Supreme Court Accused Of Starting A 'Theocracy' Following Public School Prayer Ruling In Another Controversial And Memeable Decision

June 27th, 2022 - 1:44 PM EDT by Aidan Walker

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A prayer led by Coach Kennedy, a tweet commenting on the controversy.

A Supreme Court decision in the case Kennedy v. Bremerton School Distrct announced earlier today has catapulted religion and religious memes to the top of Twitter.


The case is a dispute between a public high school football coach who led prayers after games and the school district that employed him. The district told the coach, Joseph Kennedy, to stop because it believed his prayers violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, which forbids the government and its employees from promoting or establishing any one religion. Kennedy refused to stop the prayers, leading to a local controversy and his eventual firing.

Kennedy sued the school district for violating his free speech rights. A lower court sided with the school district, finding that Kennedy’s prayers actually did violate the Establishment Clause, but the Supreme Court, in a 6-3 ruling, thought otherwise.


The six conservatives on the court, led by Justice Neil Gorsuch, held that religious expressions like Mr. Kennedy’s in public schools should be allowed. This follows a ruling last week that allowed private religious schools to receive public funding.

Many on Twitter wondered whether the ruling would be different if Kennedy were a Muslim or a Jew rather than a Christian.


Many are throwing around the phrase “Christofascist” to describe the reasoning and agenda of the conservative majority. The Court has continually sided with the organized Christian right on issues like abortion and Establishment Clause cases.


Justice Amy Coney Barrett has controversially been involved with a secretive Christian organization that some observers term a “cult.” The phrase “theocracy” trended on Twitter today, along with several other hashtags relating to the controversy, as people discussed their thoughts about the future of America.


Some compared Kennedy’s football field prayers to Colin Kaepernick’s kneeling controversy to raise awareness about police violence against Black people.


The dissent opinion by Justice Sonia Sotomayor received a lot of attention as well, particularly for lines that criticized the majority and for including photographs that show Justice Gorsuch, who wrote the opinion for the majority, mischaracterized Kennedy’s prayers as “private.”


An issue many brought up is the religious composition of the current Court: seven Catholics and two Jews. At the moment, the entire conservative majority are Catholics, which is not representative of the religious composition of America at large.

A popular tweet format about the imagined response of the Founding Fathers to current events has emerged in the wake of the Court's Roe v. Wade ruling, and the most-liked tweet using the phrase referred to Catholicism on the court. The tweet format riffs on the "originalist" approach of legal interpretation favored by the conservative majority, which claims the Constitution should be read and applied exactly as the Founding Fathers wrote it.

Originalism, frequently criticized by historians, rests on the idea that the original intent of the Founders is both knowable (arguably, it is not) and makes sense in the present day.




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