Joseph Kennedy, who used to be an assistant coach for a high school football team near Seattle, 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 in Bremerton, Wash., 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 on Monday, and there is good reason to think that its newly expanded conservative majority will not only rule in Mr. 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 Mr. 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 Mr. 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.”
Rachel Laser, the president of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, which represents the school board, said, “What we’re focused on is the religious freedom of students.”
“Going to the 50-yard line directly after the game when you’re the coach, with the students assuming they’re supposed to gather with the coach, and praying at that time puts pressure on kids to join,” she said.
Mr. Kennedy acknowledged that, as time went on, students did join him.
“I started out praying by myself,” he said. “I guarantee it was no longer than 10 seconds.”
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.”
Asked whether some athletes might have felt compelled to join in, he gave a stock response. “I coached for about eight years and there were about 60 kids on the team each year,” he said. “I challenged every news reporter and said: ‘Find somebody.’”
Unfortunately, I agree with Vox's Ian Millihiser: the fact that this case is even being heard with the law clearly favoring the school district makes it clear that in a post Hobby Lobby world, both public and private sector employees are going to be forced by SCOTUS to have to directly accommodate "religious freedoms" of the individual at the direct expense of greater good.
Given that existing law so clearly favors the school district in the Kennedy case, the Supreme Court’s decision to hear this case at all suggests that a majority of the justices are eager to change the law to make it more favorable to government-sanctioned religious activity.
For one thing, when the case reached the Supreme Court in 2019, a total of four justices signed on to Alito’s opinion claiming that a lower court that ruled against Kennedy demonstrated an “understanding of the free speech rights of public school teachers [that] is troubling and may justify review in the future.”
Alito appeared unconcerned that a school official might wield his authority to pressure students into religious exercise. Instead, he fretted that coaches should not be told that their “duty to serve as a good role model requires the coach to refrain from any manifestation of religious faith.”
Less than two years after Alito wrote these words, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died, and she was replaced by conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett. Almost immediately after Barrett’s confirmation gave Republicans a supermajority on the Supreme Court, the Court’s new majority started handing down transformative new religion decisions granting broad new rights to the religious right.
Thus, while the weight of established law should crush Kennedy’s case, the biggest open question in Kennedy is most likely to be just how much leeway the Court will give public school teachers and coaches to preach their religious beliefs to their students.
I expect that leeway to be near absolute.
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