Engel V Vitale Quotes

Separation of church and state,” as we now popularly understand it, is a much more modern invention; to be precise, it comes from a 1947 Supreme Court opinion by Justice Hugo Black. Justice Black would later go on, in 1962, to declare prayer in public schools unconstitutional (Engel v. Vitale). But it was that 1947 opinion, Everson v. Board of Education, that laid the legal groundwork.

By promising that his Catholic faith would not guide or even inform how he formulated public policy or governed as president, Kennedy was relegating religion to a strictly private sphere, just as the Supreme Court would do two years later in Engel v. Vitale, striking down prayer in public schools, and, a year later, banning the reading of the Bible and the Lord’s Prayer in Abington School District v. Schempp.