The Naked Public Square

From a Washington Post editorial, endorsing Judge Jones' opinion in the I.D. case:

If a school district adopts a policy of promoting a religious cosmology, however couched, in an effort to undermine science and thereby instill religious values, that policy must fall.

On its face, the Constitution does not prohibit the government from promoting a religious world view. It prohibits the government from promoting a particular sect. The Warren Court, though, basically attempted to expand the prohibition to mean that the government cannot promote/endorse belief in God at all (especially in the classroom), which is the genesis of the WaPo quote above.

It's a curious development. Here's an allegorical story about it that I wrote for Catholic Exchange. The gist of the story is this: By proscribing God from the public square (in the class room, saying I.D. is veiled religion and therefore cannot be taught alongside atheistic evolution), the government endorses a different religion: that of atheism. If you don't think atheism is a religion, you haven't talked to many atheists and felt their fervor; you haven't been reading their dogmatic works; you haven't been following the jurisprudence that recognizes it as a religion. Why does atheism get the public field all to itself? I've never received a satisfactory answer to that question. The secularists say it's simple neutrality, but it's simply not. It's a terribly lopsided victory for the religion that denies God.