The latest issue of the Harvard Law Review contains an extensive appreciation of a selection of Justice Breyer’s opinions. I thought to note one essay as particularly well done: Professor Richard Fallon’s discussion of Justice Breyer’s decisive concurrence in Van Orden v. Perry–one of two companion Ten Commandments decisions issued by the Court in 2005. In that concurrence, Justice Breyer decided for a variety of reasons that, he said, defied codification by test or iron rule, that the monument that had stood for many years on the grounds of the Texas state Capitol did not violate the Establishment Clause. Here is Professor Fallon (footnotes omitted):
Justice Breyer’s third ground for distinguishing prior cases, and especially McCreary County, seems to me to cut to the heart of the dilemma that the Supreme Court confronted. Even if the Texas monument’s long history did not dilute its religious message, that history served as a reminder that the Establishment Clause — read against the background of history — cannot, as Justice Breyer put it, “compel the government to purge from the public sphere all that in any way partakes of the religious.” From the beginning, religion has been woven in various ways into American public life. Recognition of this heritage does not, of course, point directly to the correct ruling in Van Orden. It does, however, help to identify the tension that Van Orden required the Court to resolve, or at least manage. Although the Supreme Court has frequently articulated a demand that the government must be neutral in matters of religion, neither that demand, nor what Justice Breyer referred to as the “Court’s other tests,” can “readily explain the Establishment Clause’s tolerance, for example, of the prayers that open legislative meetings; certain references to, and invocations of, the Deity in the public words of public officials; the public references to God on coins, decrees, and buildings; or the attention paid to the religious objectives of certain holidays, including Thanksgiving.”
Without purporting to offer a comprehensive resolution to the tension that the Court’s cases exhibit, Justice Breyer’s Van Orden concurrence suggests a narrow prescription that embodies pragmatic good sense. Although modern governments may not initiate novel forms of support for religious institutions and beliefs, the Establishment Clause should not be read to mandate the chiseling out — which in some cases might be quite literal — of all religious symbols and practices that have long formed part of the architecture of American public life, American public buildings, and American public monuments. To read the Clause so stringently would provoke anger at and resentment of the Supreme Court’s perceived hostility to religion far disproportionate to any good that this approach would achieve….
There is more, and it’s well-worth reading. I, too, admire Justice Breyer’s Van Orden concurrence, but while my reasons are similar to Professor Fallon’s, they are not identical. Perhaps the primary point of divergence in our perspectives is that my defense of historical settlements and practices as a guide to interpreting the meaning of the religion clauses does not depend either on judges’ pragmatic calculations about the comparative social divisiveness of ruling this way or that, or on an overarching or master commitment to religious neutrality, but instead on the intrinsic worth of long-standing historical settlements and customs (doctrinal and social) as a method of conciliating the conflicts that attend these controversies:
The past lies in us and is constitutive of who we are, and though history may be epistemically uncertain, logical certitude is hardly the point of a theory of religious liberty. This point serves as the connection to social history. If the doctrinal negotiations of the past are worthy, though imperfect, counselors for the predicaments of the present–if they are that which we know, and their memory is that which we have–then the objects of those negotiations deserve our attention as well. Political communities are not a-temporal or static associations. They are trans-generational enterprises that depend on the transmission of political and social histories….
The past, in sum, is a beacon. It is a consolation, sometimes effective, other times not, against the ravages of conflict, incommensurability, sacrifice, and tragic loss.
The Tragedy of Religious Freedom 123, 144.
