“We are a religious people.…” The United States Supreme Court likes to quote this dictum by Justice William O. Douglas, who coined the phrase to accompany a decision in 1952. The Court has not been trying to provide America’s pious Little Jack Horners with new reasons to say, “What a good boy am I!” The justices are not supposed to favor particular religions or to discriminate against irreligion. They merely have been explaining why their legal decisions take into account the sentiments of so many citizens on the delicate subject of religion.

Two centuries ago seers might have had good reason to expect the court one day to say, “We are a secular people.…” The charter for the new nation was secular, or nonreligious. Its Constitution differed from the written covenants of other nations because it committed no one to a religious faith. Nine of the thirteen original colonies had tried to perpetuate age-old European practices in which citizens were taxed for the support of privileged churches, but these establishments were soon to crumble. The First Amendment to the Constitution asked for congressional hands off where religion was concerned. Only a small percentage of the citizens then belonged to or attended churches, and the philosophy of the Enlightenment often beckoned the educated away from conventional forms of religion.

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