 

NOTE: Where it is feasible, a syllabus (headnote) will be released, as is
being done in connection with this case, at the time the opinion is issued.
The syllabus constitutes no part of the opinion of the Court but has been
prepared by the Reporter of Decisions for the convenience of the reader.
See United States v. Detroit Lumber Co., 200 U. S. 321, 337.

SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES

          Syllabus

LEE et al. v. WEISMAN, PERSONALLY AND AS
        NEXT FRIEND OF WEISMAN
certiorari to the united states court of appeals for
           the first circuit
No. 90-1014.   Argued November 6, 1991"Decided June 24, 1992

Principals of public middle and high schools in Providence, Rhode
Island, are permitted to invite members of the clergy to give invoca-
tions and benedictions at their schools' graduation ceremonies.
Petitioner Lee, a middle school principal, invited a rabbi to offer such
prayers at the graduation ceremony for Deborah Weisman's class,
gave the Rabbi a pamphlet containing guidelines for the composition
of public prayers at civic ceremonies, and advised him that the
prayers should be nonsectarian.  Shortly before the ceremony, the
District Court denied the motion of respondent Weisman, Deborah's
father, for a temporary restraining order to prohibit school officials
from including the prayers in the ceremony.  Deborah and her family
attended the ceremony, and the prayers were recited.  Subsequently,
Weisman sought a permanent injunction barring Lee and other
petitioners, various Providence public school officials, from inviting
clergy to deliver invocations and benedictions at future graduations.
It appears likely that such prayers will be conducted at Deborah's
high school graduation.  The District Court enjoined petitioners from
continuing the practice at issue on the ground that it violated the
Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.  The Court of Appeals
affirmed.
Held:Including clergy who offer prayers as part of an official public
school graduation ceremony is forbidden by the Establishment Clause.
Pp.7-19.
(a)This Court need not revisit the questions of the definition and
scope of the principles governing the extent of permitted accommoda-
tion by the State for its citizens' religious beliefs and practices, for
the controlling precedents as they relate to prayer and religious
exercise in primary and secondary public schools compel the holding
here.  Thus, the Court will not reconsider its decision in Lemon v.
Kurtzman, 403 U.S. 602.  The principle that government may
accommodate the free exercise of religion does not supersede the
fundamental limitations imposed by the Establishment Clause, which
guarantees at a minimum that a government may not coerce anyone
to support or participate in religion or its exercise, or otherwise act
in a way which ``establishes a [state] religion or religious faith, or
tends to do so.''  Lynch v. Donnelly, 465 U.S. 668, 678.  Pp.7-8.
(b)State officials here direct the performance of a formal religious
exercise at secondary schools' promotional and graduation ceremonies.
Lee's decision that prayers should be given and his selection of the
religious participant are choices attributable to the State.  Moreover,
through the pamphlet and his advice that the prayers be nonsectari-
an, he directed and controlled the prayers' content.  That the direc-
tions may have been given in a good faith attempt to make the
prayers acceptable to most persons does not resolve the dilemma
caused by the school's involvement, since the government may not
establish an official or civic religion as a means of avoiding the
establishment of a religion with more specific creeds.  Pp.8-11.
(c)The Establishment Clause was inspired by the lesson that in
the hands of government what might begin as a tolerant expression
of religious views may end in a policy to indoctrinate and coerce.
Prayer exercises in elementary and secondary schools carry a particu-
lar risk of indirect coercion.  Engel v. Vitale, 370 U.S. 421; Abington
School District v. Schempp, 374 U.S. 203.  The school district's
supervision and control of a high school graduation ceremony places
subtle and indirect public and peer pressure on attending students
to stand as a group or maintain respectful silence during the invoca-
tion and benediction.  A reasonable dissenter of high school age could
believe that standing or remaining silent signified her own participa-
tion in, or approval of, the group exercise, rather than her respect for
it.  And the State may not place the student dissenter in the dilem-
ma of participating or protesting.  Since adolescents are often suscep-
tible to peer pressure, especially in matters of social convention, the
State may no more use social pressure to enforce orthodoxy than it
may use direct means.  The embarrassment and intrusion of the
religious exercise cannot be refuted by arguing that the prayers are
of a de minimis character, since that is an affront to the Rabbi and
those for whom the prayers have meaning, and since any intrusion
was both real and a violation of the objectors' rights.  Pp.11-15.
(d)Petitioners' argument that the option of not attending the
ceremony excuses any inducement or coercion in the ceremony itself
is rejected.  In this society, high school graduation is one of life's
most significant occasions, and a student is not free to absent herself
from the exercise in any real sense of the term ``voluntary.''  Also not
dispositive is the contention that prayers are an essential part of
these ceremonies because for many persons the occasion would lack
meaning without the recognition that human achievements cannot be
understood apart from their spiritual essence.  This position fails to
acknowledge that what for many was a spiritual imperative was for
the Weismans religious conformance compelled by the State.  It also
gives insufficient recognition to the real conflict of conscience faced
by a student who would have to choose whether to miss graduation
or conform to the state-sponsored practice, in an environment where
the risk of compulsion is especially high.  Pp.15-17.
(e)Inherent differences between the public school system and a
session of a state legislature distinguish this case from Marsh v.
Chambers, 463 U.S. 783, which condoned a prayer exercise.  The
atmosphere at a state legislature's opening, where adults are free to
enter and leave with little comment and for any number of reasons,
cannot compare with the constraining potential of the one school
event most important for the student to attend.  Pp.17-18.
908 F.2d 1090, affirmed.

Kennedy, J., delivered the opinion of the Court, in which Blackmun,
Stevens, O'Connor, and Souter, JJ., joined.  Blackmun, J., and
Souter, J., filed concurring opinions, in which Stevens and O'Connor,
JJ., joined.  Scalia, J., filed a dissenting opinion, in which Rehnquist,
C. J., and White and Thomas, JJ., joined.


NOTICE: This opinion is subject to formal revision before publication in the
preliminary print of the United States Reports.  Readers are requested to
notify the Reporter of Decisions, Supreme Court of the United States, Wash-
ington, D.C. 20543, of any typographical or other formal errors, in order that
corrections may be made before the preliminary print goes to press.
 
          SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES--------
                       No. 90-1014
                        --------
     ROBERT E. LEE, individually and as PRINCIPAL OF
               NATHAN BISHOP MIDDLE SCHOOL, et al.,
                PETITIONERS v. DANIEL WEISMAN etc.
        on writ of certiorari to the united states court of
                   appeals for the first circuit
                          [June 24, 1992]

       Justice Kennedy delivered the opinion of the Court.
       School principals in the public school system of the city of
Providence, Rhode Island, are permitted to invite members
of the clergy to offer invocation and benediction prayers as
part of the formal graduation ceremonies for middle schools
and for high schools.  The question before us is whether
including clerical members who offer prayers as part of the
official school graduation ceremony is consistent with the
Religion Clauses of the First Amendment, provisions the
Fourteenth Amendment makes applicable with full force to
the States and their school districts.
                                 I
                                 A
       Deborah Weisman graduated from Nathan Bishop Middle
School, a public school in Providence, at a formal ceremony
in June 1989.  She was about 14 years old.  For many years
it has been the policy of the Providence School Committee
and the Superintendent of Schools to permit principals to
invite members of the clergy to give invocations and
benedictions at middle school and high school graduations.
Many, but not all, of the principals elected to include
prayers as part of the graduation ceremonies.  Acting for
himself and his daughter, Deborah's father, Daniel Weis-
man, objected to any prayers at Deborah's middle school
graduation, but to no avail.  The school principal, petitioner
Robert E. Lee, invited a rabbi to deliver prayers at the
graduation exercises for Deborah's class.  Rabbi Leslie
Gutterman, of the Temple Beth El in Providence, accepted.
       It has been the custom of Providence school officials to
provide invited clergy with a pamphlet entitled ``Guidelines
for Civic Occasions,'' prepared by the National Conference
of Christians and Jews.  The Guidelines recommend that
public prayers at nonsectarian civic ceremonies be composed
with ``inclusiveness and sensitivity,'' though they acknowl-
edge that ``[p]rayer of any kind may be inappropriate on
some civic occasions.''  App. 20-21.  The principal gave
Rabbi Gutterman the pamphlet before the graduation and
advised him the invocation and benediction should be
nonsectarian.  Agreed Statement of Facts 17, id., at 13.
       Rabbi Gutterman's prayers were as follows:

                                    ``INVOCATION
                    ``God of the Free, Hope of the Brave:
                    ``For the legacy of America where diversity is cele-
brated and the rights of minorities are protected, we
         thank You.  May these young men and women grow up
         to enrich it.
                    ``For the liberty of America, we thank You.  May
         these new graduates grow up to guard it.
                    ``For the political process of America in which all its
         citizens may participate, for its court system where all
         may seek justice we thank You.  May those we honor
         this morning always turn to it in trust.
                    ``For the destiny of America we thank You.  May the
         graduates of Nathan Bishop Middle School so live that
         they might help to share it.
                   ``May our aspirations for our country and for these
         young people, who are our hope for the future, be richly
         fulfilled.
                              AMEN''

