Professor Frederick Gedicks (BYU Law), as Andrew Hamilton notes below, argues in the linked paper that Lynch v. Donnelly is a really terrible Establishment Clause decision — indeed, “anti-canonical.” With respect, I see things a little differently than Fred. Fred’s claim that “secularized” religious symbols drain such symbols of their “religious significance” is a quite common one. “Secularism,” in Fred’s piece and for many academic critics of Lynch, means non-religious. “Secular” and “religious” are antipodes, and it would be inconceivable that a symbol might partake of both qualities. For Fred, the more “secular,” the less “religious.”
This is why Fred is confounded and maybe even a little irritated by the Lynch majority’s twin claims that (1) the crèche conveys a “secular” meaning, inasmuch as it symbolizes “a significant historical religious event long celebrated in the Western World,” and (2) the secular significance of the crèche does not in any way reduce or diminish its religious significance. Lynch, 465 U.S. 668, 680 (1984). For Lynch’s critics, when the government commemorates a religious event by displaying a religious symbol, it concomitantly bleeds that symbol of its “religious” significance. And this is also why critics like Fred prefer the dissenting position of Justice Brennan, who wrote that the majority was in reality “explain[ing] away” the crèche’s religious meaning,” or, as Justice Blackmun had it, that the majority was transforming the crèche into a “neutral harbinger of the holiday season.”
But it does not seem to me that the meaning of symbols is a zero sum game. Read more