Most Americans Support Teacher-Led Prayer in Public Schools, Pew Survey Finds

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A narrow majority of American adults support policies that allow public school teachers to lead their classes in Christian prayers, according to a new Pew Research Center report released just days after Texas Gov. Greg Abbott authorized Bible readings in schools and required Ten Commandments displays in classrooms.

The two new Texas laws are part of a broader push this year as Republican lawmakers in more than a dozen states pursue bills that bolster the presence of religion in public schools — legislation critics contend violates the Constitution. The Establishment Clause of the First Amendment states “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion,” or favor one over another. Proponents of the policies in Texas and other conservative states have framed the laws as a matter of religious freedom and believe the Supreme Court is on their side. 

On the same day Abbott took those steps to legislate religion in public schools, a federal appeals court in New Orleans found a similar law requiring Ten Commandments displays in Louisiana classrooms was unconstitutional.

In Texas, and throughout the South in particular, the new laws have garnered overwhelming support from the public, the Pew report released Monday shows. While 52% of adults nationally said they favor allowing teachers to lead prayers that refer to Jesus, 81% felt that way in Mississippi and 61% did in Texas. In the Lone Star State, 38% of adults opposed having teachers lead Christian prayer. 

The latest results are “a lot higher than what we’re used to seeing” among Americans who “want to see the end of church-state separation or public displays [of the Ten Commandments],” Chip Rotolo, a research associate at Pew focused on religion, told The 74. 

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Views on Christian prayers in public school, by state

% who say they oppose/favor allowing public school teachers to lead their classes in prayers that refer to Jesus

Note: The blue and orange bars show the confidence intervals around each estimate at a 95% confidence level. In the 16 states with unbolded names, the shares saying they favor and saying they oppose Christian prayers in public schools are not significantly different.
Source: Religious Landscape Study of U.S. adults conducted July 17, 2023-March 4, 2024

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Jonathan Covey, the policy director at the nonprofit lobbying group Texas Values, told The 74 he wasn’t surprised by the survey results as people turn to religion as an “opportunity for moral clarity” and to find “comfort and encouragement in difficult times.” 

“The country wanting to see the involvement of religion in civic society, that has been a good thing, and we’ve seen that the Supreme Court has said that the Establishment Clause doesn’t demand a strict government neutrality towards religion,” Covey said. “Actually to the contrary, it’s always been understood that religion has a place in American civic society.”

Texas Values lobbied the state legislature to get the new laws across the finish line. One requires a 16-by-20-inch poster of the Ten Commandments be displayed in every public school classroom statewide. The second allows public schools to provide students and educators time during the school day to pray or read the Bible or other religious texts.  

Jonathan Saenz, the group’s president, called the new Ten Commandments requirement “a Texas-sized blessing,” noting in a statement that it “stands shoulder to shoulder with partner organizations” and is prepared to fight “against any court challenges brought against it.”  

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, then the state attorney general, attends a press conference celebrating a 2005 Supreme Court decision allowing a Ten Commandments monument to stand outside the Texas State Capitol in Austin. (Photo by Jana Birchum/Getty Images)

Americans United for Separation of Church and State, a nonprofit that opposes government policies intertwined with religion, announced plans to sue over the Texas law requiring the Ten Commandments be displayed in classrooms. The group has already filed suit against a similar Arkansas requirement signed into law in April. In that lawsuit, seven Arkansas families with children in public schools — and who identify as Jewish, Unitarian Universalist, Humanist, agnostic, atheist and nonreligious — allege the law imposes one religious perspective on all students. 

Meanwhile, a three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, considered among the nation’s most conservative, issued a 52-page unanimous ruling blocking Louisiana’s Ten Commandments law. The judges found the requirement to install a Protestant version of the commandments violated the Establishment Clause. 

Constitutional attorney Andrew Seidel, who serves as vice president of strategic communications at Americans United for Separation of Church and State, said the Fifth Circuit’s ruling made clear that “the separation of church and state is the best protection for religious freedom that we have.”

