Americans United is fighting hard for your rights. We’ve filed a host of lawsuits lately, with more on the way. Three challenge laws requiring public schools to display a state-sanctioned version of the Ten Commandments in every public school classroom. Another challenges two massive religious statues to be erected on a public building: one a Catholic saint dressed in ancient military garb, the other depicting a Catholic archangel trampling a demon.
Those who would trespass the boundaries of church and state often pooh-pooh our opposition to such displays: “Look the other way.” “The Ten Commandments were up in my classroom and I turned out fine.” “If you don’t like it, move to another country!”
Occasionally, we even hear from friends who don’t fully grasp the importance of these challenges (“really, with everything that’s going on?”). It’s worth pausing to remember why these fights are, in fact, a big deal. Do these displays violate Supreme Court precedent? Yes, they do. But that’s not a terribly persuasive point for folks who aren’t already in our camp. Are these displays clear violations of church-state separation? Yes, they are. But so what?
To help folks understand the importance of this fight, we need to get to the WHY at the heart of the constitutional principle of church-state separation AU defends every day. Let me suggest three reasons why these lawsuits are a big deal: Three reasons you can use when talking about these lawsuits with your friends, family or even on social media.
1. The Dromedary’s muzzle
Religious displays are designed to be the camel’s nose under the tent. I’ve been in this fight for nearly two decades, and one of the most popular arguments the other side lobs is: “In God We Trust is our national motto! It’s right there on our money.”
They’re citing a religious display. One foisted on us during the Civil War (coinage) and then again in the 1950s (paper currency and adopted as our motto). It’s a supposedly historic religious display that the U.S. Supreme Court itself has pointed to time and again to justify other violations of the separation of church and state.
It’s precisely for this reason that our opponents love to push these symbolic displays: to many they seem to be much less important than they truly are.
Our opponents are deliberate about this displays-first strategy. For instance, Project Blitz was a coordinated campaign to push Christian Nationalist policies and laws through state legislatures. Starting in about 2016, Project Blitz encouraged legislators to begin with symbolic pushes to display certain messages (such as In God We Trust in public buildings and on license plates), then use those bills to build support and momentum for more dangerous policies. The goal was to pass these ceremonial, and theoretically less objectionable, display bills first, then pass laws which legalize discrimination in the name of religious freedom. This strategy capitalized on the indifference to these displays.
Some 240 years ago, circa June 1785, and just a few years before the U.S. Constitution, Virginia was considering a tax to support Christian preachers. James Madison responded with one of the first and best defenses of church-state separation: Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments. Madison systematically dismantled the argument for such a tax. The Memorial is worth reading today. Madison marches through 15 numbered points with unstoppable logic and moving rhetoric that make the Memorial’s success seem inevitable. Virginians agreed and voted down the tax.
In his third point, Madison argued that “It is proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties…” Ten Commandments displays in classrooms and Catholic saints adorning public buildings are always just the beginning. If unchallenged, we’re giving inches, losing miles. Soon, the people who pushed the Commandments might, for instance, write a new policy that requires students to follow the Pledge of Allegiance with a recitation of the Ten Commandments — commandments that begin “I AM THE LORD THY GOD.” And that brings us to our second reason: religious freedom.
2. Religious freedom
AU’s lawsuits defend true religious freedom. Sometimes it’s worth stating the obvious. But especially now, when there is a movement afoot to warp and pervert the legal meaning of religious freedom as a constitutional right, it’s important that we draw the legal lines in the correct place. These cases defend the religious freedom of every citizen.
For instance, in Texas, Arkansas and Louisiana, the governments are not just posting scripture, politicians are rewriting scripture. They have sanitized and edited the Ten Commandments. Despite the fact that the lawmakers have, as Alexander Hamilton noted in the Federalist Papers, “no particle of spiritual jurisdiction.” At least when Thomas Jefferson took a razor to the Bible and excised all the supernatural moments, it was an exercise of personal scholarship. Our lawsuits are challenging politicians who are desecrating the Bible in their pursuit of abusing their power to impose their beliefs on public school children. While assaulting scripture, these politicians are portraying themselves as more pious than people challenging this desecration.
We know where our founders would come down on this fight. In the 1786 Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, Jefferson and Madison skewered “the impious presumption of legislators and rulers, civil as well as ecclesiastical, who, being themselves but fallible and uninspired men, have assumed dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible … .”
The government editing what many people believe to be holy writ is one major problem. But with these displays, the government is also weighing in on the most important religious question there is: the existence of a god or gods. Not only is it affirmatively stating the existence of such a god (sorry atheists!), but the government is also picking and choosing among all possible gods and then imposing that particular god on children. It’s also selecting the rules of that god which the government deems worthy of the students’ notice. History is replete with warnings about what happens next.
3. Equality
Equality is an impossible aspiration without the separation of church and state. AU’s lawsuits showcase the role church-state separation plays in advancing equality. This is the “why” that we need to talk about a lot more.
Religious displays are symbols. They are intended to be symbolic — to communicate a deep, resonant image.
The Ten Commandments displays are meant to tell the viewer — the captive kindergartner or third grader or seventh grader — which god is approved by the government. Which god to pray to. Which religion is correct.
“I am the Lord thy god. Thou shalt have no others before me” is as inappropriate for a public school classroom as it is clear. This tells the Buddhist student that they’re wrong. Their worship is wrong. Their religion is wrong. And the Muslim kid that their god is false. And the Hindu child that their religion is fallacious. And the nonreligious and atheist and agnostic kids that they’re misguided, foolish, deluded.
But that’s not all. These displays also tell each and every one of those kids — atheist, Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, and, yes, even the Jewish and Christian kids whose beliefs don’t perfectly align with the state’s — that they are not welcome. That they are lesser than. That they are inferior.
Politicians in Louisiana, Texas and Arkansas are dividing a captive audience of more than 6.6 million schoolchildren along religious lines, favoring the chosen with a message of welcome and acceptance, and ostracizing everyone else. These displays foment inequality. These are monuments to inequality.
And so we’re fighting back.
This understanding of church-state separation as the bedrock of equality is not new. From the very beginning, the wall of separation between church and state has been understood to foster equality.
Madison explained as much in Memorial and Remonstrance. In the ninth of Madison’s 15 numbered points, he writes about equality. He tells us that when government breaches the wall of separation, it “degrades from the equal rank of Citizens all those whose opinions in Religion do not bend to those of the Legislative authority. Distant as it may be in its present form from the Inquisition, it differs from it only in degree. The one is the first step, the other the last in the career of intolerance.”
That is precisely what these Ten Commandments displays do: degrade from the equal rank of citizens all those whose religious opinions dissent from the religion of these politicians.
Equality is still very much an aspiration in this country. But we cannot build it without the bedrock of church-state separation.
So why are AU’s lawsuits a big deal? Our lawsuits challenging these displays are more important now than ever. We are stopping what will inevitably become worse violations of our true religious freedom and defending the foundation for an equality this country has long aspired to attain. That’s why.
Andrew L. Seidel is AU’s vice president of Strategic Communications. He is a constitutional attorney and the author of two books.