After a decade, a Florida city has finally given up defending an illegal prayer vigil

Ocala has settled a lawsuit after a judge confirmed it violated the Establishment Clause by promoting Christianity

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It took over 11 years and a stop at the U.S. Supreme Court, but there’s finally a resolution in a case involving a government-sponsored Christian prayer vigil. While the end result is a settlement between the two sides, the city ultimately comes out on the losing end.

It comes a year after a federal judge ruled that the city of Ocala, Florida violated the Constitution when it held the Christian vigil—and that held true even when considering the Supreme Court’s revised rules for church/state separation cases.

(Image via Shutterstock)

What City of Ocala, Florida v. Art Rojas, et al is about

In 2014, after a shooting spree that injured several children, Greg Graham, chief of the Ocala Police Department in Florida, posted an unusual letter to the department’s Facebook page. Co-signed by community development director for the Ocala/Marion County Family YMCA Narvella Haynes, the letter called for public prayer:

We are facing a crisis in the City of Ocala and Marion County that requires fervent prayer and your presence to show unity and help in this senseless crime spree that is affecting our communities.

…

I am urging you all to please support a very important “Community Prayer Vigil” that will be held this coming Wednesday, September 24, 2014 at 6:30 pm to be held at our Downtown Square located in the heart of the City.

It was troubling that a Chief of Police thought the best solution to stop crime was prayer, as if the only alternative was waving a white flag. He could have asked the community to report suspicious activity, or called on politicians to enforce tougher gun safety laws, or demanded state legislators provide more funding for the police department, or (in the long-term) looked for ways to get people out of poverty so some of them didn't feel the need to resort to crime.

Instead, he went with God.

There may have been value to having members of the community unite toward a common cause, but promoting prayer (and, make no mistake, this was always about Christian prayer) was more divisive than anything else. More importantly, this wasn't some grassroots push for prayer led by citizens. It was a top-down call for Christianity to solve secular problems with uniformed chaplains lending their authority to the event.

The American Humanist Association soon wrote a letter to the Chief, calling on him to remove the prayer request from the department's page and asking for reassurance that the police department wouldn't be participating in the event. (Individual officers could always go on their own time, but a government entity had no business promoting religion.)

… For a police department to say that a spree of violence "requires fervent prayer" is an endorsement of religion that violates the First Amendment, as is your statement: "I am urging you all to please support the very important Community Prayer Vigil." There are many ways that police can support a community that is experiencing a crime spree, but such religious proselytizing is not an acceptable means. A governmental call to "show unity" through prayer is in fact inherently divisive, as is evidenced by the numerous complaints posted beneath your letter on Facebook. Religious leaders and private citizens may organize such events, but please keep the apparatus of government out of it.

Nothing ever came of that request. The original post is still up (!) on the police department’s Facebook page and they ultimately participated in the prayer vigil.

Shortly afterwards, when local residents (including Art Rojas) complained about this vigil to Ocala’s Mayor Kent Guinn, he responded by saying the actions were justified because "We open every council meeting with a prayer. And we end the prayer in Jesus name we pray. [O]ur city seal says 'God be with us' and we pray that he is and us with him."

Way to miss the point.

A federal judge relied on the Lemon Test to rule against the police chief

After all those warnings were rebuffed, the AHA filed a lawsuit against the police department in November of 2014, claiming this was a constitutional violation. They noted the department's support for the "revivalist" event, where officers "prayed, sang religious songs and delivered Christian sermons." They cited the Facebook post announcing the event, which was written on official department letterhead and signed by both the police chief and a local Baptist leader.

The case took a number of twists and turns regarding who had legal standing to file the lawsuit, but in 2016, U.S. District Judge Timothy J. Corrigan issued a ruling confirming the AHA’s strongest arguments.

“In sum, under the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, the government cannot initiate, organize, sponsor, or conduct a community prayer vigil,” explained Judge Corrigan. “That is what happened here.”

…

“Police departments shouldn’t be endorsing religion, yet that’s exactly what the Ocala Police Department did here by sponsoring and promoting a prayer vigil,” said David Niose, AHA legal director. “We hope this ruling ensures that prayer rallies in the future will be run by churches, not police departments.”

