# Abington School District v. Schempp **374 U.S. 203 (1963).** Decided **8–1** one year after *[[Engel v. Vitale]]*, the Court held that state-mandated **Bible reading and recitation of the Lord's Prayer** in public schools violate the Establishment Clause. Where *Engel* struck a prayer the state had written, *Schempp* struck the state's requirement that students read a text the state had not written. Together the two decisions removed school-sponsored religious exercise from American public education. ## Why it matters for the KB **1. It closed the obvious workaround.** After *Engel*, the available response was that the problem had been *state authorship* — so use scripture instead, which the state did not compose. *Schempp* foreclosed that a year later. The pairing is what made the church-state holding stable, and it is why the two cases are always cited together in the grievance narrative. **2. It produced the test that governed for decades.** *Schempp* articulated the secular-purpose and primary-effect inquiry that fed into the *Lemon* framework — the analytical machinery for Establishment Clause cases until the Court moved toward a history-and-tradition approach. The vault's interest is in the transition: **the doctrine did not so much reverse as get replaced by a different question**, which is a quieter form of overruling and harder to point at. **3. It is where the "hostility to religion" frame originates.** The dissent and the reaction framed removal of state-sponsored exercise as state *opposition* to religion rather than neutrality toward it. That framing — neutrality read as hostility — is one of the most durable moves in the vault's [[Christian Nationalism]] material, and it underwrites the contemporary argument that excluding religious institutions from public funding is discrimination against them. **4. The counter-project has been remarkably successful.** The trajectory from *Schempp* to religious charter schools and public voucher funding of religious education is one of the clearest long-run doctrinal reversals the vault tracks, accomplished over six decades through judicial appointments rather than through any change in the constitutional text. ## See Also - [[Engel v. Vitale]] — the prior term - [[First Amendment]] · [[Christian Nationalism]] - [[Federalist Society]] — the appointments project that changed the doctrine