# Engel v. Vitale **370 U.S. 421 (1962).** The Supreme Court held it unconstitutional for state officials to compose an official prayer and encourage its recitation in public schools. Decided **6–1**, opinion by Justice Black; Stewart dissenting; Frankfurter and White taking no part. ## The prayer The New York Board of Regents had recommended a **22-word, deliberately nondenominational** prayer to school districts: > "Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon Thee, and we beg Thy blessings upon us, our parents, our teachers and our Country." Recitation was voluntary; students could be excused. The Court held that neither feature saved it. The constitutional problem was that **the state had written a prayer** — not that anyone was compelled to say it. ## Why it matters for the KB **1. It is the single most politically productive Supreme Court decision in the formation of the religious right.** More than *Brown*, more than *Roe* chronologically, *Engel* supplied the founding grievance: the claim that the federal courts "took prayer out of schools." The [[Christian Nationalism]] material in this vault traces a direct organizational line from the reaction to *Engel* and *[[Abington School District v. Schempp]]* through the 1970s–80s religious-right infrastructure. **2. The nondenominational drafting is why the decision lands where it does.** The Regents wrote the blandest possible prayer precisely to avoid sectarian objection, and the Court found that irrelevant — a state-authored prayer is establishment regardless of how inoffensive its content. That holding is what makes *Engel* unusable as a "just be more inclusive" problem, and it is why the subsequent strategy shifted from writing better prayers to **changing who is on the Court**. **3. The popular account of it is wrong in a specific and useful way.** *Engel* did not prohibit prayer in schools. Students praying individually or in groups was not at issue and remains protected. What it prohibited was the **state composing and sponsoring** prayer. The gap between the holding and the grievance is itself the object of study: a decision that is widely understood to have done something it did not do has been more politically potent than the decision it actually was. **4. It is the church-state anchor for the voucher argument.** The contemporary school-choice and religious-charter litigation the vault tracks runs in the opposite direction — toward public funding of religious schooling — and *Engel* is the high-water mark it is pushing back from. ## See Also - [[Abington School District v. Schempp]] — the following term, Bible reading and the Lord's Prayer - [[First Amendment]] · [[Christian Nationalism]] - [[Brown v. Board of Education]] — the other Warren Court decision that reorganized American politics