In justifying his decision, Judge Corrigan explained that Establishment Clause cases relied on the application of the Lemon Test, basically a three-prong approach to assess whether government action goes too far when it comes to religion. The Lemon Test said a statute must have a secular purpose, neither advance or prohibit religion, and avoid "excessive government entanglement" with religion.

When it came to Ocala, the prayer vigil obviously had a religious purpose. The judge said it could "hardly be thought to be anything other than an endorsement of religion." And since the police department invited the community to attend the prayer vigil, there was entanglement. And given the formal involvement of the police chaplains, the judge wrote, "the entanglement was excessive."

Failure on any one of the prongs would have been enough for a judge to declare the event illegal.

It failed all of them.

The end result was that the plaintiffs received a total of $6.00, one dollar from each of the two defendants (since it was never about the money). The taxpayers of Ocala were also on the hook to pay the legal bills for the AHA.

The right-wing legal machine sprang into action to appeal the decision

The right-wing American Center for Law and Justice appealed the decision to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in early 2022. Using phrases like "cancel culture," they argued that the atheists were trying to "shut down protected First Amendment gatherings." Specifically, a response brief filed in 2021 said that participating in the prayer vigil was legal because there was no evidence of coercion, there was no evidence of a lack of neutrality, the plaintiffs lacked standing, and the Establishment Clause was on their side... all of which were fairly laughable arguments, largely because they implied a government endorsement of Christianity was only illegal if people were forced to participate.

(By that same logic, every police department in the country could hang a giant cross on their front door and put a Ten Commandments display in the lobby, but none of that would count as promotion of Christianity unless someone explicitly said so or required new employees to adopt the religion.)

If we were talking about any other religion besides Christianity, these actions would've been stopped years ago, but conservative Christians believe neutrality is persecution, and they just can't handle anyone complaining when their faith is treated like the default option for everyone in the community.

Unfortunately, though, their appeal was successful. A three-judge panel unanimously overturned the earlier decision. (All three judges were appointed by Republican presidents.)

Goodbye to the Lemon Test

But on what grounds did they overturn it? When it came to the question of whether the City of Ocala violated the Establishment Clause, like the district judge had said, the Appeals Court responded with a hilariously vague “Maybe."

The bottom line, the appellate court said, was that Judge Corrigan used the Lemon Test as his standard for deciding whether the prayer vigil had crossed the line. But the Supreme Court said in the Kennedy v. Bremerton case—the one about the showboating high school football coach who performed prayers at midfield after games—that the Lemon Test was officially dead... which meant it could no longer be the standard.

(In their explanation, they referred to a line written by the late Justice Antonin Scalia about how the Lemon Test is like a "ghoul in a late-night horror movie that repeatedly sits up in its grave and shuffles abroad, after being repeatedly killed and buried.")

After this appeal was filed, however, the Supreme Court drove a stake through the heart of the ghoul and told us that the Lemon test is gone, buried for good, never again to sit up in its grave. Finally and unambiguously, the Court has “abandoned Lemon and its endorsement test offshoot”... In the course of doing so, the Court asserted that it had already done it — “long ago”... — which was news to a third of the Court’s Justices...

Regardless of exactly when the ghastly decision was dispatched for good, the Supreme Court has definitively decided that Lemon is dead — long live historical practices and understandings.

...

We remand this case to the district court to give it an opportunity to apply in the first instance the historical practices and understandings standard endorsed in Kennedy.

Simply put, the earlier decision relied on the Lemon Test, but because that test could no longer be used, the district court needed to re-evaluate the legality of the prayer vigil using tradition as the standard. ("Tradition," of course, tends to favor Christianity at the expense of everyone else, which is why conservatives love it.)

Keep in mind that it was beyond obvious that the prayer vigil failed every single prong of the Lemon Test. But because the ultra-conservative Supreme Court decided that the Lemon Test itself is dead, they have made it that much harder for people to prove when government actions violate the Establishment Clause.

But before the case could be sent back down, the American Center for Law and Justice asked the Supreme Court to step in.

