Keep Right — Column by Ralph K. Ginorio
The Idaho Legislature recently passed House Bill 623 (2026), and Governor Brad Little added his endorsement by signing it. Happily, because of this, a moment of silent reflection is returning to Idaho’s public schools.
In my K-12 student years, back when Pteranodons routinely blotted out the sunlight, we had a moment of silent reflection in public schools. Look at me. I turned out,… well, maybe that is not the best example.
However, as a whole, my generation did well with this. It is a truly amazing thing to be in a High School surrounded by thousands of young people who are all being totally silent. It allows everyone to pause in preparations for the new day. Having an entire campus do so together makes this moment even more conspicuously worthwhile. As a universal and shared experience, it builds a sense of camaraderie.
Previous generations had something even better than a moment of silence. For almost the first two centuries of our existence as a Federal Republic, Americans had school prayer. Then, in Engle vs. Vitale (1962), Chief Justice Earl Warren’s radical activist United States Supreme Court discovered that for all of this time, American schools had been violating the Establishment Clause in our Constitution.
Here is an example of the kind of mandatory school prayer that the Warren Court abolished. At Cranston High School West, in the not-at-all Conservative state of Rhode Island, this prayer was posted on a hallway wall from 1963 until an activist sued the school to have it taken down in 2012.
Our Heavenly Father,
Grant us each day the desire to do our best,
to grow mentally and morally as well as physically,
to be kind and helpful to our classmates and teachers,
to be honest with ourselves as well as with others.
Help us to be good sports and to smile when we lose as well as when we win.
Teach us the value of true friendship.
Help us always to conduct ourselves so as to bring credit
to Cranston High School West.
Amen!
For the vast majority of our Republic’s existence, we were a self-consciously Judeo-Christian society. We shared a set of common philosophical and moral convictions. We had an identifiable heart.
We were simultaneously also tolerant of others with differing beliefs who lived within our midst. Our Mother Country, England, was officially Anglican Protestant. The Thirteen Colonies each invited differing Protestant and Reformed Christian denominations to immigrate. Maryland even invited Roman Catholic Christians. Many of our Founding Fathers were Deists. Some were Freemasons. Formerly Dutch New York permitted Jews to settle.
After the Revolution, both Jewish and Eastern Orthodox Christian communities grew. In the Nineteenth Century, our tolerance stretched to include members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, Quakers, Shakers, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Christian Scientists, Amish, Mennonites, as well as a myriad of Native American faiths. By the turn of the Twentieth Century American society tolerated and included agnostics, atheists, Moslems, Communists, Buddhists, Hindus, and countless other faiths, ideologies, and philosophies.
Alongside all of this diversity of conviction, the core of the American mainstream was a broadly Judeo-Christian accord which set the tone for our customs and interactions. These traditions included deep Christian customs within the military. They included non-denominational prayers in schools.
Then, in the last third of the 20th Century, we began an experiment in de-Christianization that would have made the architect of French Revolutionary de-Christianization, Jacques Rene Hebert, envious. We have since been willfully cutting out our shared social convictions in service to a Utopian concept of utter religious and philosophical neutrality.
Every culture, including ours, has at its core a certain set of non-negotiable beliefs. This experiment in neutrality has been so damaging precisely because it assaults the very concept that America stands for any distinct values.
Compare our social cohesion, family resilience, crime rates, addiction rates, and suicide rates from before our de-Christianization to after. No, we were not perfect then, to be sure. But it is fair to ask if de-Christianization was a necessary step in the crusade to eliminate (or at least substantially reduce) official, customary, and legal racism, sexism, and homophobia from our
society.
E PLURIBUS UNUM: Out of many, one! The American Republic was founded by immigrants from Europe; primarily British but including a wide set of Western Europeans. As we expanded, immigration surged from Western and Central Europe, then from Eastern Europe, then from beyond Europe.
Mandatory public education was established in the late 19th century so that the “Melting Pot” would function. Issei (Japanese for 1st generation immigrants) would adapt to survive here, Nisei (2nd generation immigrants) would grow up speaking English and going to American schools as Americans, and Sansei (3rd generation immigrants) would be as culturally American as anyone else.
Educators do have a fundamental duty to acculturate. This means bringing the children of immigrants into our shared mainstream Judeo-Christian, English speaking, and American variant of Western Civilization.
It also means introducing all young people to their shared cultural heritage as Americans. This is how the United States, along with all other cultures and civilizations, perpetuates itself recognizably intact into the future.
Such prayers are at least as essential as saying the Pledge of Allegiance or other pseudo-religious civic rituals. These help us to bring up children from around the world to be distinctly American.
A moment of silent reflection does many things that a school prayer does, though not as well. Still, it does tangibly serve our schools’ primary duty of acculturation. It is a step in the right direction of restoring our unique national identity.