“These Ten Commandments displays are meant to tell the viewer — the captive kindergartener or third grader or seventh grader — which God is approved by the government, which God to pray to, which religion is correct,” Seidel told The 74. “That is inappropriate for a public school classroom, as inappropriate as it is clear that that tells the Buddhist students that they’re wrong, the Muslim kid that their religion is false, the Hindu child that their gods are fallacious, and the non-religious and atheist and agnostic kids are told by the state they’re misguided.” 

Religion is partisan

Results from the Pew study reflect a political split on support for the separation of church and state. Opposition to teacher-led prayer at school was strongest in Democratic strongholds like Massachusetts and California and highest in Washington, D.C., at 69%. Across 22 states, majorities of adults supported school prayers led by teachers. Opponents were in the majority in 12 states and the District of Columbia, and in 16 states, the share of respondents who supported school prayer was not statistically different from those in opposition. The nationally representative survey of nearly 37,000 U.S. adults, taken between July 2023 and March 2024, has a margin of error of plus or minus 0.8 percentage points. 

Rotolo, the Pew research associate, said he found the regional patterns particularly interesting. While support was strongest in the South, “you see right down the whole West Coast, most people oppose seeing Christian prayer in school.”

Pew conducted a similar survey in 2021, when 46% of adults said teachers should not be allowed to lead students in any kinds of prayers, a practice that saw support at the time from just 30% of respondents. However, 23% said they had no opinion on the issue. The latest survey didn’t give respondents an opportunity to choose “neither.” 

“Just by posing the question differently, we actually see some different results,” Rotolo said, acknowledging that the change could also reflect a shift in public opinion over the last four years. It’s also possible that some respondents who said they support school prayer in the recent survey “may not have particularly strong opinions about this” and may have chosen “neither” if given the option. 

Rotolo said the favorability of teacher-led prayer in public schools was dominant among Republicans, at 70%.  Just 34% of Democrats were in support. Older Americans were also significantly more likely to allow educator-led prayers in schools than recent high school students. 

Support also varied drastically between racial groups. Among Black respondents, 67% supported teacher-led prayer compared to 50% of white adults. Just 36% of Asian Americans were in favor. 

Seidel, of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, said he wasn’t particularly surprised to see the Pew survey results, in part because it reflects a “coordinated assault on the separation of church and state right now” amid attempts by lawmakers across the country “to promote Christian nationalism.” 

“Those folks in the minority, whether it be religion or nonreligious, are the biggest supporters of separation of church and state because they know what it is to have a government impose their religion on them,” Seidel said.

Meanwhile in 2023, Texas became the first state in the nation to allow school districts to hire religiously affiliated chaplains to provide counseling services to students. As of April, just one school district has hired a full-time religious chaplain while more than two dozen others have opted out of the measure. In 2021, Texas lawmakers required schools to display any “In God We Trust” signs donated to them by private organizations, and in 2024, the State Board of Education approved a curriculum that relies heavily on biblical teachings. 

The efforts to bolster religion in schools, including in Texas and Louisiana, could again appear before the Supreme Court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority. In 1980, the high court struck down a Kentucky law requiring the Ten Commandments be displayed in classrooms, finding the displays served no secular purpose and ran afoul of the First Amendment. 

This time, Republican lawmakers are banking on a more favorable court makeup. In 2022, the Supreme Court found the First Amendment protected a Washington high school football coach’s right to lead prayers on the field after games. Last month, an evenly divided Supreme Court blocked the opening of a religious charter school in Oklahoma, which would have been the nation’s first. If Justice Amy Coney Barrett had not recused herself in that case, some believe there would have been a majority permitting the school.

Covey, of the nonprofit Texas Values, said recent Supreme Court opinions have begun to abandon the 1980 opinion against the Ten Commandments displays in Kentucky schools. The court’s opinion upholding the Washington football coach’s right to pray on the field, he said, was “the nail in the coffin.” 

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