While the whole of America seems to be blathering on about Colin Kaepernick’s contempt of the American flag, the Ninth Circuit Court handed down a ruling last week about another man who took a knee. It makes me happy to hear so many voices raised for First Amendment rights, and makes me hopeful that Joseph Kennedy’s rights will eventually be respected.

His is a story less well known. First hired as an assistant football coach of Bremerton High School in Washington in 2008, Kennedy was reportedly leading their coaches and players in prayer even before he was hired. These were voluntary prayers, in the tradition of Bremerton High, both before and after games.

From the beginning of his tenure as coach, he also had the custom of kneeling, alone, on the 50-yard line after each game and offering a prayer of thanksgiving to his God. Several games into his first season, he was approached by some players asking if they could join him. He replied, “This is a free country.” 

That was 2008. Things are changing.

After seven continuous years of leading these prayers, an employee of another school complained to the Bremerton administrator. This single complaint from someone completely outside of the Bremerton community immediately led Coach Kennedy to voluntarily cease all communal prayers, both in the locker room and on the field. 

Pause here to notice that the Kaepernick controversy was caused by a sudden change on his part after a 13-year career (prep, college, and pro) of standing for the National Anthem. By contrast, Kennedy’s troubles were not brought on by a change in his actions but by a solitary complaint after seven years of consistently accepted activity. 

This is the first thing to notice in today’s First Amendment wars. There is a gargantuan bias toward novelty and against long-established traditions. The practice of locker room prayers not only had a seven-year tradition under coach Kennedy but also predated his hiring. On the other hand, Kaepernick flouted a tradition of standing for the National Anthem before a football game which dates back over 70 years, even before the merger that created the modern NFL.

Repeatedly, we see this bias at work. Novelties like same-sex marriage become the newest sacred cows, while decades-long traditions are tossed away like yesterday’s underwear. This is evidence not of open-mindedness but of revolutionary fever. 

Traditions connect us with our past and serve as time-tested vehicles to inculcate community values. Revolutionaries hate traditions precisely because they work. Revolutionary cries for tolerance and open-mindedness are generally preludes to the most intolerant and closed-minded actions.

A second interesting aspect of the Coach Kennedy case is the response of the school district to the publicizing of the controversy. At first, Coach Kennedy was able to keep the last vestige of his private prayer under the radar. He simply waited until most people left the field before praying. 

But then he wrote a letter formally asking for a religious accommodation under the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He thought this would formalize the compromise, allowing him to continue privately saying post-game prayer on the 50-yard line. But this simple letter made the very act of kneeling become a public scandal. 

In free societies, formal accommodations for religion can meet everyone’s needs. But in totalitarian societies, there are no such things as formal exemptions; only temporary and informal non-enforcement can preserve the new public religion. Counter-revolutionary practices, once visible, must be ruthlessly put down. 

For the Bremerton School District, Kennedy’s public letter was seen as a hostile act. It required a new and sterner edict. For seven years, fans had watched some of the players and coaches gather around coach Kennedy on the 50-yard line. They were no strangers to the practice. What did the Bremerton administration expect would happen when that practice was suddenly banned?

Did they think the fans wouldn’t notice, or wouldn’t care? Did they expect Coach Kennedy to end that practice overnight without saying a word to the players, coaches and fans who had grown accustomed to it? This is a third problem with revolutionaries. They never seem to anticipate the natural consequences of their revolutionary edicts.

Coach Kennedy tried to be proactive. He informed the school board, the players and the coaches that he was no longer allowed to pray corporately with them but that he would still pray privately. This seemed the most sensible thing to say since the school board banned him from signaling when he was about to pray but insisted that he was “free to engage in religious activity, including prayer, so long as it does not interfere with job responsibilities.”

But teams and communities have their own ideas as well. The Bremerton school board had forgotten that in a truly free and voluntary community, you cannot coerce one citizen without coercing them all.

To forbid a man from group-praying means also to forbid others from grouping around him for prayer. In other words, not only did they forbid free speech to Kennedy, they simultaneously forbode free association to the coaches and players, students and parents who wanted to join him.

This does not sit well with free people. Nor did the fans, coaches and players take this news sitting down. So, while the district could not forbid others from joining him, they nevertheless held Kennedy personally responsible for anyone who did. This set the stage for the next escalation.

As players and fans talked openly about watching his actions and joining him as soon as he knelt to pray, the district enforcers worried that they didn’t have the power to stop them. In time, they made yet another new edict. For the first time in the history of Bremerton football, parents and fans would be forbidden from coming onto the field after a game. Of course, new rules require new enforcers. “Ultimately, the district made arrangements with the Bremerton Police Department to secure the field after games.”

But before this new rule could be passed and enforced, people simply watched and prayed. At the close of the game following his request for religious accommodation, when the district failed to answer Kennedy’s request, Kennedy shook hands with the opposing players, waited until most of the Bremerton players were otherwise engaged and dropped to a knee to pray. 

While he was silently praying, “coaches and players from the opposing team, as well as members of the general public and media, spontaneously joined [him] on the field and knelt beside him.” Worse, pictures of this event were taken and published in various media. This was too much for the Bremerton school district. 

Instead of blaming themselves for escalating the situation by edict after edict, they blamed coach Kennedy for engaging “in religious exercise … under the game lights, in BHS-logoed attire.” In only 36 days, the mere act of kneeling on the 50-yard line had gone from a long-standing custom to behavior that may “be perceived as district endorsement [of a religion].”

Seriously. That’s what they said in a court of law, and that’s what the Ninth Circuit Court affirmed in denying coach Kennedy his First Amendment rights. (All quotations in this article are from their Aug. 23 ruling.)

Excuse me, but I can guarantee you nobody on the field that night believed they were engaging in some “district-endorsed” activity. Rather, it is quite clear that everyone who joined coach Kennedy in prayer was knowingly thumbing their nose in contempt at the overreaching Bremerton School District. 

Next time you hear “the land of the free and the home of the brave,” it would be a good idea to take a knee and pray that Bremerton’s overreaching is overruled. If it’s not, we may soon see the day when no public employee will be permitted to take a knee in prayer.

Jonathan Lange has a heart for our state and community. Locally, he has raised his family and served as pastor of Our Saviour Lutheran Church in Evanston and St. Paul’s in Kemmerer for two decades. Statewide, he leads the Wyoming Pastors Network in advocating for the traditional church in the public square.