Alabama House passes bill forcing public schools to begin day with student-led prayer
No wonder the state is currently ranked 45th in the nation when it comes to education
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In one of the most senseless pieces of Christian Nationalist legislation making headway this year, Alabama House Republicans have passed a bill that would force school districts to say the Pledge of Allegiance and allow for voluntary student-led prayer time every day.
It’s the result of a non-stop push for this kind of legislation from State Rep. Reed Ingram.
Before we get into what Ingram is doing, it’s important to remember what he tried to do last year, when he introduced House Bill 231 in February of 2025. That bill would (if successful) have altered the State Constitution to do the following:
Force every public school board to adopt a policy requiring K-12 schools to say the Pledge of Allegiance as well as a “prayer representative of the Judeo-Christian values upon which the United States was founded” every morning. (Students would not be forced to participate.)
Allow the State Superintendent of Education to investigate supposed violations of this law.
Give that official the power to withhold 25% of the district’s funding the following year if there’s a “continued pattern of intentional refusal to comply.”
Permit that same official to withhold even more funding if the violations continue.
The idea that the government would pressure kids to say two separate Christian prayers each day—because the Pledge is just a Christian prayer by a different name—was bad enough. To essentially tell school districts the state would deprive them of necessary resources if they didn’t play along with the religious charade was nothing more than educational blackmail.
Al.com noted that the Birmingham City Schools stood to lose up to $40 million a year if they were found to violate this law.
While Republicans were quick to say during a committee hearing that both the Pledge and prayer were voluntary, they failed to mention how students would be coerced into participating. After all, what were they supposed to do if they didn’t want to play along? Stand outside the classroom? Draw more negative attention to themselves? Get ostracized by their classmates?
And what “Judeo-Christian” prayers would qualify? Who was writing them? Who was delivering them? Who got to decide what “values” were represented here, considering that the “Judeo-Christian values” that existed at the country’s founding presumably endorsed slavery and denied women equal participation in the government?
Ingram never bothered to answer those questions. When he introduced the bill in a committee hearing last year, it took him all of 11 seconds. And when he was asked why the bill was needed, his responses were predictably pathetic:
“Our recruiting is down for the National Guard,” Ingram said. “It’s down in every branch of the military. A lot of these kids don’t understand what the flag is.”
(It never occurs to these morons that more people might want to go into the military if they felt our country was worth defending.)
Ingram later added: “I think it would help on crime.” (No citation was provided.)
The good news is that bill never went anywhere. It died before the State House could vote on it.
That’s why, this year, Ingram tried something a little more devious.
He introduced two separate versions of the bill in different committees.
HB 43 was sent to the House Committee on Education Policy.
HB 511 was sent to the House Committee on State Government.
It was like buying two lottery tickets hoping that one of them would yield a winner. According to the Alabama Reflector, Ingram “said he filed HB 511 after HB 43 stalled in the House Education Policy Committee last week”… even though lawmakers aren’t supposed to spam the pipeline with identical bills in different committees. But he claimed he had support from his bosses.
“We didn’t know if the bill was gonna be dead or not, so leadership advised that it may be safer to go ahead and drop another bill in an abundance of caution,” Ingram said during the House State Government meeting.
The gambit appears to have paid off, though, because the House Committee on State Government supported HB 511, and the bill just passed through the full House.
The silver lining is that some important revisions were made first.
The original version of HB 511, as proposed by Ingram, would alter the State Constitution to do everything he wanted last year… but he backed off a bit. This time around, districts would merely be allowed to adopt a prayer policy that would require schools to offer a “period of prayer and reading of the Bible or other religious text on each school day” outside of instructional time. (All participants would need to submit a signed parental consent form.)
That’s still a problem, though, because if those prayer times are adopted, what the hell should students do if their parents don’t sign a consent form, or they feel pressured to participate? Where do they go? Who chooses the readings?
It was no wonder so many people spoke out against the bill during committee hearings:
Stephanie Butler, a resident of Vestavia Hills who is Jewish, said she worried about peer pressure non-Christian students could face.
“Social pressure is real, students who will walk out are singled out or labeled as outsiders,” Butler said. “My own two children have encountered this pressure as early as elementary school with weekly Bible study being held in the cafeteria during breakfast and with the Gideons’ visit to hand out Bibles in fifth grade.”
