The American Family Association of Tupelo, Miss., also has a poster campaign. "Hey, get busy!" says its Web site. "Let's place a copy of our motto 'In God We Trust' in every classroom in the country!" And if you're worried about lawsuits, it reassures, "the AFA Center for Law and Policy will be happy to defend without cost."

President Theodore Roosevelt tried to remove the motto from the nation's coins in 1907 and met with public resistance (the first and last leader to publicly question the motto).

Although the constitutionality of the country's motto has been challenged in court, it has never been found to violate the "establishment" clause of the First Amendment. Courts have viewed the motto, as well as the Pledge of Allegiance's "one nation under God," as a form of "ceremonial deism" and therefore protected.

Ceremonial deism basically postulates that there are seemingly religious statements and practices that have been around for so long and have become such an ordinary part of American life, that they've lost their religious meaning.

"There's a strange dance conservatives do when they litigate these things," says BYU law professor Frederick Gedicks, explaining the arguments that lawyers have used in court to keep God in the pledge and in the motto, on the grounds that, well, God doesn't exactly mean God in any kind of "religious" way. "Outside of court, though, they infuse it with pretty thick religious meaning."

The ceremonial deism argument is a compromise "that's not satisfactory to either group," says Creighton University professor R. Collin Mangrum, who teaches a class on "church and state."

To those who argue that the government's use of "In God We Trust" violates the Constitution's establishment clause because it does not clearly separate church and state, Mangrum responds: "Secular humanists don't seem to recognize that if you eradicate all reference to religion in the public forum, you have in effect adopted secular humanism. ... You in effect discriminate against religion."

The motto is clearly an endorsement of religion, says BYU's Gedicks. In fact, he says, "you could argue that the motto is an endorsement of a certain kind of conservative Christianity."

In the 1950s, adds religious studies professor Frank Flinn of Washington University in St. Louis, the motto was more neutral. "Nowadays, people are trying to put Christianity into it. 'In God We Trust' is coming to mean 'Jesus is our Savior.' This is the new subscript to that text."

For California activist atheist Michael Newdow, any religion endorsed by the government — even a nondenominational, vague religion — turns atheists into second-class citizens. It's all about equality, a religious version of segregated drinking fountains, says Newdow, who currently has a challenge to the national motto in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

The motto is "waved in our face to justify anti-atheist discrimination," echoes Rob Sherman, an Illinois atheist who, like Newdow, once challenged the constitutionality of the Pledge of Allegiance's "under God." The motto "is used by the Boy Scouts to justify excluding us." That's hardly ceremonial deism, he says.

But the arguments of Newdow, Sherman and others "have very few supporters compared to the other side," notes the First Amendment Center's Haynes. "In God We Trust" is by now part of the American psyche. "It's pretty quixotic to challenge it."

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E-mail: jarvik@desnews.com