Earlier this week I asked how often since the Supreme Court's decision in Marsh – if ever at all – a federal court has agreed with a local government that they are allowed to open official meetings with distinctly sectarian prayer of one faith. And wouldn't you know it, the same week, a court does just that. In Delaware, Judge Joseph Farman sided with the School Board of Indian River, finding that there's nothing wrong with a policy allowing consistently Christian prayers.
Here are some relevant quotes from the opinion below. I notice that as happy as he was to claim that Marsh in no way bars sectarian prayer in such settings, he hedges too, contending that the invocations in question weren't all that aggressively sectarian anyway.
[T]he Court cannot agree that the brief sectarian references in many of the Board Members' prayers renders Marsh inapplicable. If the Court were to accept Plaintiffs' view, a reference to a particular religious deity in any prayer offered in a legislative or deliberative body would automatically render the practice unconstitutional. This conclusion cannot be squared with the reasoning in Marsh.
Moreover, the Court questions whether the mere reference to a deity or religious figure – whether it be "Jesus Christ," "God," "Allah," "Mohammed," or "Yahweh"- necessarily renders a prayer "sectarian." For example, the Fourth Circuit has approved of a county's practice of inviting clergy from diverse faiths to offer "a wide variety of prayers" at the meetings of its governing body. Although the county had subsequently directed clergy to omit specific references to Jesus Christ, the Fourth Circuit determined that the prayers given at these meetings-which included references to "wide and embracive terms" such as "'Lord God, our creator,' 'giver and sustainer of life,' 'the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob,' 'the God of Abraham, of Moses, Jesus, and Mohammad,' 'Heavenly Father,' 'Lord our Governor,' 'mighty God,' [and] 'Lord of Lords, King of Kings, creator of planet Earth and the universe and our own creator'''-were constitutional under Marsh. Notably, the Fourth Circuit expressed no disagreement with the lower court's finding that the prayers were "not controversial nor confrontational but for, at most, mention of specific Judeo-Christian references that are nevertheless clearly recognized as symbols of the universal values intended to be conveyed. Similarly, the Eleventh Circuit has explained that the distinction between sectarian and nonsectarian prayers is anything but a bright line.
The Court recognizes that other courts have reacheddifferent conclusions . However, these decisions are notbinding, and as explained, the Court does not read Marsh asauthorizing only non-sectarian prayer.
