- Court: U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit
- Citation: 370 F.3d 1252 (11th Cir. 2004)
- Decided: 2004
- Church-State Issue: Religion In Public Schools
Description
A public-school teacher’s practice of opening her class with a request for student devotions and a moment of silence — which she began with “let us pray,” and concluded with “amen” — lacked a genuine secular purpose and conveyed a message of governmental endorsement of religion, in violation of the Establishment Clause.
The Facts: A public-school teacher typically began her class each day by eliciting prayer requests from her students, then stating, "Let us pray," before holding a moment of silence that she concluded by saying, "Amen." The school’s principal had personally observed this practice. A student challenged the practice under the Establishment Clause. The district court dismissed his Establishment Clause claim on qualified immunity grounds, but the Eleventh Circuit reversed, concluding that then-existing law clearly established a constitutional violation.
Establishment Clause: The court applied the three-part Lemon test to the teacher’s prayer practice. First, the teacher’s solicitation of "prayer requests" and her use of the phrases "let us pray" and "amen" made clear that her intent in holding a moment of silence was to foster prayer. While her supposed purpose was to teach students compassion, she had chosen a quintessentially religious means of doing so, contrary to Lemon’s purpose prong. Second, given that the effect of the teacher’s behavior was to promote prayer, an inherently religious activity, her conduct constituted an impermissible governmental endorsement of religion. This was true regardless of whether students had asked the teacher to undertake the presentations, whether they were nonsectarian, and whether students were free to not participate or even leave the room. An objective observer would still view the teacher’s actions as an official endorsement of prayer. Hence, the teacher’s practice failed the Lemon test on two separate bases. Finding the circumstances in this case virtually "indistinguishable" from those in the Supreme Court’s 1985 Jaffree decision, the court concluded the constitutional violation was clearly established, and the teacher was not entitled to qualified immunity. And because her prayer practice was regular and longstanding enough to qualify as a policy, the school board could be held vicariously liable for her conduct.
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