The ACLJ argued that the clients represented by the Humanists didn’t have standing to bring the case at all, therefore this whole case should be tossed out. They argued that one of the plaintiffs (Lucinda Hale) attended the prayer vigil specifically so she could be a party to this lawsuit—i.e. she wasn’t actually offended; she just showed up to the vigil so she could pretend to be offended—therefore she shouldn’t be able to file this lawsuit, therefore it should be thrown out of the courts.

Is psychic or emotional offense allegedly caused by observation of religious messages an injury sufficient to confer standing under Article III of the Constitution, including where the offended party deliberately seeks out the exposure in question?

The ACLJ said the Supreme Court had never granted standing to an “offended observer.” Lower courts had, but only in Establishment Clause cases. Therefore, the justices needed to step in and sort this out “once and for all.”

This Court should grant review to repudiate once and for all the idea that Establishment Clause plaintiffs can write their own ticket to federal court simply by observing an alleged constitutional violation.

That complaint raised another question: If being “offended” wasn’t enough to giving someone legal standing in this situation, what would count? Who had the right to sue when a government official used his office to endorse Christianity? (The ACLJ didn’t answer that question because they knew damn well their side could get away with a lot more shit if no one had the legal right to call them out on it unless they were forced to attend a religious event against their will.)

The Supreme Court weighed in on who has legal standing

In March of 2023, the Supreme Court declined to take up that challenge.

We don’t know how many justices agreed with that decision, but four justices need to agree to take up any case, and they didn’t have those votes. That meant the case would finally be sent back to Judge Corrigan. He could still say the vigil was illegal, but to do so, he needed to explain why the police department was promoting Christianity in a way that went far beyond a historical practice.

Two justices, however, weighed in on the decision not to take up the case.

Neil Gorsuch agreed with the outcome but wrote that giving standing to an “offended observer” was a bad idea; it just wasn’t the Supreme Court’s job to weigh in yet.

… The city asks us to take this case to make just this point. It is an understandable request. But I see no need for the Court’s intervention at this juncture. This case remains in an interlocutory posture—the Eleventh Circuit has remanded the case to the District Court to permit it to consider Kennedy’s implications in the first instance. I would allow that process to unfold. Moving forward, I expect lower courts will recognize that offended observer standing has no more foundation in the law than the Lemon test that inspired it. If I am wrong, the city is free to seek relief here after final judgment.

Clarence Thomas, on the other hand, wanted to pull the bandage off immediately:

… we have muddied the waters by repeatedly reaching the merits of Establishment Clause cases premised upon offended observer standing in the courts below…

… I continue to urge the Court to review the legitimacy of this form of standing. If the Courts of Appeals are unwilling to reconsider their offended observer precedents en banc, we should intervene…

The good news was the Supreme Court didn’t weigh in on this matter. The bad news is that they very well might in the future. First, though, because the plaintiffs had legal standing, the lower court had to decide if there was a non-Lemon Test reason to declare the prayer vigil a violation of the Establishment Clause.

The federal judge said Ocala officials still broke the law

That decision was finally announced in June of 2024. Judge Corrigan said that even with the death of the Lemon Test, the Christian vigil still violated the law.

Consider the “tradition” test that the Kennedy ruling supported. Wasn’t the vigil just like invocations at local government meetings like Ocala’s lawyers said? Not a chance, said Corrigan:

Unlike legislative prayer, the Prayer Vigil was directed at the public and asked for public participation… Moreover, the Prayer Vigil was the event, and dissimilar to legislative prayers because it did not involve prayers that were tangential to or meant to solemnize other public business.

…

Unlike Kennedy, this case does not involve alleged violations of free speech or free exercise rights of a private citizen. Rather, plaintiffs contend that the City’s conception and support of the Prayer Vigil amounted to government sponsorship and violated the Establishment Clause.

…

Based on the undisputed facts, the City’s involvement in conceiving, organizing, and implementing the Prayer Vigil is government sponsorship of a religious event.