                                    ``BENEDICTION
                    ``O God, we are grateful to You for having endowed
         us with the capacity for learning which we have
         celebrated on this joyous commencement.
                    ``Happy families give thanks for seeing their children
         achieve an important milestone.  Send Your blessings
         upon the teachers and administrators who helped
         prepare them.
                    ``The graduates now need strength and guidance for
         the future, help them to understand that we are not
         complete with academic knowledge alone.  We must
         each strive to fulfill what You require of us all:  To do
         justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly.
                    ``We give thanks to You, Lord, for keeping us alive,
         sustaining us and allowing us to reach this special,
         happy occasion.
                              AMEN''
Id., at 22-23.
       The record in this case is sparse in many respects, and
we are unfamiliar with any fixed custom or practice at
middle school graduations, referred to by the school district
as ``promotional exercises.''  We are not so constrained with
reference to high schools, however.  High school graduations
are such an integral part of American cultural life that we
can with confidence describe their customary features,
confirmed by aspects of the record and by the parties'
representations at oral argument.  In the Providence school
system, most high school graduation ceremonies are
conducted away from the school, while most middle school
ceremonies are held on school premises.  Classical High
School, which Deborah now attends, has conducted its
graduation ceremonies on school premises.  Agreed State-
ment of Facts 37, id., at 17.  The parties stipulate that
attendance at graduation ceremonies is voluntary.  Agreed
Statement of Facts 41, id., at 18.  The graduating students
enter as a group in a processional, subject to the direction
of teachers and school officials, and sit together, apart from
their families.  We assume the clergy's participation in any
high school graduation exercise would be about what it was
at Deborah's middle school ceremony.  There the students
stood for the Pledge of Allegiance and remained standing
during the Rabbi's prayers.  Tr. of Oral Arg. 38.  Even on
the assumption that there was a respectful moment of
silence both before and after the prayers, the Rabbi's two
presentations must not have extended much beyond a
minute each, if that.  We do not know whether he remained
on stage during the whole ceremony, or whether the
students received individual diplomas on stage, or if he
helped to congratulate them.
       The school board (and the United States, which supports
it as amicus curiae) argued that these short prayers and
others like them at graduation exercises are of profound
meaning to many students and parents throughout this
country who consider that due respect and acknowledge-
ment for divine guidance and for the deepest spiritual
aspirations of our people ought to be expressed at an event
as important in life as a graduation.  We assume this to be
so in addressing the difficult case now before us, for the
significance of the prayers lies also at the heart of Daniel
and Deborah Weisman's case.
                                 B
       Deborah's graduation was held on the premises of
Nathan Bishop Middle School on June 29, 1989.  Four days
before the ceremony, Daniel Weisman, in his individual
capacity as a Providence taxpayer and as next friend of
Deborah, sought a temporary restraining order in the
United States District Court for the District of Rhode Island
to prohibit school officials from including an invocation or
benediction in the graduation ceremony.  The court denied
the motion for lack of adequate time to consider it.  Debo-
rah and her family attended the graduation, where the
prayers were recited.  In July 1989, Daniel Weisman filed
an amended complaint seeking a permanent injunction
barring petitioners, various officials of the Providence public
schools, from inviting the clergy to deliver invocations and
benedictions at future graduations.  We find it unnecessary
to address Daniel Weisman's taxpayer standing, for a live
and justiciable controversy is before us.  Deborah Weisman
is enrolled as a student at Classical High School in Provi-
dence and from the record it appears likely, if not certain,
that an invocation and benediction will be conducted at her
high school graduation.  Agreed Statement of Facts 38,
id., at 17.
       The case was submitted on stipulated facts.  The District
Court held that petitioners' practice of including invocations
and benedictions in public school graduations violated the
Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, and it
enjoined petitioners from continuing the practice.  728 F.
Supp. 68 (RI 1990).  The court applied the three-part
Establishment Clause test set forth in Lemon v. Kurtzman,
403 U. S. 602 (1971).  Under that test as described in our
past cases, to satisfy the Establishment Clause a govern-
mental practice must (1) reflect a clearly secular purpose;
(2) have a primary effect that neither advances nor inhibits
religion; and (3) avoid excessive government entanglement
with religion.  Committee for Public Education & Religious
Liberty v. Nyquist, 413 U. S. 756, 773 (1973).  The District
Court held that petitioners' actions violated the second part
of the test, and so did not address either the first or the
third.  The court decided, based on its reading of our
precedents, that the effects test of Lemon is violated
whenever government action ``creates an identification of
the state with a religion, or with religion in general,'' 728 F.
Supp., at 71, or when ``the effect of the governmental action
is to endorse one religion over another, or to endorse
religion in general.''  Id., at 72.  The court determined that
the practice of including invocations and benedictions, even
so-called nonsectarian ones, in public school graduations
creates an identification of governmental power with
religious practice, endorses religion, and violates the
Establishment Clause.  In so holding the court expressed
the determination not to follow Stein v. Plainwell Commu-
nity Schools, 822 F.2d 1406 (1987), in which the Court of
Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, relying on our decision in
Marsh v. Chambers, 463 U. S. 783 (1983), held that
benedictions and invocations at public school graduations
are not always unconstitutional.  In Marsh we upheld the
constitutionality of the Nebraska State Legislature's
practice of opening each of its sessions with a prayer offered
by a chaplain paid out of public funds.  The District Court
in this case disagreed with the Sixth Circuit's reasoning
because it believed that Marsh was a narrow decision,
``limited to the unique situation of legislative prayer,'' and
did not have any relevance to school prayer cases.  728 F.
Supp., at 74.
       On appeal, the United States Court of Appeals for the
First Circuit affirmed.  The majority opinion by Judge
Torruella adopted the opinion of the District Court.  908
F.2d 1090 (1990).  Judge Bownes joined the majority, but
wrote a separate concurring opinion in which he decided
that the practices challenged here violated all three parts
of the Lemon test.  Judge Bownes went on to agree with the
District Court that Marsh had no application to school
prayer cases and that the Stein decision was flawed.  He
concluded by suggesting that under Establishment Clause
rules no prayer, even one excluding any mention of the
Deity, could be offered at a public school graduation
ceremony.  908 F.2d, at 1090-1097.  Judge Campbell
dissented, on the basis of Marsh and Stein.  He reasoned
that if the prayers delivered were nonsectarian, and if
school officials ensured that persons representing a variety
of beliefs and ethical systems were invited to present
invocations and benedictions, there was no violation of the
Establishment Clause.  908 F. 2d, at 1099.  We granted
certiorari, 499 U. S. ___ (1991), and now affirm.
                                II
       These dominant facts mark and control the confines of
our decision:  State officials direct the performance of a
formal religious exercise at promotional and graduation
ceremonies for secondary schools.  Even for those students
who object to the religious exercise, their attendance and
participation in the state-sponsored religious activity are in
a fair and real sense obligatory, though the school district
does not require attendance as a condition for receipt of the
diploma.
       This case does not require us to revisit the difficult
questions dividing us in recent cases, questions of the
definition and full scope of the principles governing the
extent of permitted accommodation by the State for the
religious beliefs and practices of many of its citizens.  See
Allegheny County v. Greater Pittsburgh ACLU, 492 U. S.
573 (1989); Wallace v. Jaffree, 472 U. S. 38 (1985); Lynch v.
Donnelly, 465 U. S. 668 (1984).  For without reference to
those principles in other contexts, the controlling precedents
as they relate to prayer and religious exercise in primary
and secondary public schools compel the holding here that
the policy of the city of Providence is an unconstitutional
one.  We can decide the case without reconsidering the
general constitutional framework by which public schools'
efforts to accommodate religion are measured.  Thus we do
not accept the invitation of petitioners and amicus the
United States to reconsider our decision in Lemon v.
Kurtzman, supra.  The government involvement with
religious activity in this case is pervasive, to the point of
creating a state-sponsored and state-directed religious
exercise in a public school.  Conducting this formal religious
observance conflicts with settled rules pertaining to prayer
exercises for students, and that suffices to determine the
question before us.
       The principle that government may accommodate the free
exercise of religion does not supersede the fundamental
limitations imposed by the Establishment Clause.  It is
beyond dispute that, at a minimum, the Constitution
guarantees that government may not coerce anyone to
support or participate in religion or its exercise, or other-
wise act in a way which ``establishes a [state] religion or
religious faith, or tends to do so.''  Lynch, supra, at 678; see
also Allegheny County, supra, at 591 quoting Everson v.
Board of Education of Ewing, 330 U. S. 1, 15-16 (1947).
The State's involvement in the school prayers challenged
today violates these central principles.
       That involvement is as troubling as it is undenied.  A
school official, the principal, decided that an invocation and
a benediction should be given; this is a choice attributable
to the State, and from a constitutional perspective it is as
if a state statute decreed that the prayers must occur.  The
principal chose the religious participant, here a rabbi, and
that choice is also attributable to the State.  The reason for
the choice of a rabbi is not disclosed by the record, but the
potential for divisiveness over the choice of a particular
member of the clergy to conduct the ceremony is apparent.
       Divisiveness, of course, can attend any state decision
respecting religions, and neither its existence nor its
potential necessarily invalidates the State's attempts to
accommodate religion in all cases.  The potential for
divisiveness is of particular relevance here though, because
it centers around an overt religious exercise in a secondary
school environment where, as we discuss below, see infra,
at __, subtle coercive pressures exist and where the student
had no real alternative which would have allowed her to
avoid the fact or appearance of participation.
       The State's role did not end with the decision to include
a prayer and with the choice of clergyman.  Principal Lee
provided Rabbi Gutterman with a copy of the ``Guidelines
for Civic Occasions,'' and advised him that his prayers
should be nonsectarian.  Through these means the principal
directed and controlled the content of the prayer.  Even if
the only sanction for ignoring the instructions were that the
rabbi would not be invited back, we think no religious
representative who valued his or her continued reputation
and effectiveness in the community would incur the State's
displeasure in this regard.  It is a cornerstone principle of
our Establishment Clause jurisprudence that ``it is no part
of the business of government to compose official prayers for
any group of the American people to recite as a part of a
religious program carried on by government,'' Engel v.
Vitale, 370 U. S. 421, 425 (1962), and that is what the
school officials attempted to do.
       Petitioners argue, and we find nothing in the case to
refute it, that the directions for the content of the prayers
were a good-faith attempt by the school to ensure that the
sectarianism which is so often the flashpoint for religious
animosity be removed from the graduation ceremony.  The
concern is understandable, as a prayer which uses ideas or
images identified with a particular religion may foster a
different sort of sectarian rivalry than an invocation or
benediction in terms more neutral.  The school's explana-
tion, however, does not resolve the dilemma caused by its
participation.  The question is not the good faith of the
school in attempting to make the prayer acceptable to most
persons, but the legitimacy of its undertaking that enter-
prise at all when the object is to produce a prayer to be
used in a formal religious exercise which students, for all
practical purposes, are obliged to attend.
       We are asked to recognize the existence of a practice of
nonsectarian prayer, prayer within the embrace of what is
known as the Judeo-Christian tradition, prayer which is
more acceptable than one which, for example, makes
explicit references to the God of Israel, or to Jesus Christ,
or to a patron saint.  There may be some support, as an
empirical observation, to the statement of the Court of
Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, picked up by Judge Camp-
bell's dissent in the Court of Appeals in this case, that there
has emerged in this country a civic religion, one which is
tolerated when sectarian exercises are not.  Stein, 822 F.
2d, at 1409; 908 F.2d 1090, 1098-1099 (CA1 1990) (Camp-
bell, J., dissenting) (case below); see also Note, Civil
Religion and the Establishment Clause, 95 Yale L.J. 1237
(1986).  If common ground can be defined which permits
once conflicting faiths to express the shared conviction that
there is an ethic and a morality which transcend human
invention, the sense of community and purpose sought by
all decent societies might be advanced.  But though the
First Amendment does not allow the government to stifle
prayers which aspire to these ends, neither does it permit
the government to undertake that task for itself.
       The First Amendment's Religion Clauses mean that
religious beliefs and religious expression are too precious to
be either proscribed or prescribed by the State.  The design
of the Constitution is that preservation and transmission of
religious beliefs and worship is a responsibility and a choice
committed to the private sphere, which itself is promised
freedom to pursue that mission.  It must not be forgotten
then, that while concern must be given to define the
protection granted to an objector or a dissenting non-
believer, these same Clauses exist to protect religion from
government interference.  James Madison, the principal
author of the Bill of Rights, did not rest his opposition to a
religious establishment on the sole ground of its effect on
the minority.  A principal ground for his view was:  ``[E]x-
perience witnesseth that ecclesiastical establishments,
instead of maintaining the purity and efficacy of Religion,
have had a contrary operation.''  Memorial and Remon-
strance Against Religious Assessments (1785), in 8 Papers
of James Madison 301 (W. Rachal, R. Rutland, B. Ripel, &
F. Teute eds. 1973).
       These concerns have particular application in the case of
school officials, whose effort to monitor prayer will be
perceived by the students as inducing a participation they
might otherwise reject.  Though the efforts of the school
officials in this case to find common ground appear to have
been a good-faith attempt to recognize the common aspects
of religions and not the divisive ones, our precedents do not
permit school officials to assist in composing prayers as an
incident to a formal exercise for their students.  Engel v.
Vitale, supra, at 425.  And these same precedents caution
us to measure the idea of a civic religion against the central
meaning of the Religion Clauses of the First Amendment,
