Bye Bye Prayers. Hello Americans, I’m Todd Starnes. Stand by for news and commentary next. Click here to join my private group for Christians and America First Conservatives.
Since 2019 the commencement exercises at Pearl High School in Mississippi have included the Pledge of Allegiance and a prayer.
The prayer was delivered by a student who typically started the invocation with a greeting to God and concluded with a hearty “Amen.”
But in 2025, there will not be a prayer.
The Mississippi school district announced they are banning what they called the “school-sponsored prayer.”
“The Board of Trustees of the Pearl Public School District has been advised of the concerns expressed in your letter dated September 11, 2024,” attorney Arthur F. Jernigan Jr. wrote in a letter to the atheists. “The district agrees that the alleged school-sponsored prayer at graduation will be eliminated.”
Their decision came after the Freedom From Religion Foundation filed a complaint. They allege that students have a constitutional right to be free from religious indoctrination in their taxpayer-funded schools.
“School districts exist to educate, not indoctrinate into religion,” chief atheist Annie Laurie Gaylor says. “Young, impressionable students — who are a captive audience — should never be expected or prodded to engage in religious rituals in our secular public schools.”
But students also have a right to embrace religion in their taxpayer-funded schools. That’s been made clear by the U.S. Constitution as well as the Supreme Court.
The out-of-town atheists say schools are not allowed to invite a student, teacher, or preacher to pray at school-sponsored events.
They point out that 49 percent of Generation Z not religious at all. And that’s because we let a bunch of godless heathen atheists ban the Almighty from the classroom.
