Supreme Court

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Alongside abortion, don't neglect the Supreme Court's big school prayer ruling

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Alongside abortion, don't neglect the Supreme Court's big school prayer ruling

Vastly overshadowed by the uproar over Politico's bombshell report that the Supreme Court may be poised to overturn past abortion rulings, the court actually released religious-liberty ruling written by retiring Justice Stephen Breyer. His Shurtleff v. City of Boston opinion (.pdf here) reasoned that since Boston had permitted 284 city hall flag displays by varied groups, it violated freedom of speech to forbid a Christian flag for fear of violating church-state separation.

Harvard Divinity student Hannah Santos, writing for Americans United, said Christian flag displays would be "disturbing and demoralizing" and evoke the Puritan founders' "cruel" intolerance. But Breyer and the other two liberal justices joined six conservatives in this unanimous — repeat unanimous — decision.

There's likely to be less Court concord on another First Amendment ruling reporters need to prepare for in coming weeks. This dispute crisply demonstrates the culture-war split among American religious groups and between most Democrats and Republicans.

Kennedy v, Bremerton School District [Docket #21-418] involves the firing of Joseph Kennedy, an assistant high school football coach in Washington state. He violated the school's order against his kneeling to utter brief prayers on the 50-yard line after games, with students who wished joining him.

Here, too, Kennedy's freedoms of speech and religion ran up against school fears about violating the Constitution's clause barring government "establishment of religion." Click here for a recent Julia Duin post looking at some of the media coverage of this debate.

In preparing coverage to interpret the forthcoming ruling, keep in mind possible ramifications beyond the gridiron. As Christianity Today reported, hypothetical situations the justices discussed during the two-hour oral argument included teachers or coaches praying silently or aloud or reading the Bible before class, coaches praying on the sidelines perhaps with specific notice that students weren't required to pray or that they cannot pray or a player simply making the sign of the cross.

Also this. A court filing from the Jewish Coalition for Religious Liberty and the Islam team at the Religious Freedom Institute informed the justices that observant Jewish teachers and coaches need to speak brief public blessings before eating or drinking, and that Muslims must join daily prayer times during public school hours or while chaperoning a field trip.


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Plug-In: Can a high school coach pray at 50-Yard line? Five SCOTUS hearing takeaways

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Plug-In: Can a high school coach pray at 50-Yard line? Five SCOTUS hearing takeaways

The case of Joseph Kennedy, a Bremerton, Washington, high school football coach who wants to kneel and pray at the 50-yard line, made it to the U.S. Supreme Court this week.

Arguments took nearly two hours, double the time scheduled. Here are five key takeaways:

1. The issue: “The case pits the rights of government workers to free speech and the free exercise of their faith against the Constitution’s prohibition of government endorsement of religion and Supreme Court precedents that forbid pressuring students to participate in religious activities,” the New York Times’ Adam Liptak explains.

2. The significance: It’s “one of its most significant cases on prayer in decades … in a clear test for how the court's new conservative majority may rule on prayer in public schools,” Newsweek’s Julia Duin reports.

Duin adds:

The case focused on whether a high school coach could openly pray after the end of a football game. Arguments included examples from elsewhere in the sports world, with mentions of former Denver Broncos football player Tim Tebow, known for kneeling on the field in prayer, and Egyptian soccer player Mohamed Salah, who kneels in a thanksgiving prayer to Allah after he scores a goal.

Read Plug-in’s past coverage of Tebow’s controversial prayers. Also, see this Duin post — “Coach Joe Kennedy goes to the Supreme Court and the media coverage gets a B+” — here at GetReligion.

3. The hypotheticals: “The U.S. Supreme Court justices spun more than a dozen hypothetical prayer scenarios during oral arguments,” Christianity Today’s Daniel Silliman notes.

The Associated Press’ Jessica Gresko highlights some of those scenarios:

A coach who crosses himself before a game. A teacher who reads the Bible aloud before the bell rings. A coach who hosts an after-school Christian youth group in his home.

Supreme Court justices discussed all those hypothetical scenarios.


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Coach Joe Kennedy goes to the Supreme Court and the media coverage gets a B+

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Coach Joe Kennedy goes to the Supreme Court and the media coverage gets a B+

God and football. Angry school officials and Satanists. That’s a combo that gets a lot of readers.

