Donald Trump Is Promising ‘Big Action’ on School Prayer to Rally Evangelical Voters – By Katie Reilly (TIME) / Jan 15 2020
President Donald Trump is promising “big action” to promote school prayer, tapping into the long-controversial issue of religion in public schools as he seeks to rally the evangelicals who were key to his 2016 election.
© Marco Bello—Bloomberg/Getty Images President Donald Trump, center, prays during an ‘Evangelicals for Trump’ Coalition launch event in Miami, Florida, on Jan. 3, 2020.
“We will not allow faithful Americans to be bullied by the hard left,” Trump said at a rally with evangelical supporters at a Florida megachurch on Jan. 3. “Very soon, I’ll be taking action to safeguard students’ and teachers’ First Amendment rights to pray in our schools. We’re doing a big action, Attorney General Bill Barr.”
Trump did not elaborate on his plans, but he is scheduled to announce “guidance on constitutional prayer in public schools” on Thursday, according to his schedule released by the White House.
But while the First Amendment supports the free exercise of religion, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that public schools cannot promote prayer or religious symbols. And legal and religious experts say it’s not clear what meaningful action Trump could take without violating that precedent.
“Private prayer, to the extent that it would ever be interfered with, is already protected by the First Amendment and there are very, very few cases where any government official has tried to interfere with a private student’s right to pray,” says Frank Ravitch, a Michigan State University law professor who has written about school prayer.
Republicans are far more likely than Democrats to support school prayer, according to a Gallup poll showing that overall American support for daily prayer in public school classrooms had fallen from 70% in 1999 to 61% in 2014. Protestants and other Christians were also far more likely than people with no religious preference to support daily prayer in the classroom and student-led prayer at graduation ceremonies.
And Trump has seen consistently high support from white evangelicals throughout his presidency. Exit polls showed that Trump won 81% of the white evangelical vote in the 2016 general election, and a December poll conducted by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that 79% of white evangelical Protestants approve of how Trump is handling his job as president. By comparison, less than half of all other Americans approve.
There have been some cracks in that support, notably when Christianity Today, a leading evangelical magazine, published an editorial in December calling for Trump’s impeachment and removal from office, describing his conduct as “profoundly immoral.” But other evangelical leaders quickly rallied behind Trump in response.
“Essentially what’s going on here is it’s pandering to social conservatives,” Ravitch says. “That’s really what this is about.”
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