West's Encyclopedia of American Law | Abington School District v. Schempp

In 1963, the U.S. Supreme Court banned the Lord's Prayer and Bible reading in public schools in Abington School District v. Schempp, 374 U.S. 203, 83 S. Ct. 1560, 10 L. Ed. 2d 844. The decision came one year after the Court had struck down, in ENGEL V. VITALE, a state-authored prayer that was recited by public school students each morning (370 U.S. 421, 82S. Ct. 1261, 8 L. Ed. 2d 601 [1962]). Engel had opened the floodgates; Schempp ensured that a steady flow of anti-school prayer rulings would continue into the future. Schempp was in many ways a repeat of Engel: the religious practices with which it was concerned were nominally different, but the logic used to find them unconstitutional was the same. This time, the majority went one step further, issuing the first concrete test for determining violations of the First Amendment's Establishment Clause.

The Schempp ruling involved two cases:...