North Carolina: In God We Trust Can Stay

The Davidson County government building in Lexington, North Carolina, has an inscription reading 'In God We Trust' which was challenged in the courts. Lower courts upheld the constitutionality of the inscription and the Supreme Court has declined to review the case, so those decisions stand.

The Beaufort Gazette reports:

“The court has over the years avoided confronting the issue directly as to whether these kinds of public religious messages - of a ceremonial or symbolic nature - are impermissibly religious,” said Keith Werhan, a law professor at Tulane University in New Orleans. “I suspect it’s a question of letting sleeping dogs lie.”

Many religious conservatives will tout this as a victory for their god and their religion, ignoring the fact that declining to review a case doesn’t signal agreement with how the case has been decided. It simply means that the Court doesn’t want to get involved — and, in this case, there are lots of political reasons to avoid this issue for as long as is possible.

The 4th Circuit Court’s decision was based, in part, on the appearance of the phrase “In God We Trust” on the nations’s money. This is something which Michael Newdow is challenging and it’s one of the reasons why he is challenging it: by being allowed to continue, the presence of a religious invocation on American money justifies the invocation of similar beliefs in other contexts. Some people think that it’s “de minimis,” or a matter too small for the courts to be concerned with, but it’s use as precedent in other cases like this demonstrates that it’s not really de minimis after all.

James Morgan Jr., the county’s attorney, said that Ten Commandments displays are different from “In God We Trust,” which has “been displayed for decades on government buildings and on the coins and paper money.”

Is this an admission that the Ten Commandments really are an inappropriate endorsement of religion? If so, it’s an interesting development. I wonder how many other conservative lawyers will be arguing that some government endorsement of religion isn’t a “real” endorsement because it doesn’t go as far as a Ten Commandments monument.

 

Quick Poll: Do you approve of the phrase 'In God We Trust' being on American coins and being the national motto?

1. Yes: it acknowledges our debt and allegiance to God.
2. Yes: it recognizes America's historical connections to religion.
3. Yes: it expresses a ceremonial deism that everyone can agree on.
4. No: it's an expression of religious beliefs and the government shouldn't do that.
5. I don't know / don't care.
=

Click an option to vote, or View Current Poll Results

 

Read More:

• Separation of Church and State 101
• Church and State News
• Secularism 101