…

As Kennedy commands, the Court bases its decision on a “historically sensitive understanding of the Establishment Clause”…, and comes to this conclusion: where government action amounts to sponsorship of or favoritism towards a religious belief system, it violates the Establishment Clause. That is what happened here.

There you have it. No matter how you looked at this prayer vigil, it was a constitutional violation. There was no church/state separation test that Ocala officials could pass because it was clearly an endorsement of religion.

The president of the American Humanist Association, Sunil Panikkath, celebrated the decision:

We are very pleased with the outcome of the case, and proud of the important role that the American Humanist Association has been able to play in upholding the Establishment Clause of our great Constitution. As the judge notes, “because the city conceived, organized, promoted, and conducted the prayer vigil, it violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.”

We applaud the bravery, earnestness and dedication of the plaintiffs who have been on this journey with us for nearly 10 years. At a time when the separation of religion and government is under threat from those who care neither for ethics nor for democracy, this is a critically important decision that reminds the nation that our Constitution is still a bulwark that protects Americans against those who would prefer to have a theocratic regime in our republic.

With this ruling, the two sides were pretty much back to where they started. The city broke the law and a judge ordered officials to take the loss, pay out attorneys’ fees, and give the plaintiffs the whopping $1 each they were owed.

The question was whether the city would appeal the decision once again. They had shown repeatedly that they couldn’t accept losing this case and there was no reason to stop now. If this was the case they wanted to use to dismantle church/state separation, though, it was a horrible set of facts on their side. The unconstitutionality of it all was just so damn egregious.

But the death of the Lemon Test also created a blueprint for Christian Nationalists to thrive. If a police department wanted to promote Christian prayer vigils in the future, all they had to do was make them a regular occurrence. If they took place frequently enough, right-wing judges could simply say they were part of a "tradition," ignoring any complaints from the church/state separation crowd.

If the city appealed, there was a chance they would once again lose the case. They already owed the other side’s attorneys’ fees. Trying to get this back up to the Supreme Court was a massive gamble—one that could cost over a million dollars, according to the city’s attorney.

At the same time, this was one of those cases that the Supreme Court is eager to take up precisely because it would enshrine religion into the law. Even though the church/state separation crowd had the facts and court decisions on their side, now is not a good time to bring any “culture war” cases to SCOTUS.

Ocala has now decided to settle the case

Thankfully, the city’s leaders have now decided to take the loss and stop appealing this case. The city voted unanimously on Tuesday to accept a settlement agreement.

During the meeting, city council member Jay Musleh explained why he was willing to take this offer despite former mayor Kent Guinn urging them to keep fighting.

This is a very losable lawsuit on our behalf… It is not a slam-dunk win. We’ve got the chance to settle. We’re admitting nothing. We’re paying nothing. We’re accepting no liability. It’s the smartest decision [I’ve] made up here in 13 years.

The settlement agreement itself is pretty straightforward. Both sides agree to let the district court’s ruling (against Ocala) be the final word on the matter, but they will also go their separate ways without requiring payments from the other side. It doesn’t necessarily prevent city agencies from shoving Christianity into future events, but this case that has dragged on for over a decade will finally end.

The city said in a public statement that it “extends its sincere gratitude to the American Center for Law and Justice, and to attorneys Abigail Southerland and Geoffrey Surtees, for their dedicated advocacy and support throughout the case.”

Jocelyn Williamson, President of the Central Florida Freethought Community, offered a much more pointed statement to me:

The City of Ocala's decision underscores the legal risk of city-organized prayer events. We’re encouraged by this outcome and hope it discourages other city and county officials from organizing religious events. Prayer vigils can be powerful expressions of community engagement, but they must arise from the hearts of citizens and not from elected officials.

The American Humanist Association, which was involved in this lawsuit, welcomed the city’s decision. Executive Director Fish Stark said this in a statement to me:

We are encouraged that the City of Ocala has chosen to accept the lower court’s decision. For us, this case was always about principle—it is never appropriate for the state to use taxpayer dollars to promote one set of religious beliefs over another. As humanists, we remain committed to the important work of defending and advocating for the separation of church and state, and we are vindicated by this outcome.

(Large portions of this article were published earlier)

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