’s Prayer particularly. Justice Clark quickly pointed out expert evidence had been given in the Pennsylvania case that portions of the New Testament were offensive to Jews and that the hassle over Bible reading had to do with the fact that the Holy Bible was, in practice, preferential to the Christian religion.
A review of religion and of state/church separation cases in the nation was then undertaken by Clark, without reference to prayer.
The most that was said in all of those pages was that prayer is a religious ceremony, period.
The “pre-eminent” textbook
Justice Douglas concurred, but he too said nothing of prayer. Justice Brennan also lacked any discussion regarding prayer in his thirty-nine page opinion. He did take several pages to talk of the history of “morning devotional exercises” as free public schools gradually took the place of private and sectarian schools in the nineteenth era. He noted that it was not until about 1910 that twelve states made such practices compulsory and named Massachusetts, Alabama, Delaware, Florida, Tennessee, and Illinois; the rule in Maryland had been instituted in 1905 and that of Pennsylvania in 1913. In all of his references, there was emphasis that the “values” to be derived from Bible reading were sufficient to justify the practices. The Bible was “pre-eminent” among textbooks; it instructed in “morality”; it taught “the truths” of religion. The Bible, however, had always been viewed as a “sectarian” book.
Goldberg and Harlan said nothing of prayer. It was only in Justice Stewart’s dissenting opinion that the rights of Atheists were even mentioned:
What our Constitution indispensably protects is the freedom of each of us, be he Jew or Agnostic, Christian or Atheist, Buddhist or Freethinker, to believe or disbelieve, to worship or not worship, to pray or keep silent, according to his own conscience, uncoerced, and unrestrained by government
The difficulty is that, seemingly, no one will take the authority to sit in judgment on the fundamental principles of religion or on its precepts which result in such a manifestation as prayer. There is a general accedence to religion; a tacit understanding is that it shall not be examined.
I am an Atheist, and “it is up with this, I will not put.”
The matter of prayer
The bottom line of the thirty-five years of litigation which has continued without interruption in the nation following this Supreme Court decision is prayer.
What is it? Why is if important enough to consume billions of hours of the time of individuals, millions of dollars of expenditures, hundreds of thousands of hours of legislative bodies’ activities, and legal cases enough to clog judicial bodies on local, state, and federal level?
What is prayer? There is a determination by the religious to force the recognition of the dependence of the civil authority as well as the entire population of the nation upon a god, to make the United States truly “one nation under God.” But the religious think it is not enough that (according to them) there is a god, but it is also necessary that humankind be dependent upon that god, converse (communicate) with that god through prayer, and be judged by that god at the time of death.
Prayer is the very breath of religion, its most quintessential, characteristic activity. Without prayer, there would be no religion. Every religion which has ever existed has been premised upon prayer, that is, communication with a god. If there is no communication between a god and his “communicants,” there is no use of a god.
Yet there is no recognition in the United States that the issue is prayer itself, not the use of prayer anywhere, whether in schools, in legislative bodies, in private or public gatherings. Those persons who most fervently fight prayer in the public schools themselves believe in the efficacy of prayer. What is inadmissible in the squabble is an appreciation and understanding that those who want children to pray are simply arguing over the locus of the prayer and, except for Atheists, not arguing over prayer itself.
Prayer is supplication to the unknown to remedy a felt inadequacy of the supplicant. It presupposes that there is an intellectual power, a big sysop in the sky with a software program of problem solving, that the sysop is amenable to being addressed by human beings through projection, and that subsequently petitions addressed to that sysop can be answered, most frequently by the modification or suspension of natural laws or normal consequences of human activities.
Teaching all children that prayer is efficacious (i.e., capturing the rising generation intellectually) is accepted by all theists since the idea of communication with a god supports the idea of the existence of a god - buttressed along by the existence of the supplicant. That such a god may become aware, through that communication, that a prayer supplicant exists establishes the supplicant’s identity as a human being. Prayer is a test of existence not only of a god but of a person: “I think, therefore I am” transmutes through “I speak, therefore I am:” to become finally, “God answers my communications, therefore I am.” This is demonstrated again and again by the cries of individuals: “I must know who I am; I am seeking self-identification; I must find myself.”
Mindless repetition of collective prayer when it is not needed for specific problem solving - a morning prayer of all children in a school situation, a collective prayer in a house of worship, a prayer at a public meeting, a prayer to open a legislative body - beguiles the individual into accepting that all people pray, and this motivates individual prayers.
The Lord’s Prayer which was the subject matter of the Murray v Curlett case, is particularly pernicious. It strips all human beings of their humanity. Leaving aside the direct order of the mythological J. C. in his alleged and “beloved” Sermon on the Mount that public prayer is hypocritical since those who pray in public simply “love to be seen of men” and will receive no reward from god for prayer, he puts all on notice to pray to “thy Father which is in secret” and that “thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly,” an injunction totally ignored by the religious and by school administrators.
But more to the point, he advises that “your Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before you ask him.” What then is the need of prayer?
J. C. then further advises, “After this manner, therefore pray ye,” and gives the Lord’s Prayer. This prayer directs humankind away from existence, from the earth and from nature, and confirms that the supplicant wants god to swallow up the earth when his “kingdom” arrives. Begging wherewithal for existence (bread), the supplicant is concerned
with sins - to do which god himself might tempt us. But nonetheless, the supplicant then affirms that god, in heaven, alone has the power to establish his kingdom on earth and to derive glory from it.
What a helluva debasement of humankind!
Of course, I could not permit my sons to repeat this palaver every day of their school lives. But my attack on the Lord's Prayer was too threatening to religion, and I and my family have been paying the price of ostracism from the culture ever since.
Perhaps one day in the future, the people of the world will catch up to me and mine. Perhaps there may be a regression to the fourteenth century as the religious sink lower and lower into intellectual barbarism. I know only that the place to fight them is here in the United States, that the time to fight them is now, and that the persons who must fight them are Atheists.
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* Since the time that Dr. O’Hair wrote this article, Corliss Lamont has died. ![[back]](../../backarrow.gif)
Born
on 13 April 1919, Dr. Madalyn Murray O'Hair initiated the United States Supreme Court case Murray v Curlett, which removed reverential Bible reading and forced-prayer recitation from the public schools of our nation, on 17 June 1963. She founded American Atheists in the same year. Together with GORA she founded the United World Atheists, sponsor of the triennial World Atheist Meet. A champion of freedom of speech, freedom of assemblage, freedom of conscience, and the right to be free from religion, she has been known nationally and internationally as an Atheist spokesperson.
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here are four basic irrational elements of religion which hold the minds of men in captivity. These elements must be met head-on in order to have humanity survive. At no time in history, prior to the advent of American Atheists, have they been directly and explicitly confronted, and the time has come when it is a necessity. The four ideas are: