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What Trump means by the 'total protection' of prayer in schools [1]
['Daily Kos Staff']
Date: 2025-09-09
At a speech during a hearing of his so-called Religious Liberty Commission, President Donald Trump made a passionate declaration that the Department of Education will issue new guidance “protecting the right to prayer in our public schools, and it’s total protection.”
Who wants to tell him?
If Trump or Education Secretary Linda McMahon had bothered to look at the Department of Education website, they would have found now-archived guidance explaining that nothing in the Constitution prohibits public school students from praying. Students can pray any time they are not engaged in school activities or instruction, can read sacred texts, and can pray with other students during noninstructional time. Students can distribute religious materials to their classmates.
Okay, but what about the freedom of teachers and coaches to pray in schools, you might ask? Well, thanks to the Supreme Court, even coercive, overtly Christian prayers led by football coaches on the 50-yard line are totally cool. That was the holding in Kennedy v. Bremerton, where the conservative justices were so eager to let Mr. Praying Football Coach have his way that they lied about the facts of this case to justify their holding. The majority holding framed the coach’s actions as “offer[ing] his prayers quietly while his students were otherwise occupied”—a total lie. Kennedy would have his athletes and the opposing team kneel around him in public while leading them in prayer. He would then ostentatiously pray in front of students and spectators from the 50-yard line after games. Per the Supreme Court, that’s just dandy, so what more does Trump want?
A copy of the Ten Commandments is posted in a hallway at the Georgia Capitol in 2024, in Atlanta.
What Trump was really telling his audience is that he wants schools to be able to force students to pray Christian prayers and to require that public schools display Christian religious texts, like the Ten Commandments. That’s what he views as “total protection” of prayer.
How do we know that? Because conservative states are already pushing it.
In Texas, state Attorney General Ken Paxton has said he wants all public school students to have to say the Lord’s Prayer. This is quite different from Paxton’s actions when faced with the scary prospect of Muslim students praying privately and quietly in a classroom. There, in 2017, he complained that allowing the students to use an empty classroom excluded students of other faiths, writing an open letter to the Dallas-area school to express his “concerns.”
Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas have each introduced objectively unconstitutional laws that require schools to display the Ten Commandments. These are getting slapped down by lower courts, but that was always going to be the case. The goal is to get this to the Supreme Court so that it will rule that forcing children to pray Christian prayers in school is fine and doesn’t violate the First Amendment.
And then Trump can crow about how this is another one of his “victories for people of faith.” Yes, the White House is keeping a running tally of how helpful he is to ensure religious liberty, and he’s up to 100 as of Monday, by their count. His triumphs include things like “President Trump established the Religious Liberty Commission to secure and promote religious liberty for Americans of all faiths” and “President Trump appointed leaders of all faiths to the Religious Liberty Commission and its advisory boards.”
Then-nominee Donald Trump is prayed over at Worship With Wonders Church in Powder Springs, Georgia, last year.
Yeah, about those boards. The advisory board of religious leaders is populated nearly exclusively by conservative Christian and Jewish appointees. Way down at the bottom, in the Lay Leaders section, there are a handful of people of the Muslim faith. The Religious Liberty Commission itself appears to have no members who are not Christian or Jewish. It’s pretty telling that Trump thinks this constitutes “leaders of all faiths.”
Trump’s top 100 victories are virtually all on behalf of Judeo-Christian individuals or causes. A bunch of the “victories” have nothing to do with religion at all but are instead bragging about how he has kicked transgender people in the teeth.
Trump’s idea of religious liberty is no liberty at all. It’s a cramped, narrow view of the world fueled by a desire to impose a particularly violent strain of Christian fascism onto the country. Public schools are one of his first targets, but they certainly won’t be his last.
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