Should Religious Symbols be Displayed on Public Property?

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While the text of the Constitution does not prohibit religious symbolism in public places, it does not require it. Public officials have the freedom to decide whether the Ten Commandments should be posted in a courthouse or whether the public square should display a nativity scene at Christmas-time. Ironically, those who oppose religious symbolism in public places, and file lawsuits to enforce their preference of a censored public square, are actually instituting an irreversible orthodoxy of secularism usually imposed by unelected federal judges. Only in this latter scenario is there any real “coercion” regarding religion.

Freedom is curtailed when religious symbolism is banned from public places because neither elected officials nor their constituents are permitted to express or recognize through that symbol a belief in God, a recognition of a particular religious tradition, or a celebration of a religious holiday. A court order demanding removal of religious symbols sends a message of censorship of and hostility toward public acknowledgments of religion and, simultaneously, takes the issue out of the voters’ hands. Elected officials know they are accountable at the next election and can be replaced if their constituents disapprove of the religious symbol or display that official has erected or supported. An elected official has little recourse against a federal court order; voters have none.

Opponents of religious symbols in public places often complain that an elected official or body’s decision to erect or support a religious display is an “endorsement of religion” that makes those who do not revere the particular religious symbol feel like “political outsiders.” Mind you, we are talking about a display that does not command or prohibit any behavior or obeisance or even attention. It is simply on public property with the approval of a public official or officials and infringes only on the right to “feel” a particular way. No display of the Ten Commandments ever stood in a courthouse door blocking all atheists who attempted to enter.

This “feeling” of “outsidership,” if you will, becomes the basis for both a lawsuit and, upon the issuance of an order by a cooperating federal court, the judicially-imposed law for the public place under scrutiny. If the rule becomes, therefore, no religious symbols on public property, then those who supported the religious display have as much a right (if not more) to feel like “political outsiders” because the religion or display they supported is now considered unconstitutional and illegal on public property. Whereas before the people could support or oppose a controversial religious display with their subsequent votes, a court-ordered public purge of religious imagery requires the government to affirmatively discriminate against religion and remain officially atheistic.  In such a “secular” square only an atheist would always feel like the hypothetical “insider” that everyone else is clamoring to be.

While the idea that “the majority rules” can be abused, we have a Constitution (ratified by the majority) to balance the rights of the minority against the power of the majority.   The irony is that lawsuits brought to impose one’s averse feelings about a religious symbol on the entire community impose the reverse tyranny: the few over the many.  The self-governing freedom of the “consent of the governed” is then replaced with “government by the dissent.” The First Amendment was meant to be a shield to protect religion and its free exercise, not a sword with which to drive it from the public eye.