ENGEL V. VITALE , 10 N.Y.2d 174, 176 N.E.2d 579, 218 N.Y.S.2d 659
Decided July 7, 1961
This case is the predecessor to the United States Supreme Court decision of the same name decided in 1962.
The Board of Education of the Union Free School District in Nassau County in 1958 required that “the regents prayer be said daily in our schools.” The Regents prayer was: “Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon Thee, and we beg Thy blessings upon us, our parents, our teachers and our Country.” It was created by the New York State Board of Regents, the governing body the State’s public school system, in order to stress the moral and spiritual heritage of America and to teach children that “God is their Creator.” It was the practice to say the prayer immediately after the salute to the flag as required daily procedure. The prayer was led by the teacher or a student selected by the teacher, with the other students joining in. As a matter of policy, no child was to be required or encouraged to join in the prayer against his/her wishes and there was no penalty for non-participation.
Taxpayers and parents of children in the District’s schools sued the school district seeking to discontinue the practice. Those bringing suit included one “non-believer” and the rest were members of various religious bodies. They claimed a violation of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution (“Congress shall make...no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”) and section 3 of Article I of the New York State Constitution (“The free exercise and enjoyment of religious profession and worship, without discrimination or preference, shall forever be allowed in this state to all mankind.”)
The New York State Court of Appeals in a 5-2 decision determined that there was no constitutional rights violation, focusing its opinion on the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause . 1 The opinion explained that the Establishment Clause was intended by the Founding Fathers to prohibit “official adoption of, or favor to, one or more sects.” The prayer itself shows no partiality to one religion or another. Separation of church and state was not intended to forbid a simple declaration of belief in God as in the regents’ prayer. This is clear, wrote Justice Desmond, by the many examples of belief and trust in a Supreme Being expressed in American government, including the Declaration of Independence, official oaths of calling upon God to witness the truth, and the Pledge of Allegiance. It makes no sense to accept these in public life but not in public schools. Belief in God is “as essential and permanent a feature of the American governmental system as is freedom of religion...”
The dissent in this case explained that the Establishment Clause was intended to do more than merely forbid an “established church” or favoritism toward one sect. It was intended to:
• eliminate divisiveness in public life caused when the government gets involved in religion or religion in government;
• avoid compulsion to practice or believe in religion;
• require government neutrality when it comes to competition between sects; and
• protect the rights of minorities, including diverse religious sects and atheists.
In a portion of the dissent echoed clearly in the United States Supreme Court opinion, Justice Dye noted that while the prayer was voluntary, the “pressure which an immature child is unable to resist because of his inherent desire to conform” made it coercive. The wall of separation between church and state “may not be overstepped in the slightest degree in favor of either the church or the state and so the board of education may not require the saying of the Regents prayer as daily school procedure.”
Learning Activities
Terms to Know
• coercion
• Establishment Clause
• nondenominational
Compare and Contrast
Look below at the excerpts from the United States Supreme Court’s decision in Engel v. Vitale and consider the following: Where does the U.S. Supreme Court differ from the New York State Court of Appeals decision? Where does it echo the Court of Appeal’s dissent?
Engel v. Vitale, 370 U.S. 421 (1962)
“We think that by using its public school system to encourage recitation of the Regents' prayer, the State of New York has adopted a practice wholly inconsistent with the Establishment Clause. …”
“There can be no doubt that New York's state prayer program officially establishes the religious beliefs embodied in the Regents' prayer. The respondents' argument to the contrary, which is largely based upon the contention that the Regents' prayer is "non-denominational" and the fact that the program, as modified and approved by state courts, does not require all pupils to recite the prayer but permits those who wish to do so to remain silent or be excused from the room, ignores the essential nature of the program's constitutional defects. Neither the fact that the prayer may be denominationally neutral nor the fact that its observance on the part of the students is voluntary can serve to free it from the limitations of the Establishment Clause, as it might from the Free Exercise Clause, of the First Amendment…Although these two clauses may in certain instances overlap, they forbid two quite different kinds of governmental encroachment upon religious freedom. The Establishment Clause, unlike the Free Exercise Clause, does not depend upon any showing of direct governmental compulsion and is violated by the enactment of laws which establish an official religion whether those laws operate directly to coerce nonobserving individuals or not. This is not to say, of course, that laws officially prescribing a particular form of religious worship do not involve coercion of such individuals. When the power, prestige and financial support of government is placed behind a particular religious belief, the indirect coercive pressure upon religious minorities to conform to the prevailing officially approved religion is plain. But the purposes underlying the Establishment Clause go much further than that. Its first and most immediate purpose rested on the belief that a union of government and religion tends to destroy government and to degrade religion .”
“Another purpose of the Establishment Clause rested upon an awareness of the historical fact that governmentally established religions and religious persecutions go hand in hand. The Founders knew that only a few years after the Book of Common Prayer became the only accepted form of religious services in the established Church of England, an Act of Uniformity was passed to compel all Englishmen to attend those services and to make it a criminal offense to conduct or attend religious gatherings of any other kind -- a law which was consistently flouted by dissenting religious groups in England and which contributed to widespread persecutions of people like John Bunyan who persisted in holding "unlawful [religious] meetings . . . to the great disturbance and distraction of the good subjects of this kingdom . . . ." And they knew that similar persecutions had received the sanction of law in several of the colonies in this country soon after the establishment of official religions in those colonies. It was in large part to get completely away from this sort of systematic religious persecution that the Founders brought into being our Nation, our Constitution, and our Bill of Rights with its prohibition against any governmental establishment of religion. The New York laws officially prescribing the Regents' prayer are inconsistent both with the purposes of the Establishment Clause and with the Establishment Clause itself.”
“To those who may subscribe to the view that
because the Regents' official prayer is so brief and general there can be no
danger to religious freedom in its governmental establishment, however, it
may be appropriate to say in the words of James Madison, the author of the
First Amendment:
’It is proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties. . . .
Who does not see that the same authority which can establish Christianity,
in exclusion of all other Religions, may establish with the same ease any
particular sect of Christians, in exclusion of all other Sects? That the
same authority which can force a citizen to contribute three pence only of
his property for the support of any one establishment, may force him to
conform to any other establishment in all cases whatsoever?’”
Critical Thinking
Why is there a need or desire for a New York State Constitutional protection for religious freedom when the United States Constitution already contains such a protection?