Blog Post – Is the First Amendment Dead in Schools?
Coach Joe Kennedy, a Marine for 20 years, started his job in 2008 as head coach for the junior varsity football team and assistant coach for the varsity team at the Bremerton School District in Washington State. At the close of his very first game, Kennedy waited for the players and other coaches to clear the field. After his official coaching duties had ended, he walked to the 50-yard line, took a knee, and prayed, quietly but audibly. After a few games, some students asked what he was doing.
“I was thanking God for you guys,” Kennedy recalls telling his players. “Then a couple said they were Christians and asked if they could join. I responded, ‘It’s a free country, you can do whatever you want to do.’”
Seven years later one must wonder whether he still believes this is a free country. In September, 2015 the school district began investigating the coach to determine if his prayers were constitutional. On September 17th the superintendent sent a demand letter to Coach Kennedy outlining what they wanted from him. These included a demand that his motivational talks to football players must not include any hint of religious content and he was free to pray off in a corner out of sight of students, players and fans. The superintendent’s reasoning? The wall of separation of church and state, of course!
This phrase is of course from a January 1st 1802 letter from President Thomas Jefferson to the Danbury Baptist Church in Connecticut. Jefferson viewed the “wall” as limiting the federal government from “intermeddling” in church government, as explained in his letter to Samuel Miller, January 23, 1808:
“I consider the government of the United States as interdicted [prohibited] by the Constitution from intermeddling with religious institutions, their doctrines, discipline, or exercises. This results not only from the provision that no law shall be made respecting the establishment or free exercise of religion, but from that also which reserves to the states the powers not delegated to the United States (10th Amendment).”
The federal government was not limited, though, from spreading religion in Western territories, as April 26, 1802, Jefferson’s administration extended a 1787 act of Congress where lands were designated:
“For the sole use of Christian Indians and the Moravian Brethren missionaries for civilizing the Indians and promoting Christianity.”
And again, December 3, 1803, during Jefferson’s administration, Congress ratified a treaty with the Kaskaskia Indians:
“Whereas the greater part of the said tribe have been baptized and received into the Catholic Church…the United States will give annually, for seven years, one hundred dollars toward the support of a priest of that religion, who will engage to perform for said tribe the duties of his office, and also to instruct as many of their children as possible…And the United States will further give the sum of three hundred dollars, to assist the said tribe in the erection of a church.”
Groups use Jefferson’s phrase “separation of church and state” to remove national acknowledgment of God, despite Jefferson’s warning against that very thing, as inscribed on the Jefferson Memorial, Washington, DC:
“God who gave us life gave us liberty. Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God?”
It was Jefferson who declared, “No provision in our Constitution ought to be dearer to man than that which protects the rights of conscience against the enterprises of the civil authority.”
So . . . would Thomas Jefferson approve of the school board’s decision last week to place Coach Kennedy on paid administrative leave after he again bowed the knee on the 50 yard line after the school’s homecoming game. Coach did not invite anyone to join him and was greatly surprised when many players and coaches from the opposing team, as well as fans, joined him at the 50 yard line.
What would our Founding Fathers think?