Majority opinion The Supreme Court upheld the District Court's decision and found the Pennsylvania prayer statute unconstitutional. Writing for the Court's majority, Justice Tom C. Clark stated, "This Court has decisively settled that the First Amendment's mandate [in the
Establishment Clause] has been made wholly applicable to the States by the Fourteenth Amendment ... in a series of cases since
Cantwell. The Court explicitly upheld
Engel v. Vitale, in which the Court ruled that a school's sanctioning of a prayer violated the
Establishment Clause of the
First Amendment to the United States Constitution, which states, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion." The
Abington court held that in organizing Bible reading, the school was conducting "a religious exercise," and "that cannot be done without violating the 'neutrality' required of the State by the balance of power between individual, church, and state that has been struck by the First Amendment" (). What was unexpected, however, were the ideas expressed in the second portion of Justice Clark's opinion written for the majority. The Court's recognition of religious ideals as valuable to the culture of the United States in that opinion are generally not cited much by either side of the church-state debate when discussing the case and the effect it had on the United States. His opening thoughts explicitly spelled out that view in past
jurisprudence with cases similar to
Abington v. Schempp. Clark continued that the Court was of the feeling that regardless of the religious nature of the citizenry, the government at all levels, as required by the Constitution, must remain neutral in matters of religion "while protecting all, prefer[ring] none, and disparag[ing] none." The Court had rejected "the contention by many that the Establishment Clause forbade only governmental preference of one faith over another." Citing
Torcaso v. Watkins, Justice Clark added, "We repeat and again reaffirm that neither a State nor the Federal Government can constitutionally force a person 'to profess a belief or disbelief in any religion.' Neither can it constitutionally pass laws or impose requirements which aid all religions as against non-believers, and neither can it aid those religions based on a belief in the existence of God as against those religions founded on different beliefs." Such prohibited behavior was self-evident in the Pennsylvania law requiring Bible reading (and allowing recitation of the Lord's Prayer) in its public schools. The Court recognized the value of such ideal neutrality from lessons of history when government and religion were either fully fused or cooperative with one another and religious liberty was nonexistent or seriously curtailed.
Brennan's concurrence Justice Brennan filed a concurrence more than seventy pages long which reviewed the history of the First Amendment and the relevant judicial and legislative history. Brennan argued that an
originalist approach would be "misdirected", giving several reasons including the ambiguity of the historical record and the increasing religious diversity of American society, which raised well-founded concerns about the traditional role of prayer and Bible reading in public schools. Brennan emphasized that the First Amendment does not require "official hostility towards religion, but only neutrality". Brennan later defended the "wall of separation" view of the Establishment Clause in other cases including a dissent in
Marsh v. Chambers where he quoted his
Schempp concurrence: "to be truly faithful to the Framers 'our use of the history of their time must limit itself to broad purposes, not specific practices'".
Stewart's dissent Justice
Potter Stewart filed the only dissent in the case. He was critical of both the
lower court opinions and the decision the Supreme Court had reached regarding them. He wished to remand the case to lower courts for further proceedings. Stewart had dissented in
Engel v. Vitale and viewed the doctrine relied on in that case as implausible, given the long history of government religious practice in the United States, including the fact that the Supreme Court opens its sessions with the declaration, "God Save this Honorable Court" and that Congress opens its sessions with prayers, among many other examples. Stewart believed that such practice fit with the nation's long history of permitting free exercise of religious practices, even in the public sphere. He declared the cases consolidated with
Schempp as "so fundamentally deficient as to make impossible an informed or responsible determination of the constitutional issues presented," specifically of whether the Establishment Clause was violated. As to the intent and scope of the religion clauses of the First Amendment, he stated: He stated his agreement with the doctrine of the Fourteenth Amendment's embrace and application of the Bill of Rights, but pointed out the irony of such an amendment "designed to leave the States free to go their own way should now have become a restriction upon their autonomy". Other critics of the Court's holding in
Abington v. Schempp often quote the following excerpt from Justice Stewart's opinion: == Subsequent developments ==