In the fall of 2015, soon after I moved to Seattle, a conflict arose across Puget Sound about a football coach who prayed on the 50-yard line after games and a school district that forbade him to do so. Here’s what I wrote back then about the coverage.

On Monday, Coach Joe Kennedy’s case went before the U.S. Supreme Court, the first time in decades that a school-prayer case has been heard by the justices. This time I was covering it for Newsweek, starting at 7 a.m. my time, which is when the debate went live on the East Coast.

Usually, the justices race through their hearings in only one hour. Kennedy v. Bremerton School District took nearly two. (You can listen to these debates on a live audio feed.)

You heard justices ask about Young Life clubs. They pondered the significance of whether a teacher who goes to an Ash Wednesday service and arrives at school with a smudge on her forehead is doing anything illegal. Would a coach have been disciplined by the school district if he planted a Ukrainian flag on the 50-yard line instead of praying?

In short, it was fascinating, and I thought most of the stories on the hearing were quite good with a few bad apples. Many of the headlines said the majority-conservative court “appeared sympathetic” to the coach, which I disagree with. The justices appeared more confused by the conflicting narratives. As Justice Stephen Breyer plaintively noted at one point: "One of my problems in this case, is that the parties seem to have different views of the facts."

The Supreme Court had turned down the case a few years ago because the facts weren’t clear and apparently, they still weren’t as of Monday. For instance, the defense said that students felt coerced into joining the coach in his prayers, and they included an amicus brief from one unnamed former player who said he felt coerced. Yet, when the Seattle Times pigeonholed three local football players about the issue back in 2015, none of them said they felt forced to go along.


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Plug-In: Déjà Vu all over again, as religion plays big role in fight over Disney and sex ed

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Plug-In: Déjà Vu all over again, as religion plays big role in fight over Disney and sex ed

I’ve never visited Walt Disney World, but I did make it to Disney church one Sunday.

Mickey, Minnie and friends are, as you might have noticed, key actors in the nation’s latest culture war skirmish.

Over the last week, the fight over Florida’s Parental Rights in Education bill — or, as critics call it, the “Don’t Say Gay” law — has made front-page headlines in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times.

Call it Disney déjà vu.

The Los Angeles Times’ Ryan Faughnder asserts:

It’s a battle that, to people who have followed Disney’s history, has a familiar ring. The current conflict is just the latest clash to reveal underlying tensions that have existed between Disney and religious conservatives for decades as the company has increasingly embraced the LGBTQ community.

It has strong echoes of the anti-Disney protests of the late 1990s, when religious leaders criticized the extension of health benefits to the partners of LGBTQ Disney employees, the coming out of Ellen DeGeneres on her sitcom on Disney-owned ABC and unofficial “Gay Day” celebrations at the theme parks.

Religious broadcaster Pat Robertson, host of “The 700 Club,” warned the city of Orlando that it risked hurricanes by tolerating Gay Days. The Southern Baptist Convention in 1997 called for a Disney boycott after the nondenominational American Family Assn. campaigned against the Burbank entertainment giant by sending thousands of protest packets to pastors. The difference now is that, instead of brochures, there’s Fox News and Twitter.

A major development in the current brawl came Thursday, as the Wall Street Journal’s Arian Campo-Flores and Robbie Whelan report:

Florida lawmakers gave final approval to a bill that would end a special tax district that allows Walt Disney Co. DIS 0.07% ▲ to govern the land housing its theme parks, escalating a weekslong dispute with Disney over its public opposition to a Florida bill that limits classroom instruction on gender and sexuality.

The measure now goes to Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has made clear he would sign it.

In a twist, Southern Baptists have been “offering discounted Disneyland tickets for families traveling to Anaheim this June for the denomination's big annual meeting,” as the Tennessean’s Liam Adams reported earlier this month.


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Left and right cheer together, for a change, as U.S. Supreme Court defends religious liberty

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Left and right cheer together, for a change, as U.S. Supreme Court defends religious liberty

Before putting his neck on the chopping block, King Charles I turned to his chaplain seeking personal peace after the chaos of the English Civil Wars.

