Is it ever okay to do this? I’ll leave it up to you to decide. Did America’s Founders do this? I assert, yes. Ted Kennedy did something very similar to what America’s Founders and the theologians they followed did. Kennedy spoke on behalf of the Senate Floor and argued in favor of hate crimes laws that protect sexual orientation at the Federal level and invoked Leviticus. He (obviously) quoted only parts of Leviticus and ignored ...

This exists in his 1813 letter, written in the context of Britain’s repeal of a law that made it a crime to deny the Trinity, John Adams writes this to the militant anti-Trinitarian, Thomas Jefferson: We can never be so certain of any prophecy, or the fulfillment of any prophecy, or of any miracle, or the design of any miracle, as we are from the revelation of nature, that is, nature’s God, that two and ...

He well understands the concept until he gets to the Ten Commandments. Justice Scalia, in his dissent in MCCREARY implies that “monotheism” has some type of constitutional privilege over non-monotheistic religions, at least in the context of government endorsement of monotheistic, over non-monotheistic religions. In that opinion he writes: Besides appealing to the demonstrably false principle that the government cannot favor religion over irreligion, today’s opinion suggests that the posting of the Ten Commandments violates ...

As I noted previously, I think Judge Michael McConnell of the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals one of the best Establishment Clause scholars. And he shows off his talent in his most recent opinion. I’m not going to analyze the ins and outs of his Establishment Clause jurisprudence (you have Eugene Volokh for that). Rather, how the passage from the opinion well illustrates the impossibility of America being a “Christian Nation” in a civil governmental ...