Anti-Christian Group Goes After Deion Sanders for Inviting Chaplain to Pray for Football Players

Christians are low-hanging fruit for leftists.

The Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) sent two letters to the University of Colorado Boulder urging the school to take action against Deion Sanders, who coaches football.

A Christian and former NFL player, Coach Sanders prays with this team after games. FFRF complained the first time in 2023 and recently sent a second letter after Coach Sanders invited a chaplain to speak to the players and pray in the locker room.

The law firm First Liberty Institute sent its own letter to the university encouraging the school to continue ignoring what it calls an incorrect and threatening letter from FFRF. From First Liberty:

For decades, courts have upheld government chaplaincy programs as constitutional in many different contexts including state legislatures, military chaplaincy programs, prisons, and hospitals. The Supreme Court upholds chaplaincy programs even where the government selects a single chaplain to serve as its routine prayer-giver who prays in accordance with his or her particular faith.

“FFRF fumbled the law,” said Keisha Russell, senior counsel at First Liberty Institute. “The United States has a robust and widely recognized tradition of both public prayer and chaplain programs dating back to the Continental Congress in 1776. This rich precedent demonstrates that the University’s program joins the long-standing American tradition that welcomes the participation of chaplains within a variety of America’s public spaces—or, as the case may be, even a locker room. Coach Sanders and the University of Colorado should ignore FFRF’s hail Mary.”

Who can forget the plight of Joe Kennedy from Washington, a former high school football coach who prayed with players after games on the 50-yard line? The school asked him to stop and refused to renew his contract when he didn’t.

Kennedy filed a lawsuit, and the case ended up in the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in his favor in 2022. The school district paid him $2 million and reinstated him.

But Kennedy, a client of First Liberty, ended up resigning. He wrote in his resignation letter that “it is apparent that the reinstatement ordered by the Supreme Court will not be fully followed after a series of actions meant to diminish my role and single me out in what I can only believe is retaliation by the school district.”