Of Church and State: A History of Prayer in the U.S. Government

Since early 2025, the Trump administration has faced a series of legal challenges and public controversies over prayer and religious observance in federal agencies. Those opposed to worship in the White House, Pentagon, and Congress invoke the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, which states that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.”

The opposition often uses the phrase “separation of church and state.” However, that phrase appears nowhere in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, or the Federalist Papers. It derives from a private letter Thomas Jefferson wrote to the Danbury Baptist Association in 1802.

The clause’s original meaning was specific: it prohibited Congress from designating an official national church, compelling participation, or funding a denomination through taxation, the model the Framers knew firsthand from the Church of England. The Trump administration has done none of those things. No denomination has been named a state church, no citizen has been compelled to worship, and no taxpayer funds have been directed to a religious institution as such.

The Pentagon prayer services began in May 2025, when Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth organized the first “Secretary’s Christian Prayer and Worship Service” during a workday at the Pentagon auditorium, broadcast live on the Department of War’s internal television network, with all department employees invited to attend.

At a monthly Christian service on March 25, 2026, Hegseth asked God to “let every round find its mark against the enemies of righteousness and our great nation.” Similar services were established at the Department of Labor, where Secretary Chavez-DeRemer spoke of her Catholic faith at the inaugural service on December 10th, and the gatherings have continued monthly.

The legal response has been led primarily by Americans United for Separation of Church and State. The suits, filed March 23, 2026, in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., are procedural in nature and do not directly challenge the constitutionality of the prayer services, representing the fourth and fifth FOIA lawsuits the group has filed against the Trump administration, following earlier suits against the Departments of Health and Human Services, State, and Veterans Affairs over the president’s February 2025 executive order aimed at eradicating anti-Christian bias in the federal government.

Separately, Trump signed an executive order on May 1, 2025, creating a Religious Liberty Commission whose members include Pastor Paula White-Cain, Cardinal Timothy Dolan, Rabbi Meir Soloveichik, and Franklin Graham.  Americans United and Democracy Forward filed a lawsuit against the commission in February 2026, challenging its composition and seeking to block publication of its report on behalf of interfaith, Muslim, Sikh, and Hindu organizations.

At the commission’s final hearing, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, the commission’s chair, called church-state separation “the biggest lie that’s been told in America since our founding.”

The term separation of church and state is one that liberals believe has special powers attached to it, like when they kept saying during his trial that Kyle Rittenhouse had “crossed state lines,” which he probably had, but that had nothing to do with the case.

In 1644, Roger Williams, founder of Rhode Island and the First Baptist Church in America, was the first public official to call for a “wall or hedge of separation” between “the wilderness of the world” and “the garden of the church,” not to restrict religion, but to protect the church from government corruption.

The phrase as used today derives from Thomas Jefferson’s 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptist Association, a private letter written to reassure a Baptist minority that the federal government would not interfere with their worship, not a legal document, legislative act, or founding text.

Notably, both Jefferson and Madison, the men most associated with church-state separation, mixed religion and government in practice: Madison issued proclamations of religious fasting and thanksgiving, and Jefferson signed treaties sending religious ministers to Native Americans.

In Zorach v. Clauson, 343 U.S. 306 (1952), the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that a New York City policy permitting public school students to leave campus for religious instruction did not violate the Establishment Clause. Justice William O. Douglas wrote: “We are a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being…”

“When the state encourages religious instruction or cooperates with religious authorities by adjusting the schedule of public events to sectarian needs, it follows the best of our traditions. To hold that it may not would be to find in the Constitution a requirement that the government shows a callous indifference to religious groups.”

There have been 151 national calls to prayer, humiliation, fasting, and thanksgiving by U.S. presidents from 1789 to 2022, with 35 of the 46 presidents signing proclamations for national prayer, and every president since Eisenhower participating in the National Prayer Breakfast. Reagan proclaimed 1983 the “Year of the Bible” and stated: “I believe the First Amendment was written not to protect the people and their laws from religious values, but to protect those values from government tyranny.”

Newsweek described the George W. Bush White House, where prayer meetings ran day and night, and Bible study was encouraged, as “the most resolutely faith-based” presidency in modern times. Jimmy Carter ordered a half-hour interfaith prayer service at the Lincoln Memorial on the morning of his 1977 inauguration.

Not only has religion been a feature of government since before World War II, but the tradition is older than the Constitution itself. The Continental Congress established the military Chaplain Corps on July 29, 1775, at the request of George Washington, authorizing one ordained chaplain at the rank of captain for each regiment, 218 of whom served through the Revolutionary War.

That same Congress called the colonies to prayer in 1775, predating the Constitution entirely. When the Senate first convened in New York City on April 6, 1789, appointing a chaplain was among its first orders of business, electing the Right Reverend Samuel Provoost, Episcopal Bishop of New York, on April 25.

The House followed on May 1, electing the Rev. William Linn, continuing the tradition established by the Continental Congresses of opening each day’s proceedings with prayer. From its first session, the Supreme Court has opened each sitting with the cry “God save the United States and this honorable Court.” Congressional prayer, military chaplains, and government-called days of fasting and thanksgiving were the baseline from which the republic began.

Washington himself left no ambiguity. In his Circular Letter to the thirteen state governors on June 8, 1783, he closed with these words:

“I now make it my earnest prayer, that God would have you, and the State over which you preside, in his holy protection, that he would incline the hearts of the Citizens to cultivate a spirit of subordination and obedience to Government, to entertain a brotherly affection and love for one another… and finally, that he would most graciously be pleased to dispose us all, to do Justice, to love mercy, and to demean ourselves with that Charity, humility and pacific temper of mind, which were the Characteristicks of the Divine Author of our blessed Religion, and without an humble imitation of whose example in these things, we can never hope to be a happy Nation.”

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