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Massachusetts Court Says Town Can’t Build Statues Of Christian Heroes Because They’re Christian

A city honoring its police officers and firefighters with the patron saints those men and women have invoked for generations is not establishing a religion.

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Massachusetts’ highest court just handed the ACLU a powerful new tool for scrubbing religious references from public life, and it did so by inventing an injury nobody has suffered.

The Supreme Judicial Court blocked Quincy, Massachusetts, from installing two bronze statues of St. Michael the Archangel and St. Florian outside its new public safety building, not because the city coerced anyone into worship, funded a church, or discriminated against a resident, but because the statues are new, large, and “closely affiliated with a particular religion.” That’s the entire violation: bronze that might make someone think of Catholicism. If that reasoning survives, it won’t stop at two statues in Quincy. 

Quincy spent $850,000 building the statues to honor the police officers and firefighters who serve the city. Mayor Thomas Koch chose St. Michael and St. Florian because they capture something ordinary civic plaques cannot: courage that runs toward danger rather than from it, patrons those professions have invoked for centuries. The court didn’t dispute that. It ruled the statues could still convey “implicit government support” for Catholicism and, as a result, “subordination of other religions,” reviving in substance the very faulty inquiry the U.S. Supreme Court has spent the last several years dismantling under the federal establishment clause. 

Neutrality means treating religious and secular expression evenhandedly, not treating religious expression as inherently suspect the moment it appears on public property. A test that singles out statues for scrutiny because they are “closely affiliated with a particular religion,” while a mural of secular civic virtues would draw no such review, is not neutral toward religion. It is hostile to it. Courts are not........

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