which is that all creeds must be tolerated and none favored.
The suggestion that government may establish an official or
civic religion as a means of avoiding the establishment of a
religion with more specific creeds strikes us as a contradic-
tion that cannot be accepted.
       The degree of school involvement here made it clear that
the graduation prayers bore the imprint of the State and
thus put school-age children who objected in an untenable
position.  We turn our attention now to consider the
position of the students, both those who desired the prayer
and she who did not.
       To endure the speech of false ideas or offensive content
and then to counter it is part of learning how to live in a
pluralistic society, a society which insists upon open
discourse towards the end of a tolerant citizenry.  And
tolerance presupposes some mutuality of obligation.  It is
argued that our constitutional vision of a free society
requires confidence in our own ability to accept or reject
ideas of which we do not approve, and that prayer at a high
school graduation does nothing more than offer a choice.
By the time they are seniors, high school students no doubt
have been required to attend classes and assemblies and to
complete assignments exposing them to ideas they find
distasteful or immoral or absurd or all of these.  Against
this background, students may consider it an odd measure
of justice to be subjected during the course of their educa-
tions to ideas deemed offensive and irreligious, but to be
denied a brief, formal prayer ceremony that the school
offers in return.  This argument cannot prevail, however.
It overlooks a fundamental dynamic of the Constitution.
       The First Amendment protects speech and religion by
quite different mechanisms.  Speech is protected by insur-
ing its full expression even when the government partici-
pates, for the very object of some of our most important
speech is to persuade the government to adopt an idea as
its own.  Meese v. Keene, 481 U. S. 465, 480-481 (1987); see
also Keller v. State Bar of California, 496 U. S. 1, 10-11
(1990); Abood v. Detroit Board of Education, 431 U. S. 209
(1977).  The method for protecting freedom of worship and
freedom of conscience in religious matters is quite the
reverse.  In religious debate or expression the government
is not a prime participant, for the Framers deemed religious
establishment antithetical to the freedom of all.  The Free
Exercise Clause embraces a freedom of conscience and
worship that has close parallels in the speech provisions of
the First Amendment, but the Establishment Clause is a
specific prohibition on forms of state intervention in
religious affairs with no precise counterpart in the speech
provisions.  Buckley v. Valeo, 424 U. S. 1, 92-93, and n. 127
(1976) (per curiam).  The explanation lies in the lesson of
history that was and is the inspiration for the Establish-
ment Clause, the lesson that in the hands of government
what might begin as a tolerant expression of religious views
may end in a policy to indoctrinate and coerce.  A state-
created orthodoxy puts at grave risk that freedom of belief
and conscience which are the sole assurance that religious
faith is real, not imposed.
       The lessons of the First Amendment are as urgent in the
modern world as in the 18th Century when it was written.
One timeless lesson is that if citizens are subjected to state-
sponsored religious exercises, the State disavows its own
duty to guard and respect that sphere of inviolable con-
science and belief which is the mark of a free people.  To
compromise that principle today would be to deny our own
tradition and forfeit our standing to urge others to secure
the protections of that tradition for themselves.
       As we have observed before, there are heightened
concerns with protecting freedom of conscience from subtle
coercive pressure in the elementary and secondary public
schools.  See, e.g., Abington School District v. Schempp, 374
U. S. 203, 307 (1963) (Goldberg, J., concurring); Edwards v.
Aguillard, 482 U. S. 578, 584 (1987); Westside Community
Bd. of Ed. v. Mergens, 496 U. S. 226, 261-262 (1990)
(Kennedy, J., concurring).  Our decisions in Engel v. Vitale,
370 U. S. 421 (1962), and Abington School District, supra,
recognize, among other things, that prayer exercises in
public schools carry a particular risk of indirect coercion.
The concern may not be limited to the context of schools,
but it is most pronounced there.  See Allegheny County v.
Greater Pittsburgh ACLU, 492 U. S., at 661 (Kennedy, J.,
concurring in judgment in part and dissenting in part).
What to most believers may seem nothing more than a
reasonable request that the nonbeliever respect their
religious practices, in a school context may appear to the
nonbeliever or dissenter to be an attempt to employ the
machinery of the State to enforce a religious orthodoxy.
       We need not look beyond the circumstances of this case
to see the phenomenon at work.  The undeniable fact is
that the school district's supervision and control of a high
school graduation ceremony places public pressure, as well
as peer pressure, on attending students to stand as a group
or, at least, maintain respectful silence during the Invoca-
tion and Benediction.  This pressure, though subtle and
indirect, can be as real as any overt compulsion.  Of course,
in our culture standing or remaining silent can signify
adherence to a view or simple respect for the views of
others.  And no doubt some persons who have no desire to
join a prayer have little objection to standing as a sign of
respect for those who do.  But for the dissenter of high
school age, who has a reasonable perception that she is
being forced by the State to pray in a manner her con-
science will not allow, the injury is no less real.  There can
be no doubt that for many, if not most, of the students at
the graduation, the act of standing or remaining silent was
an expression of participation in the Rabbi's prayer.  That
was the very point of the religious exercise.  It is of little
comfort to a dissenter, then, to be told that for her the act
of standing or remaining in silence signifies mere respect,
rather than participation.  What matters is that, given our
social conventions, a reasonable dissenter in this milieu
could believe that the group exercise signified her own
participation or approval of it.
       Finding no violation under these circumstances would
place objectors in the dilemma of participating, with all that
implies, or protesting.  We do not address whether that
choice is acceptable if the affected citizens are mature
adults, but we think the State may not, consistent with the
Establishment Clause, place primary and secondary school
children in this position.  Research in psychology supports
the common assumption that adolescents are often suscepti-
ble to pressure from their peers towards conformity, and
that the influence is strongest in matters of social conven-
tion.  Brittain, Adolescent Choices and Parent-Peer Cross-
Pressures, 28 Am. Sociological Rev. 385 (June 1963); Clasen
& Brown, The Multidimensionality of Peer Pressure in
Adolescence, 14 J. of Youth and Adolescence 451 (Dec.
1985); Brown, Clasen, & Eicher, Perceptions of Peer
Pressure, Peer Conformity Dispositions, and Self-Reported
Behavior Among Adolescents, 22 Developmental Psychology
521 (July 1986).  To recognize that the choice imposed by
the State constitutes an unacceptable constraint only
acknowledges that the government may no more use social
pressure to enforce orthodoxy than it may use more direct
means.
       The injury caused by the government's action, and the
reason why Daniel and Deborah Weisman object to it, is
that the State, in a school setting, in effect required
participation in a religious exercise.  It is, we concede, a
brief exercise during which the individual can concentrate
on joining its message, meditate on her own religion, or let
her mind wander.  But the embarrassment and the intru-
sion of the religious exercise cannot be refuted by arguing
that these prayers, and similar ones to be said in the
future, are of a de minimis character.  To do so would be an
affront to the Rabbi who offered them and to all those for
whom the prayers were an essential and profound recogni-
tion of divine authority.  And for the same reason, we think
that the intrusion is greater than the two minutes or so of
time consumed for prayers like these.  Assuming, as we
must, that the prayers were offensive to the student and
the parent who now object, the intrusion was both real and,
in the context of a secondary school, a violation of the
objectors' rights.  That the intrusion was in the course of
promulgating religion that sought to be civic or nonsec-
tarian rather than pertaining to one sect does not lessen
the offense or isolation to the objectors.  At best it narrows
their number, at worst increases their sense of isolation and
affront.  See supra, at __.
       There was a stipulation in the District Court that atten-
dance at graduation and promotional ceremonies is volun-
tary.  Statement of Agreed Facts 41, App. 18.  Petitioners
and the United States, as amicus, made this a center point
of the case, arguing that the option of not attending the
graduation excuses any inducement or coercion in the
ceremony itself.  The argument lacks all persuasion.  Law
reaches past formalism.  And to say a teenage student has
a real choice not to attend her high school graduation is
formalistic in the extreme.  True, Deborah could elect not
to attend commencement without renouncing her diploma;
but we shall not allow the case to turn on this point.
Everyone knows that in our society and in our culture high
school graduation is one of life's most significant occasions.
A school rule which excuses attendance is beside the point.
Attendance may not be required by official decree, yet it is
apparent that a student is not free to absent herself from
the graduation exercise in any real sense of the term
``voluntary,'' for absence would require forfeiture of those
intangible benefits which have motivated the student
through youth and all her high school years.  Graduation is
a time for family and those closest to the student to
celebrate success and express mutual wishes of gratitude
and respect, all to the end of impressing upon the young
person the role that it is his or her right and duty to
assume in the community and all of its diverse parts.
       The importance of the event is the point the school
district and the United States rely upon to argue that a
formal prayer ought to be permitted, but it becomes one of
the principal reasons why their argument must fail.  Their
contention, one of considerable force were it not for the
constitutional constraints applied to state action, is that the
prayers are an essential part of these ceremonies because
for many persons an occasion of this significance lacks
meaning if there is no recognition, however brief, that
human achievements cannot be understood apart from their
spiritual essence.  We think the Government's position that
this interest suffices to force students to choose between
compliance or forfeiture demonstrates fundamental incon-
sistency in its argumentation.  It fails to acknowledge that
what for many of Deborah's classmates and their parents
was a spiritual imperative was for Daniel and Deborah
Weisman religious conformance compelled by the State.
While in some societies the wishes of the majority might
prevail, the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment
is addressed to this contingency and rejects the balance
urged upon us.  The Constitution forbids the State to exact
religious conformity from a student as the price of attending
her own high school graduation.  This is the calculus the
Constitution commands.
       The Government's argument gives insufficient recognition
to the real conflict of conscience faced by the young student.
The essence of the Government's position is that with
regard to a civic, social occasion of this importance it is the
objector, not the majority, who must take unilateral and
private action to avoid compromising religious scruples,
here by electing to miss the graduation exercise.  This turns
conventional First Amendment analysis on its head.  It is
a tenet of the First Amendment that the State cannot
require one of its citizens to forfeit his or her rights and
benefits as the price of resisting conformance to state-
sponsored religious practice.  To say that a student must
remain apart from the ceremony at the opening invocation
and closing benediction is to risk compelling conformity in
an environment analogous to the classroom setting, where
we have said the risk of compulsion is especially high.  See
supra, at __.  Just as in Engel v. Vitale, 370 U. S., at 430,
and Abington School District v. Schempp, 374 U. S., at
224-225, we found that provisions within the challenged
legislation permitting a student to be voluntarily excused
from attendance or participation in the daily prayers did
not shield those practices from invalidation, the fact that
attendance at the graduation ceremonies is voluntary in a
legal sense does not save the religious exercise.
       Inherent differences between the public school system
and a session of a State Legislature distinguish this case
from Marsh v. Chambers, 463 U. S. 783 (1983).  The
considerations we have raised in objection to the invocation
and benediction are in many respects similar to the
arguments we considered in Marsh.  But there are also
obvious differences.  The atmosphere at the opening of a
session of a state legislature where adults are free to enter
and leave with little comment and for any number of
reasons cannot compare with the constraining potential of
the one school event most important for the student to
attend.  The influence and force of a formal exercise in a
school graduation are far greater than the prayer exercise
we condoned in Marsh.  The Marsh majority in fact gave
specific recognition to this distinction and placed particular
reliance on it in upholding the prayers at issue there.  463
U. S., at 792.  Today's case is different.  At a high school
graduation, teachers and principals must and do retain a
high degree of control over the precise contents of the
program, the speeches, the timing, the movements, the
dress, and the decorum of the students.  Bethel School Dist.
No. 403 v. Fraser, 478 U. S. 675 (1986).  In this atmosphere
the state-imposed character of an invocation and benedic-
tion by clergy selected by the school combine to make the
prayer a state-sanctioned religious exercise in which the
student was left with no alternative but to submit.  This is
different from Marsh and suffices to make the religious
exercise a First Amendment violation.  Our Establishment
Clause jurisprudence remains a delicate and fact-sensitive
one, and we cannot accept the parallel relied upon by
petitioners and the United States between the facts of
Marsh and the case now before us.  Our decisions in Engel
v. Vitale, supra, and Abington School District v. Schempp,
supra, require us to distinguish the public school context.
       We do not hold that every state action implicating
religion is invalid if one or a few citizens find it offensive.
People may take offense at all manner of religious as well
as nonreligious messages, but offense alone does not in
every case show a violation.  We know too that sometimes
to endure social isolation or even anger may be the price of
conscience or nonconformity.  But, by any reading of our
cases, the conformity required of the student in this case
was too high an exaction to withstand the test of the
Establishment Clause.  The prayer exercises in this case
are especially improper because the State has in every
practical sense compelled attendance and participation in
an explicit religious exercise at an event of singular
importance to every student, one the objecting student had
no real alternative to avoid.
       Our jurisprudence in this area is of necessity one of line-
drawing, of determining at what point a dissenter's rights
of religious freedom are infringed by the State.
         ``The First Amendment does not prohibit practices
         which by any realistic measure create none of the
         dangers which it is designed to prevent and which do
         not so directly or substantially involve the state in
         religious exercises or in the favoring of religion as to
         have meaningful and practical impact.  It is of course
         true that great consequences can grow from small
         beginnings, but the measure of constitutional adjudica-
tion is the ability and willingness to distinguish
         between real threat and mere shadow.''  Abington
         School District v. Schempp, supra, at 308 (Goldberg, J.,
         concurring).

