Supreme Court declines case involving loudspeaker prayers at high school football games

A decade-long attempt to force Christian prayers over state-run loudspeakers finally collapsed, much to the frustration of Christian Nationalists

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Yesterday, the Supreme Court rejected a case that could have struck another blow against church/state separation. It involved prayer at high school football events sanctioned by the state of Florida, and it took a decade to finally get to this ending.

A football player prays instead of workout out or practicing (image via Shutterstock)

Here’s what this is all about: Back in December of 2015, two private Christian schools, Cambridge Christian School (CCS) and University Christian School, made it all the way to the championship game in the state’s class 2A football playoffs. Before the game, one of the CCS administrators wanted to say prayers over the public address system. But the Florida High School Athletic Association (FHSAA), which oversees all games, correctly said no. This was a state-run event. It was televised. It was at a public facility. It would be illegal for Christians to hijack the loudspeaker system for religious purposes.

Obviously no one was stopping the Christian players and coaches from praying on their own, but as we all know by now, conservative Christians don’t believe prayer counts unless they can push it upon everyone else. (In fact, before the championship game, the players, coaches, administrators, and “at least one referee” gathered at midfield to pray together. They did the same thing afterwards, too. But because those prayers weren’t broadcast to the public, no one, including the FHSAA, had a problem with it.)

The Christians eventually filed a lawsuit over the lack of access to the loudspeaker. If you want all the details of the case history, keep reading. If you don’t, skip ahead to the next section. But in short, every judge who looked at this case said the Christians were full of shit as far as their legal arguments went.

The legal background of this case.

A judge tossed this case out in 2017—because, again, what the Christian schools wanted was illegal. In 2019, an appeals court reversed part of that ruling, saying there was merit to the case and it needed to be judged on those merits rather than be tossed out altogether. In March of 2022, the same district judge again ruled against the Christian school because what they wanted was still illegal.

It eventually went up to the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, which thankfully affirmed the earlier ruling, at least as it pertained to the First Amendment claims. The judges said prayers over the loudspeaker counted as “government speech” and that the FHSAA rejecting the prayer request wasn’t a violation of the Christians’ First Amendment rights. (Another appeal to the full Eleventh Circuit went nowhere.)

I have to reiterate that all of this made sense. The Supreme Court ruled in 2000, in Santa Fe Independent School District v. Doe, that prayers delivered “on school property, at school-sponsored events, over the school's public address system” violated the Establishment Clause. The judges had no choice but to apply that decision here.

It didn’t help that Cambridge Christian School had two big problems worth detailing here.

One was standing. Even if the judges ruled in their favor, it’s not like Cambridge Christian was going to be in the championship game anytime soon because, frankly, they sucked at football. The Eleventh Circuit judges said as much:

… the school does need to demonstrate that future injury is “certainly impending,” or at the very least, that there is a “substantial risk” that the harm will occur... And given the Lancers’ past performance on the gridiron, it cannot meet that standard. All the more so because as Cambridge Christian admits, the “competitiveness” of its football team “has waned” over the last few seasons, and the team is now in what it calls a “rebuilding phase” that it expects to last for a “few years.” Hope springs eternal but standing cannot be built on hope. With all due respect to the Cambridge Christian Fighting Lancers, there’s nothing to suggest that the team’s participation in a future football state championship is imminent or even likely.

Ouch. You know your football team is bad when even judges are mocking your record.

The other issue the judges had was mootness. This lawsuit no longer mattered, in a way, because Florida had, in 2023, passed a law to make sure this situation never happened again.

They were creating a carveout for Cambridge Christian School, but the law was broad enough that it could theoretically apply to other schools too.

House Bill 225 said that any high school athletic association that included public schools—like, say, the Florida High School Athletic Association which “regulate[s] all interscholastic activities” across the state—had to allow participating schools in a state series (i.e. playoff games) to “make brief opening remarks, if requested by the school, using the public address system at the event.” Those remarks couldn’t be longer than two minutes at a time. And the governor’s office explicitly said those remarks could include “public prayer.”

In practice, that meant schools could request the use of the public address system before a playoff game, where representatives from both teams could spend two minutes each telling the crowd to accept Jesus, implying that not doing so would lead to damnation.

