In my work with legal historian Professor Mark David Hall, we’ve shown that despite a widespread misunderstanding of the role of Christianity in our founding and decades of bad Supreme Court rulings, such displays are constitutional — a lesson the ACLU and others who challenged the Louisiana law are likely to learn soon.
While the founders were uniformly opposed to government imposing religion, they did think religion, especially Christianity, was extremely important to the founding of the country. They understood that humans are created in the image of God and instilled with dignity. And if people have dignity, they must have rights to protect that dignity. This is the religious inspiration for the huge number of rights enumerated for all citizens at the founding of the republic.
The founders also believed that to ensure the success of the American experiment, people needed to use those rights responsibly. Put bluntly, they must be moral. George Washington said in his Farewell Address, “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports.” For a republican form of government to work, you must have a moral people, meaning a religious people.
What about Thomas Jefferson, you may ask? He is held up as the poster child for the strict separation of church and state, famously informing the Danbury Baptist Association in 1802 that the First Amendment created a “wall of separation between Church & State.”
The purpose of Jefferson’s letter was to reassure the Baptist congregation that the government wouldn’t interfere with their church, not that religion would have no place in the actions of government. He did not think the Constitution kept the government out of the business of religion altogether. For instance, as governor of Virginia, he invited his fellow Americans to join him in prayer. Jefferson also made the War Department and Treasury Department buildings available for church services. So, in his own political life, Jefferson didn’t act as if there were a wall of separation between church and state. //
Shortly after Gov. Jeff Landry signed the Louisiana law mandating displays of the Ten Commandments in classrooms, the American Civil Liberties Union sued. It claimed the Ten Commandments are not a source of American law and that having the displays would unconstitutionally expose some people to a religion they don’t believe in. A few months later, a federal judge ruled in the ACLU’s favor, and the state appealed to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. Professor Hall and I submitted an amicus brief in support of Louisiana with the appellate court.