       Our society would be less than true to its heritage if it
lacked abiding concern for the values of its young people,
and we acknowledge the profound belief of adherents to
many faiths that there must be a place in the student's life
for precepts of a morality higher even than the law we
today enforce.  We express no hostility to those aspirations,
nor would our oath permit us to do so.  A relentless and all-
pervasive attempt to exclude religion from every aspect of
public life could itself become inconsistent with the Consti-
tution.  See Abington School District, supra, at 306 (Gold-
berg, J., concurring).  We recognize that, at graduation time
and throughout the course of the educational process, there
will be instances when religious values, religious practices,
and religious persons will have some interaction with the
public schools and their students.  See Westside Community
Bd. of Ed. v. Mergens, 496 U. S. 226 (1990).  But these
matters, often questions of accommodation of religion, are
not before us.  The sole question presented is whether a
religious exercise may be conducted at a graduation ceremo-
ny in circumstances where, as we have found, young
graduates who object are induced to conform.  No holding
by this Court suggests that a school can persuade or compel
a student to participate in a religious exercise.  That is
being done here, and it is forbidden by the Establishment
Clause of the First Amendment.
      For the reasons we have stated, the judgment of the
Court of Appeals is
                                                   Affirmed.




             SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES--------
                       No. 90-1014
                        --------
     ROBERT E. LEE, individually and as PRINCIPAL OF
               NATHAN BISHOP MIDDLE SCHOOL, et al.,
                PETITIONERS v. DANIEL WEISMAN etc.
        on writ of certiorari to the united states court of
                   appeals for the first circuit
                          [June 24, 1992]

       Justice Blackmun, with whom Justice Stevens and
Justice O'Connor join, concurring.
       Nearly half a century of review and refinement of
Establishment Clause jurisprudence has distilled one clear
understanding: Government may neither promote nor
affiliate itself with any religious doctrine or organization,
nor may it obtrude itself in the internal affairs of any
religious institution.  The application of these principles to
the present case mandates the decision reached today by
the Court.
                                 I
       This Court first reviewed a challenge to state law under
the Establishment Clause in Everson v. Board of Education,
330 U. S. 1 (1947).  Relying on the history of the Clause,
and the Court's prior analysis, Justice Black outlined the
considerations that have become the touchstone of Estab-
lishment Clause jurisprudence:  Neither a State nor the
Federal Government can pass laws which aid one religion,
aid all religions, or prefer one religion over another.
Neither a State nor the Federal Government, openly or
secretly, can participate in the affairs of any religious
organization and vice versa.   In the words of Jefferson,
the clause against establishment of religion by law was
intended to erect `a wall of separation between church and
State.'  Everson, 330 U. S., at 16, quoting Reynolds v.
United States, 98 U. S. 145, 164 (1879).  The dissenters
agreed:  The Amendment's purpose . . . was to create a
complete and permanent separation of the spheres of
religious activity and civil authority by comprehensively
forbidding every form of public aid or support for religion.
330 U.S., at 31-32 (Rutledge, J., dissenting, joined by
Frankfurter, Jackson, and Burton, JJ.).
       In Engel v. Vitale, 370 U. S. 421 (1962), the Court consid-
ered for the first time the constitutionality of prayer in a
public school.  Students said aloud a short prayer selected
by the State Board of Regents:  Almighty God, we acknowl-
edge our dependence upon Thee, and we beg Thy blessings
upon us, our parents, our teachers and our Country.  Id.,
at 422.  Justice Black, writing for the Court, again made
clear that the First Amendment forbids the use of the
power or prestige of the government to control, support, or
influence the religious beliefs and practices of the American
people.  Although the prayer was  denominationally
neutral and  its observance on the part of the students
[was] voluntary, id., at 430, the Court found that it
violated this essential precept of the Establishment Clause.
       A year later, the Court again invalidated government-
sponsored prayer in public schools in Abington School
District v. Schempp, 374 U. S. 203 (1963).  In Schempp, the
school day for Baltimore, Maryland, and Abington Town-
ship, Pennsylvania, students began with a reading from the
Bible, or a recitation of the Lord's Prayer, or both.  After a
thorough review of the Court's prior Establishment Clause
cases, the Court concluded:
 [T]he Establishment Clause has been directly consid-
ered by this Court eight times in the past score of years
and, with only one Justice dissenting on the point, it
has consistently held that the clause withdrew all
legislative power respecting religious belief or the
expression thereof.  The test may be stated as follows:
what are the purpose and the primary effect of the
enactment?  If either is the advancement or inhibition
of religion, then the enactment exceeds the scope of
legislative power as circumscribed by the Constitution.
Id., at 222.