The law took a hands-off approach to what was said over the PA system, the only caveat being that the comments couldn’t be “derogatory, rude, or threatening.” That meant schools could decide for themselves who spoke and therefore what got said. That gave an upper hand to any schools with a Christian majority who wanted to use their platform to proselytize. (You know non-Christians wouldn’t get equal opportunities here. Schools can always find a “neutral” way to promote the faith of their choice, like instituting a team vote or having coaches select the speakers.)

Nothing in that bill prohibited a team from publicly praying for God to give them an edge over the other side. Nothing prohibited a speaker from condemning LGBTQ people under the guise of avoiding “sin.” Nothing prohibited a school from urging the crowd to give themselves over to Christ. While it would technically be legal for a Muslim student to lead the crowd in a prayer to Allah, that would almost certainly never happen.

This bill was nothing more than a Trojan horse to allow public demonstrations of prayer at athletic competitions… even though student athletes and coaches were already permitted to pray on their own. (The law requires an announcement saying all remarks are “not endorsed by and does not reflect the views and or opinions of” the athletic association, but a disclaimer doesn’t undo the damage.)

This whole situation was never about prayer because prayer wasn’t illegal. This was about making a show of Christian dominance using public school athletes and public stadiums and public equipment as the vessels. There’s a reason Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the bill into law during a ceremony at—where else?—Cambridge Christian School.

The judges at the Eleventh Circuit said that, with that law now in place, it’s not like Cambridge Christian needed the court to step in.

The judges did, however, weigh in on the merits of the case anyway. They said that the history of the FHSAA’s loudspeaker policies confirmed that it was government speech. (It was almost entirely scripted and delivered by an announcer selected by an outside group, not a representative from competing schools.) There was only one example the judges could find of a Christian school principal being allowed to pray over the loudspeaker. It took place during a championship game in 2012, but they noted that “One instance does not a history make.”

They also said that the public would reasonably assume comments over the loudspeaker were government speech and that the state endorsed the message.

Finally, they said that the government had control of the messages being delivered over the loudspeaker, therefore not giving Christian representatives access to the loudspeaker wasn’t a rejection of their free speech rights.

This case should have been over at that point.

The case is now in front of the Supreme Court

But conservative Christian legal groups were never going to be satisfied with that. So Cambridge Christian and its right-wing lawyers asked the Supreme Court to step in and reverse that decision… even though the Appeals Court unanimously said they had no business bringing this case forward because they lacked standing, the case was moot, and they would have lost on the merits anyway.

Their argument was that the Santa Fe ruling all this was based on relied on the Lemon Test, a standard to decide if certain policies violated church/state separation. The Supreme Court has since said that test is effectively dead. The Court also said the “endorsement” test is dead—that just because a religious message is delivered via a government system, that doesn’t necessarily make it illegal. (When showboating, attention-seeking Christian public school football coach Joe Kennedy wanted to pray at midfield after games, SCOTUS said that didn’t count as government endorsement of religion.)

But even without the Lemon Test or the endorsement test, church/state separation is still very much alive. That’s what the Christians were trying to destroy.

Legal scholar Charles J. Russo summarized the issue at The Conversation:

If the Supreme Court agrees to hear Cambridge Christian’s appeal, the justices will face two issues. The first is whether communal prayer over a loudspeaker before a state athletic association game is indeed government speech – especially because officials permitted a wide array of nonreligious private speech over the loudspeaker. The second issue is whether the endorsement factor of the government-speech doctrine revives the endorsement test.

…

If the court does agree to review Cambridge Christian, it may well expand the parameters of religious expression in public — not just at football games.

In other words, the Supreme Court had the opportunity to amplify government endorsement of Christianity.

Writing for Rolling Stone, Constitutional attorney and First Amendment expert Andrew Seidel also pointed out that alleged attempted rapist Brett Kavanaugh had a conflict of interest and needed to recuse himself from the case.

Why? I mentioned earlier that the Supreme Court ruled in 2000, in Santa Fe Independent School District v. Doe, that prayers delivered “on school property, at school-sponsored events, over the school’s public address system” violated the Establishment Clause.

Kavanaugh was, at the time, a lawyer for the firm Kirkland & Ellis who argued on the other side.

[Kavanaugh’s] argument in the amicus brief culminated by invoking Nazis, arguing that if the court’s justices were to rule in favor of the families who didn’t want the government forcing Christian prayers on everyone, then Christians would be relegated “to bottom-of-the-barrel status in our society — below socialists and Nazis and Klan members and panhandlers and ideological and political advocacy groups of all stripes.” In other words, without a right to impose prayer on everyone, Christians are inferior.

