SALISBURY — Over a decade ago, Rowan County was hit with a lawsuit from local plaintiffs who argued that the county commissioner’s practice of leading a prayer at the beginning of every meeting was unconstitutional. In 2019, the county settled Lund v. Rowan County, paying $285,000 in attorney fees to the ACLU who represented the plaintiffs.

That has been the sole cost associated with the lawsuit, as the county was represented for free by the National Center for Life and Liberty.

There are no ongoing fees associated with the county’s continued practice of chaplain-led prayers, with Sheriff’s Office Chaplain Michael Taylor giving a “solemnizing prayer” at the beginning of the meetings.

The practice of having a chaplain give a prayer every meeting follows closely along with the U.S. Supreme Court Decision in Town of Greece v. Galloway, in which the court decided that sectarian prayers could be allowed if they were not given by government officials and did not “denigrate nonbelievers or religious minorities, threaten damnation or preach conversion,” wrote Justice Anthony Kennedy in the majority opinion.

The chaplain-led prayers are also done because one of the main issues in the Fourth Circuit of the United States Court of Appeals’ decision was that, “For years on end, the elected members of the county’s Board of Commissioners composed and delivered pointedly sectarian invocations. They rotated the prayer opportunity amongst themselves; no one else was permitted to offer an invocation,” as Justice J. Harvie Wilkinson wrote in the majority opinion.