Because the schools' opening exercises were government-
sponsored religious ceremonies, the Court found that the
primary effect was the advancement of religion and held,
therefore, that the activity violated the Establishment
Clause.  Id., at 223-224.
       Five years later, the next time the Court considered
whether religious activity in public schools violated the
Establishment Clause, it reiterated the principle that
government  may not aid, foster, or promote one religion or
religious theory against another or even against the
militant opposite.  Epperson v. Arkansas, 393 U. S. 97, 104
(1968).   `If [the purpose or primary effect] is the advance-
ment or inhibition of religion then the enactment exceeds
the scope of legislative power as circumscribed by the
Constitution.'  Id., at 107 (quoting Schempp, 374 U. S., at
222).  Finding that the Arkansas law aided religion by
preventing the teaching of evolution, the Court invalidated
it.
       In 1971, Chief Justice Burger reviewed the Court's past
decisions and found:  Three . . . tests may be gleaned from
our cases.  Lemon v. Kurtzman, 403 U. S. 602, 612.  In
order for a statute to survive an Establishment Clause
challenge,  [f]irst, the statute must have a secular legisla-
tive purpose; second, its principal or primary effect must be
one that neither advances nor inhibits religion; finally the
statute must not foster an excessive government entangle-
ment with religion.  Id., at 612-613 (internal quotation
marks and citations omitted).  After Lemon, the Court
continued to rely on these basic principles in resolving
Establishment Clause disputes.
       Application of these principles to the facts of this case is
straightforward.  There can be  no doubt that the  invoca-
tion of God's blessings delivered at Nathan Bishop Middle
School  is a religious activity.  Engel, 370 U. S., at 424.  In
the words of Engel, the Rabbi's prayer  is a solemn avowal
of divine faith and supplication for the blessings of the
Almighty.  The nature of such a prayer has always been
religious.  Ibid.  The question then is whether the govern-
ment has  plac[ed] its official stamp of approval on the
prayer.  Id., at 429.  As the Court ably demonstrates, when
the government  compose[s] official prayers, id., at 425,
selects the member of the clergy to deliver the prayer, has
the prayer delivered at a public school event that is
planned, supervised and given by school officials, and
pressures students to attend and participate in the prayer,
there can be no doubt that the government is advancing
and promoting religion.  As our prior decisions teach us,
it is this that the Constitution prohibits.
                                II
       I join the Court's opinion today because I find nothing in
it inconsistent with the essential precepts of the Establish-
ment Clause developed in our precedents.  The Court holds
that the graduation prayer is unconstitutional because the
State  in effect required participation in a religious exer-
cise.  Ante, at 14.  Although our precedents make clear
that proof of government coercion is not necessary to prove
an Establishment Clause violation, it is sufficient.  Govern-
ment pressure to participate in a religious activity is an
obvious indication that the government is endorsing or
promoting religion.
       But it is not enough that the government restrain from
compelling religious practices: it must not engage in them
either.  See Schempp, 374 U. S., at 305 (Goldberg, J.,
concurring).  The Court repeatedly has recognized that a
violation of the Establishment Clause is not predicated on
coercion.  See, e.g., id., at 223; id., at 229 (Douglas, J.,
concurring); Wallace v. Jaffree, 472 U. S. 38, 72 (1985)
(O'Connor, J., concurring in judgment) ( The decisions [in
Engel and Schempp] acknowledged the coercion implicit
under the statutory schemes, but they expressly turned only
on the fact that the government was sponsoring a mani-
festly religious exercise (citation omitted)); Comm. for
Public Ed. v. Nyquist, 413 U. S. 756, 786 (1973) ( [P]roof of
coercion . . . [is] not a necessary element of any claim under
the Establishment Clause).  The Establishment Clause
proscribes public schools from  conveying or attempting to
convey a message that religion or a particular religious
belief is favored or preferred, County of Allegheny v.
ACLU,  492 U. S. 573, 593 (1989) (internal quotations
omitted) (emphasis in original), even if the schools do not
actually  impos[e] pressure upon a student to participate
in a religious activity.  Westside Community Bd. of Ed.
v. Mergens, 496 U. S. 226, 261 (1990) (Kennedy, J.,
concurring).
       The scope of the Establishment Clause's prohibitions
developed in our case law derives from the Clause's pur-
poses.  The First Amendment encompasses two distinct
guarantees"the government shall make no law respecting
an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise
thereof"both with the common purpose of securing
religious liberty.  Through vigorous enforcement of both
clauses, we  promote and assure the fullest possible scope
of religious liberty and tolerance for all and . . . nurture the
conditions which secure the best hope of attainment of that
end.  Schempp, 374 U. S., at 305 (Goldberg, J., concurring).
       There is no doubt that attempts to aid religion through
government coercion jeopardize freedom of conscience.
Even subtle pressure diminishes the right of each individu-
al to choose voluntarily what to believe.  Representative
Carroll explained during congressional debate over the
Establishment Clause:  [T]he rights of conscience are, in
their nature, of peculiar delicacy, and will little bear the
gentlest touch of governmental hand.  I Annals of Cong.
757 (August 15, 1789).
       Our decisions have gone beyond prohibiting coercion,
however, because the Court has recognized that  the fullest
possible scope of religious liberty, Schempp, 374 U. S., at
305 (Goldberg, J., concurring), entails more than freedom
from coercion.  The Establishment Clause protects religious
liberty on a grand scale; it is a social compact that guaran-
tees for generations a democracy and a strong religious
community"both essential to safeguarding religious liberty.
 Our fathers seem to have been perfectly sincere in their
belief that the members of the Church would be more
patriotic, and the citizens of the State more religious, by
keeping their respective functions entirely separate.
Religious Liberty, in Essays and Speeches of Jeremiah S.
Black 53 (C. Black ed. 1885) (Chief Justice of the Common-
wealth of Pennsylvania).
       The mixing of government and religion can be a threat to
free government, even if no one is forced to participate.
When the government puts its imprimatur on a particular
religion, it conveys a message of exclusion to all those who
do not adhere to the favored beliefs.  A government cannot
be premised on the belief that all persons are created equal
when it asserts that God prefers some.  Only  [a]nguish,
hardship and bitter strife result  when zealous religious
groups struggl[e] with one another to obtain the Govern-
ment's stamp of approval.  Engel, 370 U. S., at 429; see
also Lemon, 403 U. S., at 622-623; Aguilar v. Felton, 473
U. S. 402, 416 (1985) (Powell, J., concurring).  Such a
struggle can  strain a political system to the breaking
point.  Walz v. Tax Commission, 397 U. S. 664, 694 (1970)
(opinion of Harlan, J.).
       When the government arrogates to itself a role in
religious affairs, it abandons its obligation as guarantor of
democracy.  Democracy requires the nourishment of
dialogue and dissent, while religious faith puts its trust in
an ultimate divine authority above all human deliberation.
When the government appropriates religious truth, it
 transforms rational debate into theological decree.
Nuechterlein, Note, The Free Exercise Boundaries of
Permissible Accommodation Under the Establishment
Clause, 99 Yale L.J. 1127, 1131 (1990).  Those who disagree
no longer are questioning the policy judgment of the elected
but the rules of a higher authority who is beyond reproach.
       Madison warned that government officials who would use
religious authority to pursue secular ends  exceed the
commission from which they derive their authority and are
Tyrants.  The People who submit to it are governed by laws
made neither by themselves, nor by an authority derived
from them, and are slaves.  Memorial and Remonstrance
against Religious Assessments (1785) in The Complete
Madison 300 (S. Padover, ed. 1953).  Democratic govern-
ment will not last long when proclamation replaces persua-
sion as the medium of political exchange.
        Likewise, we have recognized that  [r]eligion flourishes
in greater purity, without than with the aid of Gov[ern-
ment].  Id., at 309.  To  make room for as wide a variety
of beliefs and creeds as the spiritual needs of man deem
necessary, Zorach v. Clauson, 343 U. S. 306, 313 (1952),
the government must not align itself with any one of them.
When the government favors a particular religion or sect,
the disadvantage to all others is obvious, but even the
favored religion may fear being  taint[ed] . . . with a
corrosive secularism.  Grand Rapids School Dist. v. Ball,
473 U. S. 373, 385 (1985).  The favored religion may be
compromised as political figures reshape the religion's
beliefs for their own purposes; it may be reformed as
government largesse brings government regulation.
Keeping religion in the hands of private groups minimizes
state intrusion on religious choice and best enables each
religion to  flourish according to the zeal of its adherents
and the appeal of its dogma.  Zorach, 343 U. S., at 313.
       It is these understandings and fears that underlie our
Establishment Clause jurisprudence.  We have believed
that religious freedom cannot exist in the absence of a free
democratic government, and that such a government cannot
endure when there is fusion between religion and the
political regime.  We have believed that religious freedom
cannot thrive in the absence of a vibrant religious commu-
nity and that such a community cannot prosper when it is
bound to the secular.  And we have believed that these were
the animating principles behind the adoption of the
Establishment Clause.  To that end, our cases have prohib-
ited government endorsement of religion, its sponsorship,
and active involvement in religion, whether or not citizens
were coerced to conform.
       I remain convinced that our jurisprudence is not mis-
guided, and that it requires the decision reached by the
Court today.  Accordingly, I join the Court in affirming the
judgment of the Court of Appeals.


          SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES--------
                       No. 90-1014
                        --------
     ROBERT E. LEE, individually and as PRINCIPAL OF
               NATHAN BISHOP MIDDLE SCHOOL, et al.,
                PETITIONERS v. DANIEL WEISMAN etc.
        on writ of certiorari to the united states court of
                   appeals for the first circuit
                          [June 24, 1992]


       Justice Souter, with whom Justice Stevens and
Justice O'Connor join, concurring.
       I join the whole of the Court's opinion, and fully agree
that prayers at public school graduation ceremonies
indirectly coerce religious observance.  I write separately
nonetheless on two issues of Establishment Clause analysis
that underlie my independent resolution of this case:
whether the Clause applies to governmental practices that
do not favor one religion or denomination over others, and
whether state coercion of religious conformity, over and
above state endorsement of religious exercise or belief, is a
necessary element of an Establishment Clause violation.

                                 I
       Forty-five years ago, this Court announced a basic
principle of constitutional law from which it has not
strayed: the Establishment Clause forbids not only state
practices that  aid one religion . . . or prefer one religion
over another, but also those that  aid all religions.
Everson v. Board of Education of Ewing, 330 U. S. 1, 15
(1947).  Today we reaffirm that principle, holding that the
Establishment Clause forbids state-sponsored prayers in
public school settings no matter how nondenominational the
prayers may be.  In barring the State from sponsoring
generically Theistic prayers where it could not sponsor
sectarian ones, we hold true to a line of precedent from
which there is no adequate historical case to depart.

                                 A
       Since Everson, we have consistently held the Clause
applicable no less to governmental acts favoring religion
generally than to acts favoring one religion over others.
Thus, in Engel v. Vitale, 370 U. S. 421 (1962), we held that
the public schools may not subject their students to read-
ings of any prayer, however  denominationally neutral.
Id., at 430.  More recently, in Wallace v. Jaffree, 472 U. S.
38 (1985), we held that an Alabama moment-of-silence
statute passed for the sole purpose of  returning voluntary
prayer to public schools, id., at 57, violated the Establish-
ment Clause even though it did not encourage students to
pray to any particular deity.  We said that  when the
underlying principle has been examined in the crucible of
litigation, the Court has unambiguously concluded that the
individual freedom of conscience protected by the First
Amendment embraces the right to select any religious faith
or none at all.  Id., at 52-53.  This conclusion, we held,
 derives support not only from the interest in respect-
ing the individual's freedom of conscience, but also
from the conviction that religious beliefs worthy of
respect are the product of free and voluntary choice by
the faithful, and from recognition of the fact that the
political interest in forestalling intolerance extends
beyond intolerance among Christian sects"or even
intolerance among `religions'"to encompass intolerance
of the disbeliever and the uncertain.  Id., at 53-54
(footnotes omitted).
   Likewise, in Texas Monthly, Inc. v. Bullock, 489 U. S. 1
(1989), we struck down a state tax exemption benefiting
only religious periodicals; even though the statute in
question worked no discrimination among sects, a majority
of the Court found that its preference for religious publica-
tions over all other kinds  effectively endorses religious
belief.  Id., at 17 (plurality opinion); see id., at 28
(Blackmun, J., concurring in judgment) ( A statutory
preference for the dissemination of religious ideas offends
our most basic understanding of what the Establishment
Clause is all about and hence is constitutionally intolera-
ble).  And in Torcaso v. Watkins, 367 U. S. 488 (1961), we
struck down a provision of the Maryland Constitution
requiring public officials to declare a  `belief in the exis-
tence of God,' id., at 489, reasoning that, under the
Religion Clauses of the First Amendment,  neither a State
nor the Federal Government . . . can constitutionally pass
laws or impose requirements which aid all religions as
against non-believers . . . , id., at 495.  See also Epperson
v. Arkansas, 393 U. S. 97, 104 (1968) ( The First Amend-
ment mandates governmental neutrality between religion
and religion, and between religion and nonreligion); School
Dist. of Abington v. Schempp, 374 U. S. 203, 216 (1963)
( this Court has rejected unequivocally the contention that
the Establishment Clause forbids only governmental
preference of one religion over another); id., at 319-320
(Stewart, J., dissenting) (the Clause applies  to each of us,
be he Jew or Agnostic, Christian or Atheist, Buddhist or
Freethinker).
       Such is the settled law.  Here, as elsewhere, we should
stick to it absent some compelling reason to discard it.  See
Arizona v. Rumsey, 467 U. S. 203, 212 (1984); Payne v.
Tennessee, 501 U. S. "", "" (1991) (slip op., at 8)
(Souter, J., concurring).



