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This may turn out to be the first accommodationist court in years. "The wall of separation between church and state is a metaphor based on bad history," declared Chief Justice William Rehnquist in 1985. "It should be frankly and explicitly abandoned." The Lee case is also the first major test of Justice Clarence Thomas, who remarked in 1985, "My mother says that when they took God out of the schools, the schools went to hell. She may be right." Were Thomas and his colleagues to agree with Rehnquist, it could change dramatically the role that religion plays in America's marketplace of ideas -- and ultimately, in every citizen's private life.
If ever there was an issue cast in shades of gray, this is it. Faith is often a matter of given truths and absolute beliefs, but once it becomes entangled in law and politics, its certainties begin to blur. One of the primary fears of the separationists is that if government gets too involved with religion, the result will resemble the bloodless, lifeless state-backed churches in Europe. Many of the supporters of the church-state wall fear that politicians, bent on compromise more than conversion, would try to invent some inoffensive brand of faith -- the creche encircled by reindeer hauling Santa's sleigh. "What you are tending to see is a new secular state religion," says Lee Boothby, a Seventh-day Adventist who is general counsel with Americans United for Separation of Church and State. "It's not really religion."
Other separationists are most concerned with protecting atheists or members of minority faiths from pressure to conform. This is a far more diverse country than it was in 1892, when the Supreme Court declared, "This is a Christian nation." Millions of Americans attend worship services each week, but the locales range from Hindu temples in California to churches of snake- handling Pentecostalists in Appalachia. Baptist parents might like their child's school day to start with a Bible reading, but could a Muslim teacher choose a passage from the Koran instead? Do Satanists have the right to distribute materials at school? Would a santero football coach be allowed to sacrifice a chicken before the big game?
If only the Christian God is allowed to make public appearances, non- Christians fear they will be unprotected in many subtle ways. "The danger," notes Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe, a noted liberal constitutional expert, "is that those who are not part of the locally dominant culture will be reduced to a sort of second-class citizenship. Though they may not have to wear yellow stars on their sleeves, they will be given a message that they are outsiders."
On the other side, accommodationists make many of the same arguments with a different twist. It is religious people who have been ostracized, argues lawyer John Whitehead, founder of the Rutherford Institute, a not-for-profit religious-liberty advocacy organization backed by conservative Protestants. Whitehead entered the church-state fray in 1976 when he defended a fourth- grade girl in California whose teacher said she could not wear a cross on her necklace. "Society has been secularized, and the religious person finds he's the odd person out," Whitehead says. "In public schools, religion is something to be avoided, obsolete. I see kids expressing their beliefs as healthy."