Coach’s prayers prompt test of religious freedom

BREMERTON, WASH. » Joseph Kennedy, who used to be an assistant coach for the high school football team here, pointed to the spot on the 50-yard line where he would take a knee and offer prayers after games.

He was wearing a Bremerton Knights jacket and squinting in the drizzling morning rain, and he repeated a promise he had made to God when he became a coach.

“I will give you the glory after every game, win or lose,” he said, adding that the setting mattered: “It just made sense to do it on the field of battle.”

Coaching was his calling, he said. But after the school board told him to stop mixing football and faith on the field, he left the job and sued, with lower courts rejecting his argument that the board had violated his First Amendment rights.

The Supreme Court will hear arguments in the case Monday, and there is good reason to think that its newly expanded conservative majority will not only rule in Kennedy’s favor but also make a major statement about the role religion may play in public life.

The court’s decision, expected by June, could revise earlier understandings about when prayer is permitted in public schools, the rights of government employees and what counts as pressuring students to participate in religious activities.

The two sides offer starkly different accounts of what happened and what is at stake. To hear Kennedy tell it, he sought only to offer a brief, silent and solitary prayer, little different from saying grace before a meal in the school cafeteria. From the school board’s perspective, the public nature of his prayers and his stature as a leader and role model meant that students felt forced to participate, whatever their religion and whether they wanted to or not.

The community in Bremerton appeared to be largely sympathetic to Kennedy, who is gregarious, playful and popular. But the school board’s Supreme Court brief suggested that some residents opposed to prayer on the football field may have hesitated to speak out given the strong feelings the issue has produced.

“District administrators received threats and hate mail,” the brief said. “Strangers confronted and screamed obscenities at the head coach, who feared for his safety.”

Kennedy acknowledged that, as time went on, students did join him.

When athletes asked to participate, he said he told them that America was a free country.

“It was,” he added, “never any kind of thing where it was a mandatory thing.”