                             B
       Some have challenged this precedent by reading the
Establishment Clause to permit  nonpreferential state
promotion of religion.  The challengers argue that, as
originally understood by the Framers,  [t]he Establishment
Clause did not require government neutrality between
religion and irreligion nor did it prohibit the Federal
Government from providing nondiscriminatory aid to
religion.  Wallace, supra, at 106 (Rehnquist, J., dissent-
ing); see also R. Cord, Separation of Church and State:
Historical Fact and Current Fiction (1988).  While a case
has been made for this position, it is not so convincing as to
warrant reconsideration of our settled law; indeed, I find in
the history of the Clause's textual development a more
powerful argument supporting the Court's jurisprudence
following Everson.
       When James Madison arrived at the First Congress with
a series of proposals to amend the National Constitution,
one of the provisions read that  [t]he civil rights of none
shall be abridged on account of religious belief or worship,
nor shall any national religion be established, nor shall the
full and equal rights of conscience be in any manner, or on
any pretext, infringed.  1 Annals of Cong. 434 (1789).
Madison's language did not last long.  It was sent to a
Select Committee of the House, which, without explanation,
changed it to read that  no religion shall be established by
law, nor shall the equal rights of conscience be infringed.
Id., at 729.  Thence the proposal went to the Committee of
the Whole, which was in turn dissatisfied with the Select
Committee's language and adopted an alternative proposed
by Samuel Livermore of New Hampshire:   Congress shall
make no laws touching religion, or infringing the rights of
conscience.  See id., at 731.  Livermore's proposal would
have forbidden laws having anything to do with religion
and was thus not only far broader than Madison's version,
but broader even than the scope of the Establishment
Clause as we now understand it.  See, e.g., Corporation of
Presiding Bishop of Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day
Saints v. Amos, 483 U. S. 327 (1987) (upholding legislative
exemption of religious groups from certain obligations under
civil rights laws).
       The House rewrote the amendment once more before
sending it to the Senate, this time adopting, without
recorded debate, language derived from a proposal by
Fisher Ames of Massachusetts:   Congress shall make no
law establishing Religion, or prohibiting the free exercise
thereof, nor shall the rights of conscience be infringed.  1
Documentary History of the First Federal Congress of the
United States of America 136 (Senate Journal) (L. de Pauw
ed. 1972); see 1 Annals of Cong. 765 (1789).  Perhaps, on
further reflection, the Representatives had thought Liver-
more's proposal too expansive, or perhaps, as one historian
has suggested, they had simply worried that his language
would not  satisfy the demands of those who wanted
something said specifically against establishments of
religion.  L. Levy, The Establishment Clause 81 (1986)
(hereinafter Levy).  We do not know; what we do know is
that the House rejected the Select Committee's version,
which arguably ensured only that  no religion enjoyed an
official preference over others, and deliberately chose
instead a prohibition extending to laws establishing
 religion in general.
       The sequence of the Senate's treatment of this House
proposal, and the House's response to the Senate, confirm
that the Framers meant the Establishment Clause's
prohibition to encompass nonpreferential aid to religion.  In
September 1789, the Senate considered a number of
provisions that would have permitted such aid, and ulti-
mately it adopted one of them.  First, it briefly entertained
this language:   Congress shall make no law establishing
One Religious Sect or Society in preference to others, nor
shall the rights of conscience be infringed.  1 Documentary
History, supra, at 151 (Senate Journal).  After rejecting two
minor amendments to that proposal, see ibid., the Senate
dropped it altogether and chose a provision identical to the
House's proposal, but without the clause protecting the
 rights of conscience, ibid.  With no record of the Senate
debates, we cannot know what prompted these changes, but
the record does tell us that, six days later, the Senate went
half circle and adopted its narrowest language yet:   Con-
gress shall make no law establishing articles of faith or a
mode of worship, or prohibiting the free exercise of reli-
gion.  Id., at 166.  The Senate sent this proposal to the
House along with its versions of the other constitutional
amendments proposed.
       Though it accepted much of the Senate's work on the Bill
of Rights, the House rejected the Senate's version of the
Establishment Clause and called for a joint conference
committee, to which the Senate agreed.  The House
conferees ultimately won out, persuading the Senate to
accept this as the final text of the Religion Clauses:
 Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment
of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.  What
is remarkable is that, unlike the earliest House drafts or
the final Senate proposal, the prevailing language is not
limited to laws respecting an establishment of  a religion,
 a national religion,  one religious sect, or specific  articles
of faith.  The Framers repeatedly considered and deliber-
ately rejected such narrow language and instead extended
their prohibition to state support for  religion in general.
       Implicit in their choice is the distinction between prefer-
ential and nonpreferential establishments, which the weight
of evidence suggests the Framers appreciated.  See, e.g.,
Laycock,  Nonpreferential Aid 902-906; Levy 91-119.  But
cf. T. Curry, The First Freedoms 208-222 (1986).  Of
particular note, the Framers were vividly familiar with
efforts in the colonies and, later, the States to impose
general, nondenominational assessments and other inci-
dents of ostensibly ecumenical establishments.  See gener-
ally Levy 1-62.  The Virginia Statute for Religious Free-
dom, written by Jefferson and sponsored by Madison,
captured the separationist response to such measures.
Condemning all establishments, however nonpreferentialist,
the Statute broadly guaranteed that  no man shall be
compelled to frequent or support any religious worship,
place, or ministry whatsoever, including his own.  Act for
Establishing Religious Freedom (1785), in 5 The Founders'
Constitution 84, 85 (P. Kurland & R. Lerner eds. 1987).
Forcing a citizen to support even his own church would,
among other things, deny  the ministry those temporary
rewards, which proceeding from an approbation of their
personal conduct, are an additional incitement to earnest
and unremitting labours for the instruction of mankind.
Id, at 84.  In general, Madison later added,  religion &
Govt. will both exist in greater purity, the less they are
mixed together.  Letter from J. Madison to E. Livingston,
10 July 1822, in 5 The Founders' Constitution, at 105, 106.
       What we thus know of the Framers' experience under-
scores the observation of one prominent commentator, that
confining the Establishment Clause to a prohibition on
preferential aid  requires a premise that the Framers were
extraordinarily bad drafters"that they believed one thing
but adopted language that said something substantially
different, and that they did so after repeatedly attending to
the choice of language.  Laycock, ``Nonpreferential'' Aid
882-883; see also Allegheny County v. American Civil
Liberties Union, Greater Pittsburgh Chapter, 492 U. S. 573,
647-648 (1989) (opinion of Stevens, J.).  We must presume,
since there is no conclusive evidence to the contrary, that
the Framers embraced the significance of their textual judg-
ment.  Thus, on balance, history neither contradicts nor
warrants reconsideration of the settled principle that the
Establishment Clause forbids support for religion in general
no less than support for one religion or some.

                                 C
       While these considerations are, for me, sufficient to reject
the nonpreferentialist position, one further concern ani-
mates my judgment.  In many contexts, including this one,
nonpreferentialism requires some distinction between
 sectarian religious practices and those that would be, by
some measure, ecumenical enough to pass Establishment
Clause muster.  Simply by requiring the enquiry, nonprefer-
entialists invite the courts to engage in comparative
theology.  I can hardly imagine a subject less amenable to
the competence of the federal judiciary, or more deliberately
to be avoided where possible.
       This case is nicely in point.  Since the nonpreferentiality
of a prayer must be judged by its text, Justice Blackmun
pertinently observes, ante, at 6, n. 5, that Rabbi Gutterman
drew his exhortation  [t]o do justly, to love mercy, to walk
humbly straight from the King James version of Micah, ch.
6, v. 8.  At some undefinable point, the similarities between
a state-sponsored prayer and the sacred text of a specific
religion would so closely identify the former with the latter
that even a nonpreferentialist would have to concede a
breach of the Establishment Clause.  And even if Micah's
thought is sufficiently generic for most believers, it still
embodies a straightforwardly Theistic premise, and so does
the Rabbi's prayer.  Many Americans who consider them-
selves religious are not Theistic; some, like several of the
Framers, are Deists who would question Rabbi Gutterman's
plea for divine advancement of the country's political and
moral good.  Thus, a nonpreferentialist who would condemn
subjecting public school graduates to, say, the Anglican
liturgy would still need to explain why the government's
preference for Theistic over non-Theistic religion is
constitutional.
       Nor does it solve the problem to say that the State should
promote a  diversity of religious views; that position would
necessarily compel the government and, inevitably, the
courts to make wholly inappropriate judgments about the
number of religions the State should sponsor and the
relative frequency with which it should sponsor each.  In
fact, the prospect would be even worse than that.  As
Madison observed in criticizing religious presidential
proclamations, the practice of sponsoring religious messages
tends, over time,  to narrow the recommendation to the
standard of the predominant sect.  Madison's  Detached
Memoranda, 3 Wm. & Mary Q. 534, 561 (E. Fleet ed. 1946)
(hereinafter Madison's ``Detached Memoranda'').  We have
not changed much since the days of Madison, and the
judiciary should not willingly enter the political arena to
battle the centripetal force leading from religious pluralism
to official preference for the faith with the most votes.

                                II
       Petitioners rest most of their argument on a theory that,
whether or not the Establishment Clause permits extensive
nonsectarian support for religion, it does not forbid the
state to sponsor affirmations of religious belief that coerce
neither support for religion nor participation in religious
observance.  I appreciate the force of some of the arguments
supporting a  coercion analysis of the Clause.  See gener-
ally Allegheny County, supra, at 655-679 (opinion of
Kennedy, J.); McConnell, Coercion: The Lost Element of
Establishment, 27 Wm. & Mary L. Rev. 933 (1986).  But we
could not adopt that reading without abandoning our
settled law, a course that, in my view, the text of the
Clause would not readily permit.  Nor does the extratextual
evidence of original meaning stand so unequivocally at odds
with the textual premise inherent in existing precedent that
we should fundamentally reconsider our course.

                                 A
       Over the years, this Court has declared the invalidity of
many noncoercive state laws and practices conveying a
message of religious endorsement.  For example, in Alle-
gheny County, supra, we forbade the prominent display of
a nativity scene on public property; without contesting the
dissent's observation that the creche coerced no one into
accepting or supporting whatever message it proclaimed,
five Members of the Court found its display unconstitu-
tional as a state endorsement of Christianity.  Id., at
589-594, 598-602.  Likewise, in Wallace v. Jaffree, 472
U. S. 38 (1985), we struck down a state law requiring a
moment of silence in public classrooms not because the
statute coerced students to participate in prayer (for it did
not), but because the manner of its enactment  convey[ed]
a message of state approval of prayer activities in the public
schools.  Id., at 61; see also id., at 67-84 (O'Connor, J.,
concurring in judgment).  Cf. Engel v. Vitale, 370 U. S., at
431 ( When the power, prestige and financial support of
government is placed behind a particular religious belief,
the indirect coercive pressure upon religious minorities to
conform to the prevailing officially approved religion is
plain.  But the purposes underlying the Establishment
Clause go much further than that).
       In Epperson v. Arkansas, 393 U. S. 97 (1968), we invali-
dated a state law that barred the teaching of Darwin's
theory of evolution because, even though the statute
obviously did not coerce anyone to support religion or
participate in any religious practice, it was enacted for a
singularly religious purpose.  See also Edwards v.
Aguillard, 482 U. S. 578, 593 (1987) (statute requiring
instruction in  creation science  endorses religion in
violation of the First Amendment).  And in School Dist. of
Grand Rapids v. Ball, 473 U. S. 373 (1985), we invalidated
a program whereby the State sent public school teachers to
parochial schools to instruct students on ostensibly nonreli-
gious matters; while the scheme clearly did not coerce
anyone to receive or subsidize religious instruction, we held
it invalid because, among other things,  [t]he symbolic
union of church and state inherent in the [program]
threatens to convey a message of state support for religion
to students and to the general public.  Id., at 397; see also
Texas Monthly, Inc. v. Bullock, 489 U. S., at 17 (plurality
opinion) (tax exemption benefiting only religious publica-
tions  effectively endorses religious belief); id., at 28
(Blackmun, J., concurring in judgment) (exemption
unconstitutional because State  engaged in preferential
support for the communication of religious messages).
       Our precedents may not always have drawn perfectly
straight lines.  They simply cannot, however, support the
position that a showing of coercion is necessary to a
successful Establishment Clause claim.
                             B
       Like the provisions about  due process and  unreason-
able searches and seizures, the constitutional language
forbidding laws  respecting an establishment of religion is
not pellucid.  But virtually everyone acknowledges that the
Clause bans more than formal establishments of religion in
the traditional sense, that is, massive state support for
religion through, among other means, comprehensive
schemes of taxation.  See generally Levy 1-62 (discussing
such establishments in the colonies and early States).  This
much follows from the Framers' explicit rejection of simpler
provisions prohibiting either the establishment of a religion
or laws  establishing religion in favor of the broader ban
on laws  respecting an establishment of religion.  See
supra, at 4-6.
       While some argue that the Framers added the word
 respecting simply to foreclose federal interference with
State establishments of religion, see, e.g., Amar, The Bill of
Rights as a Constitution, 100 Yale L. J. 1131, 1157 (1991),
the language sweeps more broadly than that.  In Madison's
words, the Clause in its final form forbids  everything like
a national religious establishment, see Madison's  Detached
Memoranda 558, and, after incorporation, it forbids
 everything like a State religious establishment.  Cf.
Allegheny County, 492 U. S., at 649 (opinion of Stevens,
J.).  The sweep is broad enough that Madison himself
characterized congressional provisions for legislative and
military chaplains as unconstitutional  establishments.
Madison's  Detached Memoranda 558-559; see infra, at
16-17, and n. 6.
   While petitioners insist that the prohibition extends only
to the  coercive features and incidents of establishment,
they cannot easily square that claim with the constitutional
text.  The First Amendment forbids not just laws  respect-
ing an establishment of religion, but also those  prohibiting
the free exercise thereof.  Yet laws that coerce nonadher-
ents to  support or participate in any religion or its exer-
cise, Allegheny County, supra, at 659-660 (opinion of
Kennedy, J.), would virtually by definition violate their
right to religious free exercise.  See Employment Div., Dept.
of Human Resources of Ore. v. Smith, 494 U. S. 872, 877
(1990) (under Free Exercise Clause,  government may not
compel affirmation of religious belief), citing Torcaso v.
Watkins, 367 U. S. 488 (1961); see also J. Madison, Memori-
al and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments (1785)
(compelling support for religious establishments violates
 free exercise of Religion), quoted in 5 The Founders'
Constitution, at 82, 84.  Thus, a literal application of the
coercion test would render the Establishment Clause a vir-
tual nullity, as petitioners' counsel essentially conceded at
oral argument.  Tr. of Oral Arg. 18.
       Our cases presuppose as much; as we said in School Dist.
of Abington, supra,  [t]he distinction between the two
clauses is apparent"a violation of the Free Exercise Clause
is predicated on coercion while the Establishment Clause
violation need not be so attended.  374 U. S., at 223; see
also Laycock, ``Nonpreferential'' Aid 922 ( If coercion is . . .
an element of the establishment clause, establishment adds
nothing to free exercise).  While one may argue that the
Framers meant the Establishment Clause simply to
ornament the First Amendment, cf. T. Curry, The First
Freedoms 216-217 (1986), that must be a reading of last
resort.  Without compelling evidence to the contrary, we
should presume that the Framers meant the Clause to
stand for something more than petitioners attribute to it.