The king was, on that infamous 1649 day, pondering heaven, hell and forgiveness.

“To show you that I am a good Christian," the king said, pointing to London Bishop William Juxon, "I hope there is a good man that will bear me witness that I have forgiven all the world, and even those in particular that have been the chief causers of my death. Who they are, God knows, I do not desire to know. God forgive them."

This isn't the kind of theology that ordinarily shapes U.S. Supreme Court decisions. Nevertheless, it was part of a litany of historical references during debates preceding a recent decision requiring Texas to grant a convicted murderer his Baptist pastor's audible prayers and comforting touch during his execution.

This was a rare moment in which activists on both sides of America's culture wars cheered for "religious liberty," a freedom that until recently didn't require cynical "scare quotes" that suggest uncertainty. This trend in First Amendment discourse has, for me, become the most important story I have covered during the third of a century -- as of this week -- in which I have written this national "On Religion" column.

The big question: Why did appeals to centuries of tradition work this time?

The condemned prisoner, John Ramirez, told the court he believed his pastor's "laying on of hands on him as he dies, and the vocalization of prayers and scripture, will assist his passing from life to death and will guide his path to the afterlife."

In his decision, Chief Justice John Roberts saluted the "rich history" of evidence supporting this prisoner's request "to have his pastor lay hands on him and pray over him during the execution. Both are traditional forms of religious exercise."


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Podcast: Thoughts on a third of a century as a columnist (and a symbolic SCOTUS ruling)

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Podcast: Thoughts on a third of a century as a columnist (and a symbolic SCOTUS ruling)

This week marked a rather symbolic anniversary for my national “On Religion” column, which I have been writing now for (#GULP) a third of a century.

As you would imagine, I spend some time thinking about the subject for this week’s column: “Why 'religious liberty' has ended up inside quotation marks.” This column was also the hook for this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (CLICK HERE to tune that in).

Anyone who has followed my work with GetReligion and “On Religion” will not be surprised that I chose to write about the First Amendment and and a highly symbolic religious liberty case (no scare quotes there) at the U.S. Supreme Court.

But hold that thought. I’d like to walk through what are, for me, four symbolic columns I have written in the past, as I head into year No. 34.

That first column in 1988 was rather newsy: “Pat Robertson, evangelicals and the White House.” Here’s the lede on that:

On the morning before Easter, Pat Robertson stood in a pulpit under an American flag and a banner that read, "King of Kings, Lord of Lords."

Alas, change the name of the candidate and that still sounds rather relevant, considering the state of warfare inside American evangelicalism these days (see this must-read Richard Ostling post).

On the 10th anniversary of the column — that seemed like a long time, back then — I focused on a classic book by sociologist James Davison Hunter (“Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America”) that has greatly influenced my work as a journalist and as a professor. The column opened by describing an interesting trend at political and religious rallies at that time:


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Five faith facts about the life of Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman at SCOTUS

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Five faith facts about the life of Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman at SCOTUS

Faith. It’s an important part of Ketanji Brown Jackson’s story.

Here are five religion facts about the 51-year-old judge who on Thursday became the first Black woman confirmed to the U.S. Supreme Court:

1. Jackson will be “the first-ever nondenominational Supreme Court justice,” as Christianity Today’s Kate Shellnutt points out.

2. She’ll become the second current Protestant on the court (along with Neil Gorsuch), joining six Catholics (Samuel Alito, Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh, John Roberts, Sonia Sotomayor and Clarence Thomas) and one Jewish justice (Elena Kagan), according to Christianity Today’s Megan Fowler.

But Religion News Service’s Jack Jenkins tweets that Jackson will be “the only current Supreme Court justice who publicly IDsas Protestant.” “Gorsuch attended an Episcopal church before joining SCOTUS,” Jenkins explains, “but grew up Catholic and how he personally IDs is unclear.”

3. Jackson “has put her religious faith front, center — and vague,” notes The Associated Press’ Peter Smith. “She’s spoken strongly of the role of her faith in her life and career but hasn’t gotten into the specifics of that commitment.”

RNS’ Adelle Banks offers more details on Jackson’s past statements about her faith in God.

