Trump announces new guidance to protect prayer in public schools: 'To have a great nation, you must have religion'

President Donald Trump announced on Monday (September 8) that the Department of Education will issue new guidance aimed at protecting prayer in public schools. He made the statement at the trial of the White House Religious Liberty Commission, held in the Museum of the Bible in Washington, DC. The event, with ‘Religious Freedom in Public Education’, was the second public meeting of the commission. Trump: “To have a great nation, you must have religion” Trump, who regularly promised to restore religion in American life, walked out to the crowd just after 10:30 and thanked the commission for his work. “To have a great nation, you have to have religion – I believe it so strongly,” he said. “There must be something after we went through it all, and that something is God.” He has accused public schools of “indoctrinating” students with antirelight propaganda “before revealing the new initiative for the Department of Education. The details of the guidance were not immediately clear. Trump listed a broader agenda in his almost hour-long remarks, including the deployment of the national guard to combat crime in Washington, DC, to combat, which he described as ‘anti-Christian prejudice’, and returned to observed ‘wokeness’ at the Smithsonian Institution. “Honestly, they make changes, you know,” he said. “They were also told what to do by people who came before me, in all fairness, but they make changes. Major changes are made to the Smithsonian. ‘ A nation built on prayer concluded the speech with a prayer led by the secretary of housing and urban development secretary Scott Turner. Trump then declared: “The United States has always been a nation that believes in the power of prayer. We will defend our freedoms, our values, our sovereignty, and we will defend our freedom.” He concluded on an optimistic note: “We are at the beginning of a golden era.” He left the stage after a version of ‘Amazing Grace’. Prolonged legal debate public schools have been banned from leading the classroom prayers since a 1962 Supreme Court ruling that found that such practices violated the first amendment. However, students have retained the right to pray private or in groups during free time. Trump previously issued revised guidance in 2020, while the administration of former President Joe Biden updated the rules in 2023 to emphasize that schools could take “reasonable steps” to ensure that students were not forced to prayer. During his 2023 campaign, Trump promised to “bring prayer back to our schools”, a promise that now echoes in his second-term policy.