Sonja Shaw Working to Restore Opening Prayers to Board Meetings

Chino Valley Unified School District School Board President Sonja Shaw is best known for her fight for parental rights. But she is also quietly fighting a pitched legal battle to restore opening prayers to Board meetings.

With the help of the religious liberty law firm  Advocates for Faith and Freedom, Shaw is seeking to overturn a 2018 court injunction that prohibits invocations at board meetings. The injunction was issued in response to a lawsuit filed by a hyper-sensitive atheist group called the Freedom from Religion Foundation,  which argued that the prayers amounted to an unconstitutional establishment of religion in violation of the First Amendment.

But Shaw and her lawyers are arguing that the 2018 injunction is outdated because it was based on a longstanding Supreme Court test for Establishment Clause violations that the High Court abandoned with a 2022 ruling in favor of a high school football coach saying prayers after games.

The 2022 ruling replaced the stringent “Lemon Test” for determining impermissible intersections of religion and government with an edict that allowed them if consistent with “historic practices and understandings.”

To that end, the lawsuit that Advocates for Faith and Freedom filed last July seeking to overturn the injunction argued that “history, tradition, and common sense demonstrate that invocations done to solemnize an occasion and unify government employees prior to a school board session is rooted in our Nation’s history.”

But United States District Court for the Central District of California Judge Jesus Bernal rejected that argument last October and ruled the injunction could stay in place.

Shaw and her lawyers this January filed an appeal of Bernal’s ruling with the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

Shaw told the California Globe that when she became School Board president in 2023 and learned about the injunction she was determined to fight it because “they are not going to bully us and we have constitutional rights,” meaning freedom of religion.

“The board made a decision to pursue it and [have the injunction] overturned. We are hoping to get our right to have invocations.”

 She said “every government body” except school boards is allowed to have invocations. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

Advocates for Faith and Freedom lawyer Joel Oster told the California Globe that, “The most important principle here is the fight to preserve America’s history. The Supreme Court in Kennedy said the challenges under the First Amendment should be determined based on historical practices. And the history here is that legislative prayers have been going on throughout the entirety of American history. In fact, invocations to open public gatherings is so common place it occurs in Congress, at the White House, the Supreme Court, town halls, and even NASCAR. Simply put – opening meetings with an invocation is not an establishment of religion.”

Oster said Judge Bernal’s ruling allowing the injunction to stay in place, “failed to recognize that the Supreme Court rejected Lemon and replaced it with a history and traditions test. The proper inquiry is whether the invocation practice has historically been viewed as an unconstitutional establishment of religion. History screams one answer – it has not.”

Similarly, in his appeal, Oster argued that invocations were firmly rooted in this country’s traditions, dating back to the founding.

“Applying the history and traditions test shows that the founders would not have viewed opening a public meeting with an invocation as an unconstitutional establishment of religion. Since the time of the Founding, all three branches of government regularly conducted invocations during the course of official government business. Likewise, at the time of the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, these practices continued, and invocations were a common way for  school board meetings to begin. Accordingly, Chino Valley’s policy of beginning school board meetings with an invocation comports with our countries history and tradition.”

Moreover, “Applying the history and traditions test, opening a school board meeting with an invocation does not violate the Establishment Clause. Invocations solemnize an occasion and unify government employees prior to a school board session. This tradition is rooted in our nation’s history, and so relief from the permanent injunctive order is appropriate.”

The Freedom from Religion Foundation did not reply to a request for comment sent earlier this afternoon.