4. At a hearing last month, Jackson was pressed on her faith by Sen. Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina, ReligionUnplugged.com’s Hamil R. Harris reports.

The Deseret News’ Kelsey Dallas recounts this exchange between Graham and Jackson:

“On a scale of 1 to 10, how faithful would you say you are in terms of religion? I go to church probably three times a year so that speaks poorly of me. Do you attend church regularly?,” Graham said.

Jackson declined to give a rating, noting that she worried about the message doing so would send to Americans watching at home.


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Naw! Nobody in the Title IX wars is asking LGBTQ questions about religious schools

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Naw! Nobody in the Title IX wars is asking LGBTQ questions about religious schools

Every now and then, I finish reading a major-media news story and I think: Wait a minute. There’s a massive hole here (and one that’s going to produce all kinds of news headlines). Didn’t anyone notice?

In this case, we are talking about another story involving a head-on collision between the First Amendment and the evolving doctrines of the Sexual Revolution. The battleground is the hyper-tense world of higher education. The Washington Post headline, in this case: “New Title IX rules set to assert rights of transgender students.”

We will get to the overture in a moment. But can you spot the “hole” that is sort-of mentioned in this background paragraph which is buried way down in the Post report?

Title IX is a 1972 law that bars discrimination on the basis of sex in any educational program or activity that receives federal money. Schools found in violation risk losing federal aid. Advocates have long held that this definition rightfully includes discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity.

OK. Does “any educational program or activity that receives federal money” include student-loan programs?

If so, maybe this story should have at least mentioned the 7,000 or so religious colleges and universities in this land? I mean, is there any chance that LGBTQ activists are going to challenge the religious liberty claims of these schools, many of which are explicitly doctrine-defined voluntary associations?

With that in mind, read the top of this feature at The Conversation: “What is the religious exemption to Title IX and what’s at stake in LGBTQ students’ legal challenge?”

While federal law shields most U.S. students from gender and sexual orientation discrimination, an estimated 100,000 LGBTQ students at religious institutions do not have the same protections.

Under a religious exemption provision, scores of colleges and universities can – and do – discriminate on the basis of someone’s sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression.

A class action lawsuit now challenges that discrimination.


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Are lawyers 'ministers?' Unanswered questions plague Union Gospel Mission coverage

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Are lawyers 'ministers?' Unanswered questions plague Union Gospel Mission coverage

Last week, the Supreme Court turned down a very interesting case that has gotten comparatively little media coverage outside the Pacific Northwest, which is where it originated. It was Woods v. Seattle’s Union Gospel Mission (UGM) and it’s an important milestone in allowing gay employees to be employed at evangelical Christian organizations.

I wish the high court had taken the case, as it would have gone a long way toward explaining if all employees at religious organizations are counted as “ministers,” or only the ones with spiritual-sounding titles.

It’s a battle that’s going to keep on being fought and I’m guessing that leaders at evangelical and Catholic groups are not taking the Court’s silence on this case as good news.

The Seattle Times’ account of the Court’s rejection is below, although I would’ve liked to have seen a more balanced headline than: “U.S. Supreme Court won’t hear Seattle’s Union Gospel Mission’s anti-LGBTQ+ hiring policies case.” The kind of gives you an idea of where the article is going, doesn’t it?

Assuming the Times reporters did read some of the arguments from UGM, they would have known the subject was not just some anti-gay organization, but that UGM also had problems with this employee’s lack of clear Christian commitment.

The U.S. Supreme Court announced … that it will not review a case involving Seattle’s Union Gospel Mission, which was sued in 2017 over its anti-LGBTQ+ hiring policy after it declined to hire a bisexual lawyer who applied for a job.

Justice Samuel Alito and Justice Clarence Thomas agreed with the decision not to hear the case at this stage. But according to The Associated Press, they said that “the day may soon come” when the court needs to confront the issue the case presents.

The Seattle-based Christian organization filed a petition in August 2021, asking the Supreme Court to decide a case in which the Washington Supreme Court ruled in favor of the plaintiff, attorney Matt Woods, in March 2021.

I covered this in December for Newsweek (of course it helps that I live driving distance from UGM’s headquarters), and believe me, UGM helps the folks who no one else wants to help.


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