Significance: Renewed interest in prayer in the public schools led the Supreme Court to re-examine its stance on the establishment clause of the First Amendment as it applied to state governments. In this case the Court ruled that states did not have the authority to establish religion.
Background: A 1978 Alabama statute allowed schools to hold a one-minute period of silence for meditation each day. In 1981 the law was amended to allow that silence to be used for meditation “or voluntary prayer,” and the following year, the law was amended yet again to allow teachers to lead students in a specific Christian prayer. In 1982 Ishmael Jaffree and various groups that supported the separation of church and state challenged the law, suing Governor George Wallace. Jaffree claimed that the Alabama law violated the establishment clause. The law and its amendments were upheld in district court, but the Alabama Court of Appeals found the two amendments unconstitutional. The case was appealed to the Supreme Court.
Decision: This case was argued on December 4, 1984, and decided on June 4, 1985, by a vote of 6 to 3. Justice John Stevens spoke for the Court, which overturned the Alabama law. Having agreed with the district court that the original law was constitutional and with the appeals court that the 1982 amendment was unconstitutional, the Supreme Court considered only the 1981 amendment, which allowed both meditation and prayer. In the majority opinion, Justice Stevens remarked that the Alabama law did not have a secular, or nonreligious, purpose. By adding the words “or voluntary prayer” to the law, the state indicated that it considered prayer to be the favored practice. Justices Warren Burger and Byron White, in their dissenting opinions, argued that the Alabama law established neutrality toward religious activity and was therefore constitutional. Justice Rehnquist argued in his dissenting opinion that the establishment clause only prohibited the government from preferring one religion over another; it did not force the government to be neutral between religion and nonreligion.
Excerpt from the Opinion of the Court: “The [Alabama] legislature enacted [the 1981 amendment] for the sole purpose of expressing the State’s endorsement [support] of prayer activities for one minute at the beginning of each schoolday. The addition of ‘or voluntary prayer’ indicates that the State intended to characterize prayer as a favored practice. Such an endorsement is not consistent with the established principle that the government must pursue a course of complete neutrality toward religion.”
