The following is presented as part of The Columbian’s Opinion content, which offers a point of view in order to provoke thought and debate of civic issues. Opinions represent the viewpoint of the author. Unsigned editorials represent the consensus opinion of The Columbian’s editorial board, which operates independently of the news department.
Since Aug. 1, all public K-12 schools, colleges and universities in Louisiana are required to display our national motto — “In God We Trust” — in every classroom.
Louisiana House Bill 8 specifies a “poster or framed document” measuring at least 11 by 14 inches, upon which the motto is printed in a “large, easily readable font.” This law reflects a trend: In 2018, Florida required public schools to display the motto in every building, Arkansas enacted a similar law (2017) and South Dakota did the same in 2019.
In 2021, Texas lawmakers required all public schools and colleges to post the motto in a “conspicuous place” but only if the poster is donated. Recently the Texas Legislature seriously considered mandating the posting of The Ten Commandments in every classroom, as well.
These efforts are generally pictured as benign and noncoercive. Debbie Horton, the Louisiana state representative who sponsored HB 8, told The Lafayette Daily Advertiser: “I’m not asking you to accept my God or pushing religion on anyone … I just want children to see that there is a creator. I don’t see it as a controversial bill.”
And, after all, “In God We Trust” is already ubiquitous in our society. Just look at the dollar bills in your wallet.
Still, one wonders if this is a good idea. Trusting God takes place in the heart, and it’s probably presumptuous to make repetitive assertions of collective piety in classrooms and on dollar bills on behalf of a nation that — to be honest — doesn’t do that great a job of trusting God.
Besides, has anyone considered what the Almighty thinks about the casual appropriation of His or Her name for a national slogan on every dollar bill?
Jesus wasn’t fond of the root of all evil. He didn’t express any desire to replace Caesar’s image on Roman coins with his own. Jesus drove the moneychangers out of the temple with a whip, and he generally denounced laying up treasures on Earth instead of in heaven.
And yet money is the very vehicle by which most of us display our lack of trust in God by getting and spending as much as possible. Then we have the presumption to slap the Almighty’s name on every dollar bill, whether it’s dropped into a collection plate or slipped into a stripper’s G-string.
But there’s a bigger problem with the new Louisiana law: It’s hard to see how requiring the display of “In God We Trust” in public classrooms doesn’t violate the establishment clause of the Constitution’s First Amendment, which seems to take the government out of the religion business or, at least, forbids favoring one religion over another.
Yet HB 8 will almost certainly survive in the courts, which have reliably ruled that expressions of religion toward ceremonial ends do not violate the Constitution. That’s why our national legislative bodies, and many state legislatures, can open their sessions with a prayer offered up by a congressional chaplain. That’s why “In God We Trust” has been engraved on our money since the Civil War without running afoul of the law.
Generally the courts have relied on a notion called “ceremonial deism,” which holds that such acts as opening legislative sessions with a prayer or invoking God in our national motto do not violate the Constitution “chiefly because they have lost through rote repetition any significant religious content,” as Justice William Brennan put it in 1984.
In other words, religious acts and expressions by the state are constitutional precisely because the religion has been drained out of them by overuse. How can that be good for religion?
Besides, if posting our national motto in every classroom is a good idea, why not require it in all public places? Why not in the offices of city hall, at the department of motor vehicles, in the tax office and in public libraries?
House Bill 8’s sponsor answers this question: “I want children to see that there is a creator.” In other words, the bill is meant to be instructional — at taxpayers’ expense — rather than ceremonial.
And how does that not violate the separation of church and state?
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