Top court targets 'civil religion'

Should Thanksgiving be made illegal as a national holiday and U.S. presidents stop issuing those annual Thanksgiving proclamations?

The idea may seem preposterous. But Thanksgiving is a typical part of the targeted phenomenon known as "civil religion," referring to generalized acknowledgments of the national heritage of faith in God that fit as many religions as possible.

A federal appeals court accommodated just that sort of objection when it outlawed the popular phrase "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance. The U.S. Supreme Court scrapped the ruling on technical grounds this year, but a future legal attack on the pledge phrase is anticipated.

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court is plunging into an equally emotional matter, the legality of the Ten Commandments displays on public property all over the nation.

Next year, the high court justices will hear arguments and rule on the memorials at the Texas Capitol and the courthouses in Kentucky's McCreary and Pulaski counties. Church-state separationists have challenged many similar monuments in court.

Opponents of displays say the commandments include explicitly religious demands about worshipping the one God.

On that point, display advocates agree with the 1980 dissent from William Rehnquist (now chief justice). He argued that the commandments have a "secular significance" due to their impact on the development of the West's legal codes.

The 1980 decision is also criticized in an important new conservative work, "The Supreme Court and Religion in American Life" (Princeton University Press, two volumes) by historian James Hitchcock.

To Hitchcock, the insidious intent of the Stone ruling was "to insulate the public sector from all religious influence." He finds it significant that the court banished the commandments without even ordering the usual arguments and briefs, showing how firmly entrenched strict interpretation of church-state separation has become.

The biblical commandments are central to Judaism and Christianity, but U.S. Muslim leaders have raised no strong objections to displays, perhaps because the Quran also says that God gave the law to Moses and teaches the same principles, though not in a single passage.

A partial exception is the Bible's command to worship and avoid work on the Sabbath (Saturday, transferred to Sunday by Christians). The Quran doesn't require Muslims to stop work for the entire day of weekly worship, but otherwise has a similar dictum: