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If the court's conservative majority is taking its cues from the Bush Administration, it promises to go much further to usher in a new era of accommodation. Solicitor General Kenneth Starr argued the Administration's position in the Lee case. He maintained that the government promotion of + religion through civic ceremonies does not violate the Constitution if coercion is not involved. Students who did not want to pray at graduation, Starr implied, could sit without joining in prayer or skip the exercises.
If the Supreme Court agrees with that position and decides to apply it across the board, the new test of the separation of church and state would not consider whether an action favors religion or whether it entangles church and state but rather whether it forces people to join in expressions of a religious belief. The implications of such a change are radical and would call into question hundreds of settled cases. "This will tear the country and each county apart," says Seventh-Day Adventist Boothby. "The unfortunate result would be to create more religious controversy, discontent and disharmony." Says Laycock: "All sorts of astonishing things become O.K. The Constitution then means a lot less than we've thought." Theoretically, Congress could decide, for example, that it would pay the salaries of preferred members of the clergy. Even less outrageous consequences, such as requiring that all public functions begin with a nondenominational prayer, could be highly divisive.
A country already wrestling with a new tribalism, with racial tensions and cultural clashes that set language and law on edge, cannot afford to slip further into religious contention. Some yardstick of moderation, and perhaps a measure of common sense, is necessary. What is too often missing from all the talk of religious and secular rights is any mention of mutual respect. When people claim the right to pray or not to pray, to worship or not to worship, as they choose, they must also respect the right of others to choose differently. For government to arbitrate in such intensely personal matters invites insurrection; but if the court and the Congress decide to distance themselves from religious disputes, they must also keep the playing field level.
For God to be kept out of the classroom or out of America's public debate by nervous school administrators or overcautious politicians serves no one's interests. That restriction prevents people from drawing on this country's rich and diverse religious heritage for guidance, and it degrades the nation's moral discourse by placing a whole realm of theological reasoning out of bounds. The price of that sort of quarantine, at a time of moral dislocation, is -- and has been -- far too high. The courts need to find a better balance between separation and accommodation -- and Americans need to respect the new religious freedom they would gain as a result.