Rep. Marilyn Lands, D-Huntsville, also had concerns about children being ostracized.
“I know we would all agree that public schools function best when all students feel equally welcome and accepted and I’m not sure this bill advances that,” she said. “I know that’s the desire of all of us, it I do think this makes students feel left out.”
Ingram said he doesn’t believe the bill will cause harm to students who aren’t Christian.
“It doesn’t say we’ve got to talk about Jesus,” Ingram said. “It’s non-denominational and if it’s a Jewish school then that’s what they’re going to go by.”
We’re talking about public schools here. They shouldn’t be religious at all. And even if this bill didn’t specifically mention Jesus, this is Alabama. You know nearly all of the religious readings would inevitably be Christian.
Eventually, though, after a series of amendments, Republicans settled on a version of the bill that was slightly less awful.
It would still force every public school board to adopt a policy requiring K-12 schools to say the Pledge of Allegiance, though students would not be forced to participate.
It would also force every district to adopt a policy requiring K-12 schools to say a prayer… as long as it was student-initiated and student-led. (Students would still not be forced to participate.)
But even that raises questions because student-initiated Christian prayers have no place in the school day. Remember: Students are already allowed to pray on their own whenever they want. This would be nothing more than a permitted disruption after the first period bell rings.
Another big change: In this version of the bill, while local superintendents of education could investigate supposed violations of this law, there’s no longer any financial penalty for refusing to comply.
What’s the penalty for districts that don’t play along? Who knows. Maybe nothing.
Even with this watered-down version of the bill, there are still other problems, as Democrats pointed out. Specifically, families that don’t want to see their public schools turn into religious indoctrination camps may end up using vouchers to send their kids to a less religious private school (which conservatives would likely support since they typically oppose public education).
“I’m just afraid and fear that any child might be put in a position where he feels uncomfortable or she feels uncomfortable,” Rep. Marilyn Lands, D-Huntsville, said during debate. “And I feel that we’re giving favor to those wealthy families who can afford to take their children elsewhere using the CHOOSE Act.”
It’s a fair point, but it was mostly ignored. This version of the bill just passed the State House 94-3 and now heads to the State Senate.
There were attempts to change it so that the prayer was replaced by a more innocuous moment of silence, but that failed, partly because Ingram demanded students hear the prayers:
“We want the students to hear it,” Ingram said. “A moment of silence is walking in the woods, it’s not a prayer bill and that’s the reason I tabled it.”
Whatever happened to giving kids the option not to participate…?
Ironically, when one lawmaker offered an amendment requiring private schools (that receive public funding via vouchers) to be subject to these measures, Ingram shot it down for a rather interesting reason:
“We have private schools that are from Korean schools and other countries and I don’t think it’s mandated that we’re gonna mandate them to say our pledge,” Ingram said. “Prayer would be great, but most of the time they have different beliefs and we don’t want to force that on somebody from a different country.”
Oh! So if people from other countries have different beliefs, then it’s not okay to shove Christianity down their throats?! A wonderful admission! If only Ingram understood that English-speaking students also have a variety of religious views…
Yet despite all the pushback, Ingram insisted this wasn’t about forcing religion on anyone:
“I’m not trying to cram religion down anyone’s throat or make it to where they’re mandated to do anything,” Ingram said after the bill passed. “A lot of times, kids don’t have the option to pray and they don’t know what prayer means.”
Kids always have the option to pray. They know what prayer means. What the hell is this man talking about.
I said this before, but there’s nothing ethical or legal about any of this. It’s a constitutional crisis waiting to happen and it’s a problem that Republicans want to create because the alternative would be doing something to actually improve public education.
There are many, many steps before this bill becomes a part of the State Constitution. But let’s be clear: Schools are not clamoring for this, and it would only create new problems, not fix existing ones. This is nothing more than a desperate attempt to shove Christianity into classrooms by wasting time and alienating a large population of students.
Alabama is currently ranked 45th in the nation in education. Reed Ingram and his fellow Republicans are determined to make the state even worse.
(Portions of this bill were published earlier)
Once again, NatCs show us who the true child groomers are. And there isn't a single drag queen or LGBTQ among them.
Forcing religion on the most vulnerable. How is that not molestation?