Compulsory chapel

Compulsory chapel is a phrase used in reference to a college or prep school, that students attend religious services regularly as a condition of their enrollment.

Most of the famous older colleges and prep schools in the United States originated as Protestant institutions. They were modelled on British universities like Oxford and Cambridge, and the British "public schools" like Eton and Harrow, all of which were essentially insitutions of the Church of England. Six of the eight schools of the Ivy League—Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, and Dartmouth were unquestionably Protestant in nature. Through the middle of the 1800s, compulsory chapel was a given at most of these schools, as it was at the service academies (West Point and Annapolis).

The American Civil War and the transcontinental railroad brought cultural change to the United States, and the Morrill Act sparked a wave of establishment of non-sectarian public universities. From about 1860 through the 1950s, compulsory chapel began to be challenged. One after another, the Ivy League schools abolished compulsory chapel. Princeton held on the longest, abolishing it in 1962