Dissent

The case was in the end decided 8-1 by the justices. The sole dissent came from Justice Potter Stewart. He believed “ The doctrine relied on in that case as implausible, given the long history of government religious practice in the United States, including the fact that the Supreme Court opens its own sessions with the declaration, "God Save this Honorable Court" and that Congress opens its sessions with prayers, among many other examples. Stewart believed that such practice fit with the nation's long history of permitting free exercise of religious practices, even in the public sphere.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abington_School_District_v._Schempp
After the case he went on to state “It is, I think, a fallacious oversimplification to regard the [religion clauses] as establishing a single constitutional standard of "separation of church and state", which can be applied in every case to delineate the required boundaries between government and religion.... As a matter of history, the First Amendment was adopted solely as a limitation upon the newly created National Government. The events leading to its adoption strongly suggest that the Establishment Clause was primarily an attempt to insure that Congress not only would be powerless to establish a national church, but would also be unable to interfere with existing state establishments. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abington_School_District_v._Schempp
And it is said many of the critics to the Court findings quote the justice when he said “If religious exercises are held to be an impermissible activity in schools, religion is placed in an artificial and state-created disadvantage.... And a refusal to permit religious exercises thus is seen, not as the realization of state neutrality, but rather as the establishment of a religion of secularism, or at least, as governmental support of the beliefs of those who think that religious exercises should be conducted only in private (Eastland, 1993, pp. 165). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abington_School_District_v._Schempp