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The Twenty-Two Words That Changed America

The Twenty-Two Words That Changed America

Tom Wallace · July 27, 2026 · 14-minute episode ·Listen on Spotify

Written in 1951 by the New York State Board of Regents

“Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon Thee, and we beg Thy blessings upon us, our parents, our teachers and our country.”

Twenty-two words. That is all it took to set off one of the most consequential legal battles in American history — a fight that started with a short, non-denominational prayer written for New York schoolchildren, and ended with prayer removed from public education altogether. Here at Fortress of Faith, we believe the story of how that happened is one every believer needs to know.

A Nation Born in Persecution

Our country’s roots run straight through Christian conviction. The Pilgrims who sailed for the New World in the 1600s were Puritans who had already suffered persecution back in England, after King Henry VIII broke from Rome and the Church of England came under the authority of the state. Under King James I — the same monarch behind the King James Bible — the Puritans were pressed to worship as the crown dictated, not as conscience led them. So in 1603 they left, first for Holland, and eventually for the colonies, hoping to find freedom of religion and to carry the gospel to the New World.

But freedom won for themselves was not always freedom extended to others. Massachusetts permitted only the Puritan faith to be preached; other colonies restricted the pulpit to Anglicans or Congregationalists alone. Baptists were among the minorities scattered through the colonies, and it was Baptist preachers who paid the price for insisting that salvation comes by grace through faith, not by works. When Obadiah Holmes held an unauthorized Baptist service in Massachusetts in 1651 and refused to pay the fine levied against him, he was publicly whipped in Boston for it. It was Baptist conviction — forged under that persecution — that helped carry true religious liberty into America’s founding documents.

What the First Amendment Actually Says

That conviction shows up plainly in the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Read it closely. It restricts Congress. It was never written to strip faith out of public life — it was written so government could never dictate a national religion the way England once had, while still leaving every citizen free to exercise their faith openly.

A Bible in the Capitol

That the church and the state coexisted comfortably in the founding era is easy to forget today. On September 12, 1782, Congress’s own chaplains reviewed Robert Aitken’s new Philadelphia-printed edition of the Bible — the first complete English Bible printed on American soil — and Congress formally commended it and recommended it to the people of the United States. And for decades, well into the 1800s, a congregation met for services inside the Capitol building itself. Thomas Jefferson attended as both vice president and president; James Madison did the same. Church and state, in that era, were not strangers to one another.

A note on that history — it’s sometimes said Congress paid to print the Aitken Bible. The historical record says otherwise: Aitken funded and printed it himself and asked Congress only for its endorsement, which Congress gave after having its chaplains examine the work (source). The point still stands — Congress reviewed and put its name behind a Bible for the American public — but the word is endorsed, not funded.

Jefferson’s Wall

It was that same Thomas Jefferson who gave us the phrase most people assume is in the Constitution but isn’t. In an 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptist Association, Jefferson wrote of a “wall of separation between Church and State” — his own summary of the First Amendment, not a quotation from it. Jefferson’s wall, in context, was meant to keep the state from reaching into the church’s affairs — not the other way around.

The Prayer, and the Court That Silenced It

That is the world the Regents’ Prayer was written into in 1951: twenty-two carefully chosen, non-denominational words meant to be entirely uncontroversial. It offended Steven Engel, a New York father who, together with a handful of others, challenged it as a violation of the Establishment Clause. The case reached the Supreme Court, and in Engel v. Vitale (1962), the Court ruled 6–1 that a state-composed prayer recited in public schools was unconstitutional, even though it was voluntary and denominationally neutral.

The Court’s opinion rested on the First Amendment alone. We would raise a further argument worth weighing: because education is nowhere mentioned in the Constitution, we believe it falls to the states under the Tenth Amendment — making this, in our view, a matter the federal courts had no business deciding for the nation at large.

From the Courtroom to Washington

We trace a straight line from that ruling to 1979, when President Jimmy Carter signed the legislation creating a cabinet-level U.S. Department of Education — formalizing federal involvement in a field we believe belongs to the states. It’s a link we draw to make our broader case for state and local control of education, prayer included.

“If you here at Fortress of Faith will have courage and stand up and be salt and light in your community, petition your school boards — we can bring prayer back into our schools.”

Be Salt and Light

Our charge to believers is straightforward: get involved. Petition your school board. Run for local office. And most of all, get on your knees. Scripture calls believers to be salt and light in the world (Matthew 5:13–16), and our appeal is that this charge starts at home — in the classroom, in the town hall, and in prayer for the nation.

Now go out and be salt and light. God bless you.

Sources & Further Reading

Fortress of Faith with Tom Wallace · The Corner of Truth and Courage

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