A Supreme Court decision in July involving a Washington football coach’s right to pray after games was called a landmark victory for religious liberty by attorney Stephanie Taub on Thursday night, with her telling a crowd at Harding University, “We’re going to see it have implications for decades.”
Bremerton High School assistant coach Joe Kennedy was the first guest speaker this school year in the American Studies Institute’s Distinguished Lecture Series. He was joined on the Benson Auditorium stage by Taub, senior counsel with First Liberty Institute, and Michael Berry, vice president of external affairs, director of military affairs and senior counsel for the institute.
Kennedy v. Bremerton School District was decided by the Supreme Court on June 27. The court ruled 6-3 in favor of his First Amendment rights, allowing him to return to the field, although he hasn’t yet. Kennedy’s daughter will be attending Harding next year.
Kennedy grew up in Bremerton. He and his sister were adopted, and he said he was “kicked out of just about every school I went to.” He was placed in group homes, foster homes, child protective custody and a boys home in eastern Washington.
“I think I was 13 when I went into the boys home, so all this time when I’m a kid, I was just an angry kid,” he said. “I was so angry at my parents when they kicked me out. I would be good for a little while; I’d be in trouble. I’d be at a different school; things would catch up to me. I’d end up getting kicked out of that school.”
Kennedy said he thinks he went to every school in a county that was about the size of White County.
He recalled coming back to his parents’ house after they moved and breaking into the house “and I was so furious and I didn’t know what else to do, so I started yelling at God and I tore the house apart, broke holes in the walls, just fits of rage. I remember just cussing at God. I didn’t know who else to cuss at I was just so mad, and I fell to my knees and I was screaming, ‘If you’re here, if there really is a God, why don’t you show up?’ Well, guess what? He showed up.”
He said the next thing he knew he was at a Christian boys home. He was told by his dad that he was going fishing and camping and when they pulled up to the house, “my mom is sitting there with all my stuff in duffel bags and I’m like, ‘What’s going on?’ and they said, ‘Just stay in the car.’”
He said the drive to the boys home seemed to take forever, but the home “was really nice with a lot of people that care about young people.” Kennedy said it was the type of place you go to right before you go to juvenile detention.
He said they had prayers three times a day and it was very structured. A couple of his counselors started “sewing seeds” in him, he said, so he thought he would “try God on.”
However, Kennedy said as soon he got “plucked out” of this home, everything went back to the way it was. At best, Kennedy said his background was “sketchy.”
He said he served in the Marines for 20 years and it was the first time in life he thought he was contributing something to society. “I was part of a team. I was better than what I was before. That’s why I went in, I wanted to know if I was actually worth something. I wanted to get past what everybody was saying when I was growing up.”
When Kennedy got out of the Marine Corps, he said he wondered “what will I do now?” Right before he got out, though, his son came to visit him and while in Washington, Kennedy wound up seeing a woman he had been in love with his entire life.
“This was 30 years later. We started hanging out,” he said. “She was actually in a very abusive marriage. She was hiding from her ex-husband. She was in the women shelters and she was hiding. We hooked up and got married and I thought, ‘Man, my life is great. I’m married to the girl that I love. I’m retired and I don’t have to do anything else. Life is great.’”
While out on a run one day and wearing a Bremerton Knights T-shirt because his wife worked for the school district, he said he was asked by someone who pulled up beside him, “Did you play?” He said his answer was, ‘No, I was too small. I wrestled in high school. I graduated from Bremerton, but I don’t really know anything about football.”
He said the guy told him they were looking for football coaches and asked him if he was interested. “I’m like, ‘Are you kidding? No.’”
Kennedy said the last thing he needed was to start leading a whole new group of people after 20 years in the Marines. He said he wanted to make his marriage work.
“It seems like every week one of these guys would call me up: ‘Hey, would you coach football? Would you coach football?’” Kennedy said the athletic director was hounding his wife about him coaching football, too.
About a year later, Kennedy said he finally agreed to put in his application and was offered the job on a Friday afternoon. Kennedy said he would think about it and make a decision Monday.
“So I was sitting there in the middle of the night, flipping through the channels and you know, there’s what 900 channels and not nothing on any of them,” he said. “I was flipping through and all of the sudden this football movie came on, ‘Facing The Giants.’ I tell you the budget for that money was what, $28? It wasn’t a high budget movie but let me tell you about four minutes into it, it was like an answer from God. It’s like he came down to my living room, punched me in the gut.
“... There’s not many times in life that you have God actually show up and actually do something like that and I just fell to my knees and I’m crying just like in the movies. I said, ‘God I’m in. I will coach. I will do this. I found my calling and I will do this the best of my abilities.’ And I said, ‘I will give you credit after every game, win or lose and I will do it right there on the battlefield.’”