                            C
       Petitioners argue from the political setting in which the
Establishment Clause was framed, and from the Framers'
own political practices following ratification, that govern-
ment may constitutionally endorse religion so long as it
does not coerce religious conformity.  The setting and the
practices warrant canvassing, but while they yield some
evidence for petitioners' argument, they do not reveal the
degree of consensus in early constitutional thought that
would raise a threat to stare decisis by challenging the pre-
sumption that the Establishment Clause adds something to
the Free Exercise Clause that follows it.
       The Framers adopted the Religion Clauses in response to
a long tradition of coercive state support for religion,
particularly in the form of tax assessments, but their
special antipathy to religious coercion did not exhaust their
hostility to the features and incidents of establishment.
Indeed, Jefferson and Madison opposed any political appro-
priation of religion, see infra, at 15-18 and, even when
challenging the hated assessments, they did not always
temper their rhetoric with distinctions between coercive and
noncoercive state action.  When, for example, Madison
criticized Virginia's general assessment bill, he invoked
principles antithetical to all state efforts to promote
religion.  An assessment, he wrote, is improper not simply
because it forces people to donate  three pence to religion,
but, more broadly, because  it is itself a signal of persecu-
tion.  It degrades from the equal rank of Citizens all those
whose opinions in Religion do not bend to those of the
Legislative authority.  J. Madison, Memorial and Remon-
strance Against Religious Assessments (1785), in 5 The
Founders' Constitution, at 83.  Madison saw that, even
without the tax collector's participation, an official endorse-
ment of religion can impair religious liberty.
       Petitioners contend that because the early Presidents
included religious messages in their inaugural and Thanks-
giving Day addresses, the Framers could not have meant
the Establishment Clause to forbid noncoercive state
endorsement of religion.  The argument ignores the fact,
however, that Americans today find such proclamations less
controversial than did the founding generation, whose
published thoughts on the matter belie petitioners' claim.
President Jefferson, for example, steadfastly refused to
issue Thanksgiving proclamations of any kind, in part
because he thought they violated the Religion Clauses.
Letter from Thomas Jefferson to Rev. S. Miller (Jan. 23,
1808), in 5 The Founders' Constitution, at 98.  In explaining
his views to the Reverend Samuel Miller, Jefferson effec-
tively anticipated, and rejected, petitioners' position:
``[I]t is only proposed that I should recommend, not
prescribe a day of fasting & prayer.  That is, that I
should indirectly assume to the U. S. an authority over
religious exercises which the Constitution has directly
precluded from them.  It must be meant too that this
recommendation is to carry some authority, and to be
sanctioned by some penalty on those who disregard it;
not indeed of fine and imprisonment, but of some
degree of proscription perhaps in public opinion.''  Id.,
at 98-99 (emphasis in original).
By condemning such noncoercive state practices that, in
 recommending the majority faith, demean religious
dissenters  in public opinion, Jefferson necessarily con-
demned what, in modern terms, we call official endorse-
ment of religion.  He accordingly construed the Establish-
ment Clause to forbid not simply state coercion, but also
state endorsement, of religious belief and observance.  And
if he opposed impersonal presidential addresses for in-
flicting  proscription in public opinion, all the more would
he have condemned less diffuse expressions of official
endorsement.
       During his first three years in office, James Madison also
refused to call for days of thanksgiving and prayer, though
later, amid the political turmoil of the War of 1812, he did
so on four separate occasions.  See Madison's  Detached
Memoranda, 562, and n. 54.  Upon retirement, in an essay
condemning as an unconstitutional  establishment the use
of public money to support congressional and military
chaplains, id., at 558-560, he concluded that  [r]eligious
proclamations by the Executive recommending thanksgiv-
ings & fasts are shoots from the same root with the
legislative acts reviewed.  Altho' recommendations only,
they imply a religious agency, making no part of the trust
delegated to political rulers.  Id., at 560.  Explaining that
 [t]he members of a Govt . . . can in no sense, be regarded
as possessing an advisory trust from their Constituents in
their religious capacities, ibid., he further observed that
the state necessarily freights all of its religious messages
with political ones:  the idea of policy [is] associated with
religion, whatever be the mode or the occasion, when a
function of the latter is assumed by those in power.  Id., at
562 (footnote omitted).
       Madison's failure to keep pace with his principles in the
face of congressional pressure cannot erase the principles.
He admitted to backsliding, and explained that he had
made the content of his wartime proclamations inconse-
quential enough to mitigate much of their impropriety.  See
ibid.; see also Letter from J. Madison to E. Livingston (July
10, 1822), in 5 The Founders' Constitution, at 105.  While
his writings suggest mild variations in his interpretation of
the Establishment Clause, Madison was no different in that
respect from the rest of his political generation.  That he
expressed so much doubt about the constitutionality of
religious proclamations, however, suggests a brand of
separationism stronger even than that embodied in our
traditional jurisprudence.  So too does his characterization
of public subsidies for legislative and military chaplains as
unconstitutional  establishments, see supra, at 16-17, and
n. 6, for the federal courts, however expansive their general
view of the Establishment Clause, have upheld both
practices.  See Marsh v. Chambers, 463 U. S. 783 (1983)
(legislative chaplains); Katcoff v. Marsh, 755 F. 2d 223 (CA2
1985) (military chaplains).
       To be sure, the leaders of the young Republic engaged in
some of the practices that separationists like Jefferson and
Madison criticized.  The First Congress did hire institu-
tional chaplains, see Marsh v. Chambers, supra, at 788, and
Presidents Washington and Adams unapologetically marked
days of ``public thanksgiving and prayer,'' see R. Cord,
Separation of Church and State 53 (1988).  Yet in the face
of the separationist dissent, those practices prove, at best,
that the Framers simply did not share a common under-
standing of the Establishment Clause, and, at worst, that
they, like other politicians, could raise constitutional ideals
one day and turn their backs on them the next.   Indeed, by
1787 the provisions of the state bills of rights had become
what Madison called mere `paper parchments'"expressions
of the most laudable sentiments, observed as much in the
breach as in practice.  Kurland, The Origins of the Religion
Clauses of the Constitution, 27 Wm. & Mary L. Rev. 839,
852 (1986) (footnote omitted).  Sometimes the National
Constitution fared no better.  Ten years after proposing the
First Amendment, Congress passed the Alien and Sedition
Acts, measures patently unconstitutional by modern
standards.  If the early Congress's political actions were
determinative, and not merely relevant, evidence of consti-
tutional meaning, we would have to gut our current First
Amendment doctrine to make room for political censorship.
       While we may be unable to know for certain what the
Framers meant by the Clause, we do know that, around the
time of its ratification, a respectable body of opinion
supported a considerably broader reading than petitioners
urge upon us.  This consistency with the textual consider-
ations is enough to preclude fundamentally reexamining our
settled law, and I am accordingly left with the task of
considering whether the state practice at issue here violates
our traditional understanding of the Clause's proscriptions.

                                III
       While the Establishment Clause's concept of neutrality is
not self-revealing, our recent cases have invested it with
specific content:  the state may not favor or endorse either
religion generally over nonreligion or one religion over
others.  See, e.g., Allegheny County, 492 U. S., at 589-594,
598-602; Texas Monthly, 489 U. S., at 17 (plurality opin-
ion); id., at 28 (Blackmun, J., concurring in judgment);
Edwards v. Aguillard, 482 U. S., at 593; School Dist. of
Grand Rapids, 473 U. S., at 389-392; Wallace v. Jaffree,
472 U. S., at 61; see also Laycock, Formal, Substantive, and
Disaggregated Neutrality Toward Religion, 39 De Paul L.
Rev. 993 (1990); cf. Lemon v. Kurtzman, 403 U. S. 602,
612-613 (1971).  This principle against favoritism and
endorsement has become the foundation of Establishment
Clause jurisprudence, ensuring that religious belief is
irrelevant to every citizen's standing in the political
community, see Allegheny County, supra, at 594; J. Madi-
son, Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assess-
ments (1785), in 5 The Founders' Constitution, at 82-83,
and protecting religion from the demeaning effects of any
governmental embrace, see id., at 83.  Now, as in the early
Republic,  religion & Govt. will both exist in greater purity,
the less they are mixed together.  Letter from J. Madison
to E. Livingston (10 July 1822), in 5 The Founders' Consti-
tution, at 106.  Our aspiration to religious liberty, embodied
in the First Amendment, permits no other standard.

                                 A
       That government must remain neutral in matters of
religion does not foreclose it from ever taking religion into
account.  The State may  accommodate the free exercise of
religion by relieving people from generally applicable rules
that interfere with their religious callings.  See, e.g.,
Corporation of Presiding Bishop of Church of Jesus Christ
of Latter-Day Saints v. Amos, 483 U. S. 327 (1987); see also
Sherbert v. Verner, 374 U. S. 398 (1963).  Contrary to the
views of some, such accommodation does not necessarily
signify an official endorsement of religious observance over
disbelief.
       In everyday life, we routinely accommodate religious
beliefs that we do not share.  A Christian inviting an
Orthodox Jew to lunch might take pains to choose a kosher
restaurant; an atheist in a hurry might yield the right of
way to an Amish man steering a horse-drawn carriage.  In
so acting, we express respect for, but not endorsement of,
the fundamental values of others.  We act without express-
ing a position on the theological merit of those values or of
religious belief in general, and no one perceives us to have
taken such a position.
       The government may act likewise.  Most religions
encourage devotional practices that are at once crucial to
the lives of believers and idiosyncratic in the eyes of
nonadherents.  By definition, secular rules of general
application are drawn from the nonadherent's vantage and,
consequently, fail to take such practices into account.  Yet
when enforcement of such rules cuts across religious
sensibilities, as it often does, it puts those affected to the
choice of taking sides between God and government.  In
such circumstances, accommodating religion reveals nothing
beyond a recognition that general rules can unnecessarily
offend the religious conscience when they offend the
conscience of secular society not at all.  Cf. Welsh v. United
States, 398 U. S. 333, 340 (1970) (plurality opinion).  Thus,
in freeing the Native American Church from federal laws
forbidding peyote use, see Drug Enforcement Administra-
tion Miscellaneous Exemptions, 21 C. F. R.  1307.31
(1991), the government conveys no endorsement of peyote
rituals, the Church, or religion as such; it simply respects
the centrality of peyote to the lives of certain Americans.
See Note, The Free Exercise Boundaries of Permissible
Accommodation Under the Establishment Clause, 99 Yale
L. J. 1127, 1135-1136 (1990).

                                 B
       Whatever else may define the scope of accommodation
permissible under the Establishment Clause, one require-
ment is clear:  accommodation must lift a discernible
burden on the free exercise of religion.  See Allegheny
County, supra, at 601, n. 51; id., at 631-632 (opinion of
O'Connor, J.); Corporation of Presiding Bishop, supra, at
348 (O'Connor, J., concurring in judgment); see also Texas
Monthly, supra, at 18, 18-19, n. 8 (plurality opinion);
Wallace v. Jaffree, 472 U. S., at 57-58, n. 45.  But see
Allegheny County, supra, at 663, n. 2 (opinion of Kennedy,
J.).  Concern for the position of religious individuals in the
modern regulatory state cannot justify official solicitude for
a religious practice unburdened by general rules; such
gratuitous largesse would effectively favor religion over
disbelief.  By these lights one easily sees that, in sponsoring
the graduation prayers at issue here, the State has crossed
the line from permissible accommodation to unconstitution-
al establishment.
       Religious students cannot complain that omitting prayers
from their graduation ceremony would, in any realistic
sense,  burden their spiritual callings.  To be sure, many
of them invest this rite of passage with spiritual signifi-
cance, but they may express their religious feelings about
it before and after the ceremony.  They may even organize
a privately sponsored baccalaureate if they desire the
company of likeminded students.  Because they accordingly
have no need for the machinery of the State to affirm their
beliefs, the government's sponsorship of prayer at the
graduation ceremony is most reasonably understood as an
official endorsement of religion and, in this instance, of
Theistic religion.  One may fairly say, as one commentator
has suggested, that the government brought prayer into the
ceremony  precisely because some people want a symbolic
affirmation that government approves and endorses their
religion, and because many of the people who want this
affirmation place little or no value on the costs to religious
minorities.  Laycock, Summary and Synthesis:  The Crisis
in Religious Liberty, 60 Geo. Wash. L. Rev. 841, 844
(1992).
       Petitioners would deflect this conclusion by arguing that
graduation prayers are no different from presidential
religious proclamations and similar official  acknowledg-
ments of religion in public life.  But religious invocations
in Thanksgiving Day addresses and the like, rarely noticed,
ignored without effort, conveyed over an impersonal
medium, and directed at no one in particular, inhabit a
pallid zone worlds apart from official prayers delivered to a
captive audience of public school students and their
families.  Madison himself respected the difference between
the trivial and the serious in constitutional practice.
Realizing that his contemporaries were unlikely to take the
Establishment Clause seriously enough to forgo a legislative
chaplainship, he suggested that  [r]ather than let this step
beyond the landmarks of power have the effect of a legiti-
mate precedent, it will be better to apply to it the legal
aphorism de minimis non curat lex . . . .  Madison's
 Detached Memoranda 559; see also Letter from J. Madi-
son to E. Livingston, 10 July 1822, in 5 The Founders'
Constitution, at 105.  But that logic permits no winking at
the practice in question here.  When public school officials,
armed with the State's authority, convey an endorsement of
religion to their students, they strike near the core of the
Establishment Clause.  However  ceremonial their mes-
sages may be, they are flatly unconstitutional.



          SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES--------
                       No. 90-1014
                        --------
     ROBERT E. LEE, individually and as PRINCIPAL OF
               NATHAN BISHOP MIDDLE SCHOOL, et al.,
                PETITIONERS v. DANIEL WEISMAN etc.
        on writ of certiorari to the united states court of
                   appeals for the first circuit
                          [June 24, 1992]

       Justice Scalia, with whom The Chief Justice, Justice
White, and Justice Thomas join, dissenting.
       Three Terms ago, I joined an opinion recognizing that the
Establishment Clause must be construed in light of the
 [g]overnment policies of accommodation, acknowledgment,
and support for religion [that] are an accepted part of our
political and cultural heritage.  That opinion affirmed that
 the meaning of the Clause is to be determined by reference
to historical practices and understandings.  It said that  [a]
test for implementing the protections of the Establishment
Clause that, if applied with consistency, would invalidate
longstanding traditions cannot be a proper reading of the
Clause.  Allegheny County v. Greater Pittsburgh ACLU,
492 U. S. 573, 657, 670 (1989) (Kennedy, J., concurring in
judgment in part and dissenting in part).
       These views of course prevent me from joining today's
opinion, which is conspicuously bereft of any reference to
history.  In holding that the Establishment Clause prohibits
invocations and benedictions at public-school graduation
ceremonies, the Court"with nary a mention that it is doing
so"lays waste a tradition that is as old as public-school
graduation ceremonies themselves, and that is a component
of an even more longstanding American tradition of
nonsectarian prayer to God at public celebrations generally.
As its instrument of destruction, the bulldozer of its social
engineering, the Court invents a boundless, and boundlessly
manipulable, test of psychological coercion, which promises
to do for the Establishment Clause what the Durham rule
did for the insanity defense.  See Durham v. United States,
94 U. S. App. D. C. 228, 214 F. 2d 862 (1954).  Today's
opinion shows more forcefully than volumes of argumenta-
tion why our Nation's protection, that fortress which is our
Constitution, cannot possibly rest upon the changeable
philosophical predilections of the Justices of this Court, but
must have deep foundations in the historic practices of our
people.
                             I
       Justice Holmes' aphorism that  a page of history is worth
a volume of logic, New York Trust Co. v. Eisner, 256 U. S.
345, 349 (1921), applies with particular force to our Estab-
lishment Clause jurisprudence.  As we have recognized, our
interpretation of the Establishment Clause should  com-
por[t] with what history reveals was the contemporaneous
understanding of its guarantees.  Lynch v. Donnelly, 465
U. S. 668, 673 (1984).   [T]he line we must draw between
the permissible and the impermissible is one which accords
with history and faithfully reflects the understanding of the
Founding Fathers.  Abington School District v. Schempp,
374 U. S. 203, 294 (1963) (Brennan, J., concurring).
 [H]istorical evidence sheds light not only on what the
draftsmen intended the Establishment Clause to mean, but
also on how they thought that Clause applied to contempo-
raneous practices.  Marsh v. Chambers, 463 U. S. 783, 790
(1983).  Thus,  [t]he existence from the beginning of the
Nation's life of a practice, [while] not conclusive of its
constitutionality . . . , is a fact of considerable import in the
interpretation of the Establishment Clause.  Walz v. Tax
Comm'n of New York City, 397 U. S. 664, 681 (1970)
(Brennan, J., concurring).
       The history and tradition of our Nation are replete with
public ceremonies featuring prayers of thanksgiving and
petition.  Illustrations of this point have been amply
provided in our prior opinions, see, e.g., Lynch, supra, at
674-678; Marsh, supra, at 786-788; see also Wallace v.
Jaffree, 472 U. S. 38, 100-103 (1985) (Rehnquist, J.,
dissenting); Engel v. Vitale, 370 U. S. 421, 446-450, and n.
3 (1962) (Stewart, J., dissenting), but since the Court is so
oblivious to our history as to suggest that the Constitution
restricts  preservation and transmission of religious beliefs
. . . to the private sphere, ante, at 10, it appears necessary
to provide another brief account.
       From our Nation's origin, prayer has been a prominent
part of governmental ceremonies and proclamations.  The
Declaration of Independence, the document marking our
birth as a separate people,  appeal[ed] to the Supreme
Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions and
avowed  a firm reliance on the protection of divine Provi-
dence.  In his first inaugural address, after swearing his
oath of office on a Bible, George Washington deliberately
made a prayer a part of his first official act as President:
 it would be peculiarly improper to omit in this first
official act my fervent supplications to that Almighty
Being who rules over the universe, who presides in the
councils of nations, and whose providential aids can
supply every human defect, that His benediction may
consecrate to the liberties and happiness of the people
of the United States a Government instituted by
themselves for these essential purposes.  Inaugural
Addresses of the Presidents of the United States 2
(1989).
Such supplications have been a characteristic feature of
inaugural addresses ever since.  Thomas Jefferson, for
example, prayed in his first inaugural address:  may that
Infinite Power which rules the destinies of the universe
lead our councils to what is best, and give them a favorable
issue for your peace and prosperity.  Id., at 17.  In his
second inaugural address, Jefferson acknowledged his need
for divine guidance and invited his audience to join his
prayer:
 I shall need, too, the favor of that Being in whose
hands we are, who led our fathers, as Israel of old,
from their native land and planted them in a country
flowing with all the necessaries and comforts of life;
who has covered our infancy with His providence and
our riper years with His wisdom and power, and to
whose goodness I ask you to join in supplications with
me that He will so enlighten the minds of your ser-
vants, guide their councils, and prosper their measures
that whatsoever they do shall result in your good, and
shall secure to you the peace, friendship, and approba-
tion of all nations.  Id., at 22-23.
Similarly, James Madison, in his first inaugural address,
placed his confidence
 in the guardianship and guidance of that Almighty
Being whose power regulates the destiny of nations,
whose blessings have been so conspicuously dispensed
to this rising Republic, and to whom we are bound to
address our devout gratitude for the past, as well as
our fervent supplications and best hopes for the
future.  Id., at 28.
Most recently, President Bush, continuing the tradition
established by President Washington, asked those attending
his inauguration to bow their heads, and made a prayer his
first official act as President.  Id., at 346.
       Our national celebration of Thanksgiving likewise dates
back to President Washington.  As we recounted in Lynch,
            The day after the First Amendment was proposed,
Congress urged President Washington to proclaim `a
day of public thanksgiving and prayer, to be observed
by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many and
signal favours of Almighty God.'  President Washington
proclaimed November 26, 1789, a day of thanksgiving
to `offe[r] our prayers and supplications to the Great
Lord and Ruler of Nations, and beseech him to pardon
our national and other transgressions . . . .'  465 U. S.,
at 675, n. 2 (citations omitted).
This tradition of Thanksgiving Proclamations"with their
religious theme of prayerful gratitude to God"has been
adhered to by almost every President.  Id., at 675, and nn.
2 and 3; Wallace v. Jaffree, supra, at 100-103 (Rehnquist,
J., dissenting).
       The other two branches of the Federal Government also
have a long-established practice of prayer at public events.
As we detailed in Marsh, Congressional sessions have
opened with a chaplain's prayer ever since the First
Congress.  463 U. S., at 787-788.  And this Court's own
sessions have opened with the invocation  God save the
United States and this Honorable Court since the days of
Chief Justice Marshall.  1 C. Warren, The Supreme Court
in United States History 469 (1922).
       In addition to this general tradition of prayer at public
ceremonies, there exists a more specific tradition of invoca-
tions and benedictions at public-school graduation exercises.
By one account, the first public-high-school graduation
ceremony took place in Connecticut in July 1868"the very
month, as it happens, that the Fourteenth Amendment (the
vehicle by which the Establishment Clause has been
applied against the States) was ratified"when  15 seniors
from the Norwich Free Academy marched in their best
Sunday suits and dresses into a church hall and waited
through majestic music and long prayers.  Brodinsky,
Commencement Rites Obsolete?  Not At All, A 10-Week
Study Shows, Updating School Board Policies, Vol. 10, p. 3
(Apr. 1979).  As the Court obliquely acknowledges in
describing the  customary features of high school gradua-
tions, ante, at 3-4, and as respondents do not contest, the
invocation and benediction have long been recognized to be
 as traditional as any other parts of the [school] graduation
program and are widely established.  H. McKown, Com-
mencement Activities 56 (1931); see also Brodinsky, supra,
at 5.
                                II
       The Court presumably would separate graduation
invocations and benedictions from other instances of public
 preservation and transmission of religious beliefs on the
ground that they involve  psychological coercion.  I find it
a sufficient embarrassment that our Establishment Clause
jurisprudence regarding holiday displays, see Allegheny
County v. Greater Pittsburgh ACLU, 492 U. S. 573 (1989),
has come to  requir[e] scrutiny more commonly associated
with interior decorators than with the judiciary.  American
Jewish Congress v. Chicago, 827 F. 2d 120, 129 (Easter-
brook, J., dissenting).  But interior decorating is a rock-hard
science compared to psychology practiced by amateurs.  A
few citations of  [r]esearch in psychology that have no
particular bearing upon the precise issue here, ante, at 14,
cannot disguise the fact that the Court has gone beyond the
realm where judges know what they are doing.  The Court's
argument that state officials have  coerced students to take
part in the invocation and benediction at graduation
ceremonies is, not to put too fine a point on it, incoherent.
       The Court identifies two  dominant facts that it says
dictate its ruling that invocations and benedictions at
public-school graduation ceremonies violate the Establish-
ment Clause.  Ante, at 7.  Neither of them is in any
relevant sense true.
                                 A
       The Court declares that students'  attendance and
participation in the [invocation and benediction] are in a
fair and real sense obligatory.  Ibid.  But what exactly is
this  fair and real sense?  According to the Court, students
at graduation who want  to avoid the fact or appearance of
participation, ante, at 8, in the invocation and benediction
are psychologically obligated by  public pressure, as well as
peer pressure, . . . to stand as a group or, at least, maintain
respectful silence during those prayers.  Ante, at 13.  This
assertion"the very linchpin of the Court's opinion"is
almost as intriguing for what it does not say as for what it
says.  It does not say, for example, that students are
psychologically coerced to bow their heads, place their
hands in a Durer-like prayer position, pay attention to the
prayers, utter  Amen, or in fact pray.  (Perhaps further
intensive psychological research remains to be done on
these matters.)  It claims only that students are psychologi-
cally coerced  to stand . . . or, at least, maintain respectful
silence.  Ibid. (emphasis added).  Both halves of this
disjunctive (both of which must amount to the fact or
appearance of participation in prayer if the Court's analysis
is to survive on its own terms) merit particular attention.
       To begin with the latter: The Court's notion that a
student who simply sits in  respectful silence during the
invocation and benediction (when all others are standing)
has somehow joined"or would somehow be perceived as
having joined"in the prayers is nothing short of ludicrous.
We indeed live in a vulgar age.  But surely  our social
conventions, ibid., have not coarsened to the point that
anyone who does not stand on his chair and shout obsceni-
ties can reasonably be deemed to have assented to every-
thing said in his presence.  Since the Court does not dispute
that students exposed to prayer at graduation ceremonies
retain (despite  subtle coercive pressures, ante, at 8) the
free will to sit, cf. ante, at 14, there is absolutely no basis
for the Court's decision.  It is fanciful enough to say that  a
reasonable dissenter, standing head erect in a class of
bowed heads,  could believe that the group exercise signi-
fied her own participation or approval of it, ibid.  It is
beyond the absurd to say that she could entertain such a
belief while pointedly declining to rise.
   But let us assume the very worst, that the nonparticipat-
ing graduate is  subtly coerced . . . to stand-  Even that
half of the disjunctive does not remotely establish a
 participation (or an  appearance of participation) in a
religious exercise.  The Court acknowledges that  in our
culture standing . . . can signify adherence to a view or
simple respect for the views of others.  Ante, at 13.  (Much
more often the latter than the former, I think, except
perhaps in the proverbial town meeting, where one votes by
standing.)  But if it is a permissible inference that one who
is standing is doing so simply out of respect for the prayers
of others that are in progress, then how can it possibly be
said that a  reasonable dissenter . . . could believe that the
group exercise signified her own participation or approval?
Quite obviously, it cannot.  I may add, moreover, that
maintaining respect for the religious observances of others
is a fundamental civic virtue that government (including
the public schools) can and should cultivate"so that even
if it were the case that the displaying of such respect might
be mistaken for taking part in the prayer, I would deny
that the dissenter's interest in avoiding even the false
appearance of participation constitutionally trumps the
government's interest in fostering respect for religion
generally.
       The opinion manifests that the Court itself has not given
careful consideration to its test of psychological coercion.
For if it had, how could it observe, with no hint of concern
or disapproval, that students stood for the Pledge of
Allegiance, which immediately preceded Rabbi Gutterman's
invocation?  Ante, at 4.  The government can, of course, no
more coerce political orthodoxy than religious orthodoxy.
West Virginia Board of Education v. Barnette, 319 U. S.
624, 642 (1943).  Moreover, since the Pledge of Allegiance
has been revised since Barnette to include the phrase
 under God, recital of the Pledge would appear to raise the
same Establishment Clause issue as the invocation and
benediction.  If students were psychologically coerced to
remain standing during the invocation, they must also have
been psychologically coerced, moments before, to stand for
(and thereby, in the Court's view, take part in or appear to
take part in) the Pledge.  Must the Pledge therefore be
barred from the public schools (both from graduation
ceremonies and from the classroom)?  In Barnette we held
that a public-school student could not be compelled to recite
the Pledge; we did not even hint that she could not be
compelled to observe respectful silence"indeed, even to
stand in respectful silence"when those who wished to
recite it did so.  Logically, that ought to be the next project
for the Court's bulldozer.
       I also find it odd that the Court concludes that high
school graduates may not be subjected to this supposed
psychological coercion, yet refrains from addressing whether
 mature adults may.  Ante, at 14.  I had thought that the
reason graduation from high school is regarded as so
significant an event is that it is generally associated with
transition from adolescence to young adulthood.  Many
graduating seniors, of course, are old enough to vote.  Why,
then, does the Court treat them as though they were first-
graders?  Will we soon have a jurisprudence that distin-
guishes between mature and immature adults?
                                 B
       The other  dominant fac[t] identified by the Court is that
 [s]tate officials direct the performance of a formal religious
exercise at school graduation ceremonies.  Ante, at 7.
 Direct[ing] the performance of a formal religious exercise
has a sound of liturgy to it, summoning up images of the
principal directing acolytes where to carry the cross, or
showing the rabbi where to unroll the Torah.  A Court
professing to be engaged in a  delicate and fact-sensitive
line-drawing, ante, at 18, would better describe what it
means as  prescribing the content of an invocation and
benediction.  But even that would be false.  All the record
shows is that principals of the Providence public schools,
acting within their delegated authority, have invited clergy
to deliver invocations and benedictions at graduations; and
that Principal Lee invited Rabbi Gutterman, provided him
a two-page flyer, prepared by the National Conference of
Christians and Jews, giving general advice on inclusive
prayer for civic occasions, and advised him that his prayers
at graduation should be nonsectarian.  How these facts can
fairly be transformed into the charges that Principal Lee
 directed and controlled the content of [Rabbi Gutterman's]
prayer, ante, at 9, that school officials  monitor prayer,
ante, at 10, and attempted to  `compose official prayers,'
ante, at 9, and that the  government involvement with
religious activity in this case is pervasive, ante, at 7, is
difficult to fathom.  The Court identifies nothing in the
record remotely suggesting that school officials have ever
drafted, edited, screened or censored graduation prayers, or
that Rabbi Gutterman was a mouthpiece of the school
officials.
       These distortions of the record are, of course, not harm-
less error: without them the Court's solemn assertion that
the school officials could reasonably be perceived to be
 enforc[ing] a religious orthodoxy, ante, at 13, would ring
as hollow as it ought.
                                III
       The deeper flaw in the Court's opinion does not lie in its
wrong answer to the question whether there was state-
induced  peer-pressure coercion; it lies, rather, in the
Court's making violation of the Establishment Clause hinge
on such a precious question.  The coercion that was a
hallmark of historical establishments of religion was
coercion of religious orthodoxy and of financial support by
force of law and threat of penalty.  Typically, attendance at
the state church was required; only clergy of the official
church could lawfully perform sacraments; and dissenters,
if tolerated, faced an array of civil disabilities.  L. Levy, The
Establishment Clause 4 (1986).  Thus, for example, in the
colony of Virginia, where the Church of England had been
established, ministers were required by law to conform to
the doctrine and rites of the Church of England; and all
persons were required to attend church and observe the
Sabbath, were tithed for the public support of Anglican
ministers, and were taxed for the costs of building and
repairing churches.  Id., at 3-4.
       The Establishment Clause was adopted to prohibit such
an establishment of religion at the federal level (and to
protect state establishments of religion from federal
interference).  I will further acknowledge for the sake of
argument that, as some scholars have argued, by 1790 the
term  establishment had acquired an additional mean-
ing" financial support of religion generally, by public
taxation"that reflected the development of  general or
multiple establishments, not limited to a single church.
Id., at 8-9.  But that would still be an establishment
coerced by force of law.  And I will further concede that our
constitutional tradition, from the Declaration of Indepen-
dence and the first inaugural address of Washington,
quoted earlier, down to the present day, has, with a few
aberrations, see Holy Trinity Church v. United States, 143
U. S. 457 (1892), ruled out of order government-sponsored
endorsement of religion"even when no legal coercion is
present, and indeed even when no ersatz,  peer-pressure
psycho-coercion is present"where the endorsement is
sectarian, in the sense of specifying details upon which men
and women who believe in a benevolent, omnipotent
Creator and Ruler of the world, are known to differ (for
example, the divinity of Christ).  But there is simply no
support for the proposition that the officially sponsored
nondenominational invocation and benediction read by
Rabbi Gutterman"with no one legally coerced to recite
them"violated the Constitution of the United States.  To
the contrary, they are so characteristically American they
could have come from the pen of George Washington or
Abraham Lincoln himself.
     Thus, while I have no quarrel with the Court's general
proposition that the Establishment Clause  guarantees that
government may not coerce anyone to support or participate
in religion or its exercise, ante, at 8, I see no warrant for
expanding the concept of coercion beyond acts backed by
threat of penalty"a brand of coercion that, happily, is
readily discernible to those of us who have made a career of
reading the disciples of Blackstone rather than of Freud.
The Framers were indeed opposed to coercion of religious
worship by the National Government; but, as their own
sponsorship of nonsectarian prayer in public events demon-
strates, they understood that  [s]peech is not coercive; the
listener may do as he likes.  American Jewish Congress v.
Chicago, 827 F. 2d, at 132 (Easterbrook, J., dissenting).
       This historical discussion places in revealing perspective
the Court's extravagant claim that the State has  for all
practical purposes, ante, at 9, and  in every practical
sense, ante, at 18, compelled students to participate in
prayers at graduation.  Beyond the fact, stipulated to by the
parties, that attendance at graduation is voluntary, there
is nothing in the record to indicate that failure of attending
students to take part in the invocation or benediction was
subject to any penalty or discipline.  Contrast this with, for
example, the facts of Barnette: Schoolchildren were required
by law to recite the Pledge of Allegiance; failure to do so
resulted in expulsion, threatened the expelled child with the
prospect of being sent to a reformatory for criminally
inclined juveniles, and subjected his parents to prosecution
(and incarceration) for causing delinquency.  319 U. S., at
629-630.  To characterize the  subtle coercive pressures,
ante, at 8, allegedly present here as the  practical equiva-
lent of the legal sanctions in Barnette is . . . well, let me
just say it is not a  delicate and fact-sensitive analysis.
       The Court relies on our  school prayer cases, Engel v.
Vitale, 370 U. S. 421 (1962), and Abington School District
v. Schempp, 374 U. S. 203 (1963).  Ante, at 13.  But
whatever the merit of those cases, they do not support,
much less compel, the Court's psycho-journey.  In the first
place, Engel and Schempp do not constitute an exception to
the rule, distilled from historical practice, that public
ceremonies may include prayer, see supra, at 3-6; rather,
they simply do not fall within the scope of the rule (for the
obvious reason that school instruction is not a public
ceremony).  Second, we have made clear our understanding
that school prayer occurs within a framework in which legal
coercion to attend school (i. e., coercion under threat of
penalty) provides the ultimate backdrop.  In Schempp, for
example, we emphasized that the prayers were  prescribed
as part of the curricular activities of students who are
required by law to attend school.  374 U. S., at 223
(emphasis added).  Engel's suggestion that the school-prayer
program at issue there"which permitted students  to
remain silent or be excused from the room, 370 U. S., at
430"involved  indirect coercive pressure, id., at 431,
should be understood against this backdrop of legal coer-
cion.  The question whether the opt-out procedure in Engel
sufficed to dispel the coercion resulting from the mandatory
attendance requirement is quite different from the question
whether forbidden coercion exists in an environment utterly
devoid of legal compulsion.  And finally, our school-prayer
cases turn in part on the fact that the classroom is inher-
ently an instructional setting, and daily prayer
there"where parents are not present to counter  the
students' emulation of teachers as role models and the
children's susceptibility to peer pressure, Edwards v.
Aguillard, 482 U. S. 578, 584 (1987)"might be thought to
raise special concerns regarding state interference with the
liberty of parents to direct the religious upbringing of their
children:  Families entrust public schools with the educa-
tion of their children, but condition their trust on the
understanding that the classroom will not purposely be
used to advance religious views that may conflict with the
private beliefs of the student and his or her family.  Ibid.;
see Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 268 U. S. 510, 534-535
(1925).  Voluntary prayer at graduation"a one-time
ceremony at which parents, friends and relatives are
present"can hardly be thought to raise the same concerns.
                                IV
       Our religion-clause jurisprudence has become bedeviled
(so to speak) by reliance on formulaic abstractions that are
not derived from, but positively conflict with, our long-
accepted constitutional traditions.  Foremost among these
has been the so-called Lemon test, see Lemon v. Kurtzman,
403 U. S. 602, 612-613 (1971), which has received well-
earned criticism from many members of this Court.  See,
e.g., Allegheny County, 492 U. S., at 655-656 (opinion of
Kennedy, J.); Edwards v. Aguillard, supra, at 636-640
(1987) (Scalia, J., dissenting); Wallace v. Jaffree, 472 U. S.
at 108-112 (Rehnquist, J., dissenting); Aguilar v. Felton,
473 U. S. 402, 426-430 (1985) (O'Connor, J., dissenting);
Roemer v. Maryland Bd. of Public Works, 426 U. S. 736,
768-769 (1976) (White, J., concurring in judgment).  The
Court today demonstrates the irrelevance of Lemon by
essentially ignoring it, see ante, at 7, and the interment of
that case may be the one happy byproduct of the Court's
otherwise lamentable decision.  Unfortunately, however, the
Court has replaced Lemon with its psycho-coercion test,
which suffers the double disability of having no roots
whatever in our people's historic practice, and being as
infinitely expandable as the reasons for psychotherapy
itself.
       Another happy aspect of the case is that it is only a
jurisprudential disaster and not a practical one.  Given the
odd basis for the Court's decision, invocations and benedic-
tions will be able to be given at public-school graduations
next June, as they have for the past century and a half, so
long as school authorities make clear that anyone who
abstains from screaming in protest does not necessarily
participate in the prayers.  All that is seemingly needed is
an announcement, or perhaps a written insertion at the
beginning of the graduation Program, to the effect that,
while all are asked to rise for the invocation and benedic-
tion, none is compelled to join in them, nor will be assumed,
by rising, to have done so.  That obvious fact recited, the
graduates and their parents may proceed to thank God, as
Americans have always done, for the blessings He has
generously bestowed on them and on their country.
                              *  *  *
       The reader has been told much in this case about the
personal interest of Mr. Weisman and his daughter, and
very little about the personal interests on the other side.
They are not inconsequential.  Church and state would not
be such a difficult subject if religion were, as the Court
apparently thinks it to be, some purely personal avocation
that can be indulged entirely in secret, like pornography, in
the privacy of one's room.  For most believers it is not that,
and has never been.  Religious men and women of almost
all denominations have felt it necessary to acknowledge and
beseech the blessing of God as a people, and not just as
individuals, because they believe in the  protection of divine
Providence, as the Declaration of Independence put it, not
just for individuals but for societies; because they believe
God to be, as Washington's first Thanksgiving Proclamation
put it, the  Great Lord and Ruler of Nations.  One can
believe in the effectiveness of such public worship, or one
can deprecate and deride it.  But the longstanding Ameri-
can tradition of prayer at official ceremonies displays with
unmistakable clarity that the Establishment Clause does
not forbid the government to accommodate it.
       The narrow context of the present case involves a
community's celebration of one of the milestones in its
young citizens' lives, and it is a bold step for this Court to
seek to banish from that occasion, and from thousands of
similar celebrations throughout this land, the expression of
gratitude to God that a majority of the community wishes
to make.  The issue before us today is not the abstract
philosophical question whether the alternative of frustrat-
ing this desire of a religious majority is to be preferred over
the alternative of imposing  psychological coercion, or a
feeling of exclusion, upon nonbelievers.  Rather, the
question is whether a mandatory choice in favor of the
former has been imposed by the United States Constitution.
As the age-old practices of our people show, the answer to
that question is not at all in doubt.
       I must add one final observation: The founders of our
Republic knew the fearsome potential of sectarian religious
belief to generate civil dissension and civil strife.  And they
also knew that nothing, absolutely nothing, is so inclined to
foster among religious believers of various faiths a tolera-
tion"no, an affection"for one another than voluntarily
joining in prayer together, to the God whom they all
worship and seek.  Needless to say, no one should be
compelled to do that, but it is a shame to deprive our public
culture of the opportunity, and indeed the encouragement,
for people to do it voluntarily.  The Baptist or Catholic who
heard and joined in the simple and inspiring prayers of
Rabbi Gutterman on this official and patriotic occasion was
inoculated from religious bigotry and prejudice in a manner
that can not be replicated.  To deprive our society of that
important unifying mechanism, in order to spare the
nonbeliever what seems to me the minimal inconvenience
of standing or even sitting in respectful nonparticipation, is
as senseless in policy as it is unsupported in law.
       For the foregoing reasons, I dissent.


