Americans broadly support students praying together by choice, according to Pew Research Center’s June 22 report, but far fewer favor requiring students to join teacher-led prayer.
“I am very definitely in favor of school prayer. I favor a voluntary, student led prayer,” the late D. James Kennedy, former senior pastor of Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, said in a mid-1990s conversation that interviewer Jerry Newcombe recalled in his Feb. 28, 2012 column.
Kennedy’s words predate this survey by decades, but his emphasis on voluntary participation offers historical context for a distinction Pew’s researchers examined: who leads the prayer, and whether students have to take part.
Pew surveyed 3,592 US adults April 6–12, 2026, and found that 78% favor allowing public school students to voluntarily pray in student-led groups. That figure describes adults’ opinions, not the percentage of students who pray or parents who want their children to participate.
The original questionnaire asked about four different forms of religious expression in public schools, including student-led prayer, teacher-led prayer, coach-led prayer and classroom displays of the Ten Commandments. Researchers randomized the items and rotated the favor-or-oppose response choices, rather than presenting every respondent with the same sequence.
Initially, 46% favored allowing teachers to lead their classes in prayer, while 53% opposed it. Pew then asked different follow-up questions depending on that first answer, so those figures don’t tell the whole story.
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Respondents who favored teacher-led prayer chose between requiring students to participate and allowing it only without required participation. Those who opposed it chose between not allowing teachers to lead classroom prayer at all and allowing it only without required participation.
Pew’s topline results combine those follow-ups into percentages of all surveyed adults: 8% supported required participation, 53% supported allowing teacher-led prayer only without required participation, and 37% opposed allowing it altogether. The 53% in that summary isn’t 53% of the initial supporters; it represents the full survey population.
Support for students’ voluntary prayer extended beyond Americans who identify with a religion. Pew found that 64% of religiously unaffiliated adults favored allowing voluntary prayer in student-led groups, even though 59% of that group opposed teacher-led classroom prayer altogether.
Other forms of religious expression drew less agreement than student-led prayer. Overall, 57% favored allowing coaches to lead their teams in prayer, and 50% favored displaying the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms.
The survey’s methodology identifies participants as members of Pew’s nationally representative American Trends Panel and gives the full sample a margin of error of plus or minus 1.9 percentage points. SSRS conducted 3,491 interviews online and 101 by live telephone, in English and Spanish.
Pew also cautioned that the sample included too few Jews, Muslims and members of other smaller religious groups to report their opinions separately. Families should keep that limit in mind rather than assuming the results describe every faith community equally well.
For Christian parents, the findings offer a useful distinction when talking about faith at school: support for students choosing to pray together is broader than support for adults leading them.
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