In a pandering stunt of biblical proportions, the Trump administration last week released what it presented as a major new initiative to protect the rights of students to pray and otherwise express religious belief in public schools. In fact, the updated guidelines the administration unveiled with great fanfare are little more than tweaks to standards already in place.

But critics warn that White House gamesmanship on this issue could embolden those who would violate those standards in the other direction, by using public institutions to officially promote religion. That remains as unconstitutional as it's always been — no matter how much President Donald Trump feels compelled to genuflect before evangelical voters ahead of the fall election.

It's a common myth that prayer in U.S. public schools is banned. In fact, the Supreme Court in 1962 ruled that school-sponsored prayer is a violation of the First Amendment's prohibition on governmental promotion of religion. Nothing prevents individual students, groups of students or teachers from praying on their own, even on school grounds, as long as it doesn't interfere with other students' education.

It's actually a pretty simple standard: Religion is fine, just not government-sponsored religion. But that standard seems to keep offending those on the religious right who too often view lack of governmental endorsement for their beliefs as an attack on those beliefs. It's also true that some school administrators have taken the 1962 ruling too literally, infringing on individual students' rights to pray. Thus the need for a balance.

Federal guidelines released in 2003 attempted to strike that balance, clarifying for schools what the court's standard does and doesn't mean. The Trump administration's update on those guidelines appears to adhere mostly to the same principles of helping schools walk the line between protecting student expressions of religion without engaging in official school promotion of religion.

Yet in an Oval Office ceremony last Thursday unveiling the new guidelines, Trump told those gathered that his administration was engaged in a "cultural war" to protect religious expression from a "growing totalitarian impulse on the far left" that seeks to stamp it out. Leave it to Trump — possibly the most personally irreligious president in America's history — to try to gin up a nonexistent war on prayer for the sake of riling his base.

It's evident why he feels the need. Cracks have appeared in the Trump-evangelical alliance, including a bombshell editorial last month in the publication Christianity Today calling for Trump's removal.

The church-state issue is an old stress point in American culture, one that responsible presidents seek to soothe for the sake of the country. Trump, as always, seeks to aggravate it for the sake of himself. Ultimately, the rebuke to this divisive and cynical strategy lies not in prayer, but in November's election.

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