Kennedy said he took the job seriously and was there for years, but in the first game of his eighth season, he said he was called and told, “You’re not supposed to be praying on the football field.” He said his response was, “What do you mean I’m not supposed to be praying on the football field?” and was told that the district had received a call.
“It actually started from a compliment,” he said. “We had one of the educators from another school see what we were doing and called the principal and said, ‘I just wanted to call you and tell you that what the football program is doing is really awesome.’”
Kennedy said he was thinking that was awesome but then said, “What happens when you get a compliment like that? You start an investigation.”
“That’s what they did, they started an investigation and they told me not to be praying,” he said.
Kennedy said the athletic director came up beside him and said, ‘Boy, we sure dodged a bullet?’ Kennedy said he asked him what he meant and the AD said, “Well, you’re not going to have an opportunity to actually do your prayer because it’s triple overtime, the other team needs to come on to the field [for the next game], the stands are packed with all these people trying to get to the next game,’ and I’m like, ‘It’s cool how God works these things out.’”
When the game was over, Kennedy said he went over and shook hands with all the players and was talking to the coach about the rest of the games. He said a kid came out and took a knee and said, “Coach, will you use my helmet in prayer?” Kennedy said that was the coolest thing. It was humbling. He grabbed the helmet and said a quick prayer. The athletic walked away and didn’t look happy, he said, and the head coach whispered, “You’re fired.”
Kennedy said he posted, “I think I just got fired for praying,” turned off his phone and stuck it in his pocket and went home, In the morning, his wife, who was the human resources director, said it was probably nothing.
“One of my foster sisters who is living in Virginia calls me up and says, ‘Your football team is on my TV’ and I thought cool,” he said. “Maybe they picked up our game. No. The headline said, ‘Coach Fired For Praying.’
“When things go viral, that is the most insane thing that happens these days. The power and the speed of the word goes out incredibly fast.”
He said every news channel was talking about it, and “my wife and I were at total odds over this. She is a HR director and I’m one of her employees and we’re calling the superintendent who has been a friend of ours for almost a decade. ... He said, ‘You are still my coach, get ready for the game [on Monday].’”
Kennedy said he received a letter that he could pray on duty as long as it didn’t interfere with his coaching duties. He didn’t know, though, that when he took a knee the next time, the opposing school was going to start praying with him.
He said he had to choose between his faith and his job. He started talking about it with lawyers and about halfway through the season his players asked him if he could just give in and agree with the district so they could keep him as a coach. He said he had to set the example and was not giving in.
“That was one of the hardest prayers I ever did walking out to the 50-yard line knowing it’s going to be my last time,” he said.
Singling out prayer
“The case in a nutshell held that teachers do have constitutional rights,” Taub said. “They have the right to free speech and to free exercise of religion and the court held that if Coach Kennedy could have taken that 30 seconds in another kind of speech to make a phone call, to make a quick text message but instead he took that 30 seconds to kneel in prayer but the school just singled out the prayer, singled out religious exercise and say, ‘You can do anything else but not religion.’
“You can’t treat religion like second-class speech so that was the main holding of the case, but the case went even further than that, even further than we expected. It took a step back and looked at what ford the First Amendment mean? What do the two religion clauses in the First Amendment mean; how do they work together?”
She said that the court said “this idea of the establishment clause and free exercise clause ... were actually written at the same time. They are actually complementary and they work together to protect individual rights, to protect the rights of the citizen to freely engage in religion and to be free from the established church.”
“It really was a monumental victory because for 50 years we have seen such hostility from government actors, especially in the school district,” she said. “Their instinct is just to scrub their schools from anything that is remotely religious because they have this misunderstanding of the establishment clause and they think that’s what’s required. The court has clarified no, that’s not what’s required. When you do that, when you treat liberty with hostility, when you treat it as a second-class right, that is infringing on the free exercise of teachers and coaches like Coach Kennedy.”
Berry said the case was product of today’s culture. “We’re now in a culture, in a time in which you don’t have to go looking for a fight, the fight will come looking for you.”
Kennedy said he hasn’t returned to coaching at Bremerton yet for a few reasons.
“The best way I thought about coming back was not dropping in in the middle of this football season,” he said. “These coaches, these players, have been together for years and I am fighting to get back for years, so the worse thing in the world I can actually think of is showing up in the middle of the season and say, ‘Here I am, take me back as I am. I know I didn’t do any work this year. I know this is your team but yeah, I want to come back and crash the party.’
“No, we’re trying to finish up with the court systems, let them write their final order that we were discussing back stage, the final order and how it’s going to look. How do I come back to being the coach? And I thought the most painless way to do is start at the beginning of next season, where I actually meet the coaches, I meet the player, I meet the parents, I meet the whole administration and my community and talk to them and see how I fit in there and then earn my way back on to the field.”
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