…

No fair reading of Kavanaugh’s amicus (or friend of the court) brief in the original case would leave anyone with much doubt as to which way he would rule in the new case seeking to overturn that original case.

…

The group and Cambridge Christian School want to relitigate a case that Kavanaugh lost. The future Supreme Court justice didn’t just make an argument, he argued with vitriol and venom and painted anyone who disagreed with his take as a “hostile” “absolutist” and extremist out to “cleanse public schools” and relegate American Christians to a second class status.

So there were a lot of issues at stake here. Would the Supreme Court justices take up this case despite there being no legal reason for them to do so? Would church/state separation face another deep blow from a Court that’s been incredibly hostile to it? Would Kavanaugh follow in the footsteps of Amy Coney Barrett and step away from a case that he had previously weighed in on?

We finally got those answers yesterday: No, no, and n/a.

The Supreme Court announced yesterday it would not take up this case at all, leaving the earlier ruling in place. They didn’t say anything more, but the denial means the conservatives didn’t have necessary four votes to take it up. (It’s unclear if Kavanaugh had a say at all.)

It’s a relief. Church/state separation remains in danger, of course, but at least this won’t be the vehicle they’re using to further destroy it.

In response to the denial, several atheist and church/state separation groups chimed in to express relief.

The Freedom From Religion Foundation, which filed an amicus brief in this case years ago, called it an “important win.”

“This is an important win for the constitutional rights of students and their families,” says FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor. “The Supreme Court’s refusal to revisit Santa Fe makes clear that public school athletic events are not opportunities for government-sponsored prayer.”

…

“This whole case was an example of Christian privilege run amok,” says FFRF Senior Litigation Counsel Sam Grover, who drafted FFRF’s amicus brief. “If the Florida High School Athletic Association had opened its loudspeaker for private messages, Cambridge Christian could have claimed a right to equal access. But that wasn’t the situation. The loudspeaker was for government use only. The Supreme Court’s refusal to hear the case demonstrates how utterly wrong Cambridge Christian was on the law.”

American Atheists Legal Director Geoffrey T. Blackwell told me via email:

American Atheists is pleased the Supreme Court made the right decision in declining to hear this case. The Florida High School Athletics Association followed decades of precedent—and common sense—when it refused to grant a religious school special access to its facilities to deliver a religious message. The Court made it absolutely clear 25 years ago that student-athletes and fans at state-sanctioned sporting events should be free from proselytizing. The Establishment Clause would mean nothing if our government could sidestep it simply by handing its microphone to a minister.

Fish Stark, Executive Director of the American Humanist Association, added:

Whether at a football game or in a classroom, the government has no place promoting a religious worldview. We’re glad that the Supreme Court has declined to take up this case again and will, for the moment, continue to uphold this bedrock principle of our Constitution.

As critics have been saying for years now, this case was never about religious freedom. It was always about religious privilege. Cambridge Christian School and its legal allies weren’t fighting for the right to pray since they already had that. They were fighting for the power to commandeer the machinery of the state to amplify their faith from government-run loudspeakers. That’s the goal of Christian Nationalism—not equal rights for people of different faiths or no religious faith, but a publicly funded bullhorn for their own views.

That’s why this case posed such a profound threat to religious freedom. Had the Supreme Court taken it up, the justices could have used it to chip away even more at what remains of the wall between church and state. They could have repackaged coercion as “free expression” and further normalized the idea that public institutions exist to serve one faith above all others. For a Court that has already warped the First Amendment to privilege Christian majorities, this case appeared to be a gift just waiting to be unwrapped.

Somehow, the Court blinked. Whether out of caution, calculation, or simple lack of votes, the justices didn’t feel a need to take this one up. Thank goodness. At a time when Christian Nationalists already have too much power, even a small refusal to indulge their crusade matters. It doesn’t mean Court’s hostility to church/state separation can be ignored, but it maintains whatever remains of our secular government. At least for now.

So here’s the good news: Christian Nationalists didn’t get what they wanted. The loudspeakers remain off-limits. Legal precedence is maintained—this time. At a time when so many guardrails are being dismantled, this small victory is worth shouting from the rooftops. Or, hell, a PA system.

(Portions of this article were published earlier)

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