Please take my Establishment Clause test.

The Freedom From Religion Foundation sued to have the motto "In God We Trust" taken off U.S. money. The federal judge, applying a familiar old doctrine, dismissed the suit, saying "the Supreme Court has repeatedly assumed the motto's secular purpose and effect."

Here's my test: You have 30 seconds. Don't read the article and don't look anything up. Write one sentence articulating a secular purpose for having "In God We Trust" on the money. Do the best you can — that is, be on against the Freedom From Religion side for the purposes of this exercise.

ADDED: I will read all the comments later today and pick some winners, but after reading a few, I feel like saying that the requirement that a law have a secular purpose can be diminished to nothing if you accept the proposition that there is a secular purpose for religion. Government can always say it is using religion to mollify/control/improve people for worldly ends. The argument would be that as long as religion is the means and not the end, it's a secular purpose. Note that complete atheists could embrace this kind of religion (and I assume they have throughout history all over the world).

CORRECTION:  The original post said "on" where it should have said "against." That was confusing, and I'm very sorry. It makes no sense — perhaps you noticed — to articulate the FFR side, which is there is NO secular purpose. The idea is to come up with a secular purpose, and I wanted you to do your best at that, even if you'd prefer to see FFR win this.

"Typical observers of [Big Mountain Jesus] are more interested in giving it a high five or adorning it in ski gear than sitting before it in prayer."

Said the District Court, rejecting an Establishment Clause challenge by the Freedom From Religion Foundation, and prompting the First Things blog to say:

It’s unfortunate that current doctrine favors the trivialization of a religious symbol as evidence of its constitutionality, but that’s where we are. (Remember the candy canes and reindeer around the creche?)

Yeah, well, you know how to keep religious symbols from getting trivialized? Keep them away from the government. 

Roger Williams, “Mr. Cotton’s Letter Lately Printed, Examined and Answered” (dated 1644):

When they [the Church] have opened a gap in the hedge or wall of separation between the garden of the church and the wilderness of the world, God hath ever broke down the wall itself, removed the Candlestick, etc., and made His Garden a wilderness as it is this day. And that therefore if He will ever please to restore His garden and Paradise again, it must of necessity be walled in peculiarly unto Himself from the world, and all that be saved out of the world are to be transplanted out of the wilderness of the World.

But you may enjoy the wilderness, when you're out there skiing on Big Mountain and you encounter Jesus and give him a mitten or a high 5.

"Religious freedom does not mean freedom from religion."

"People of faith too often feel they can't express their faith publicly. And if they dare display it, they find themselves under attack from individuals and organizations that have nothing to do with them or their communities for that matter," said Rick Perry, signing the "Merry Christmas" bill.

One might wonder why such a law is necessary. Republican state Rep. Dwayne Bohac, who introduced the bill, explained how he had become upset upon hearing from his 8-year-old son that the Christmas tree at his public school was referred to as "a holiday tree."

Bohac said he brought his concerns to the school district office, where he was told words like "Christmas" weren't used at the school because officials were afraid of being sued.

As if, now, no one's going to get sued. Or is that the point? If the school officials avoid saying "Merry Christmas" and having Christmas trees because they are litigation averse, there's never a lawsuit. I think Perry et al. would love to have a lawsuit about this, even if they think they will lose it. There's political gain in any legal outcome.

And yet, even with this law, those officials might still avoid saying "Merry Christmas" and having Christmas trees because of timidity about lawsuits. It's not as if the new statute requires Christmas trees and Christmas greetings.

Perhaps all that ever happens is this political theater with Rick Perry celebrating Christmas in June. Perhaps that was the point.

ADDED: Perry's phrase "organizations that have nothing to do with them or their communities" is sending out the bat-signal to Madison's Freedom From Religion Foundation. 

Shouldn't the Freedom From Religion Foundation sue the Madison school district for the extensive celebration of a religious holiday?

From the Madison Metropolitan School District website:

Kwanzaa celebrated at two schools

Students and staff at Falk and Lowell Elementary Schools recently performed and displayed art projects that reflect the principles of Kwanzaa. The culmination of a semester’s work incorporating Culturally Relevant Practices, the celebration also featured the donations from the schools' service learning project to help build a school library in Ghana. Four MMSD elementary schools (also Hawthorne and Mendota) are working together to provide Culturally Relevant Practices and experiences for all their students.

Video of Madison teachers and children celebrating Kwanzaa at the link.

The school district will surely say that Kwanzaa is not a religious holiday, but what constitutes religion for Establishment Clause purposes? It's not an easy question. I say that as someone who has taught a law school class in Religion and the Constitution for many years.

I once gave an exam that challenged students to think about Establishment Clause problems inherent in an invented state program pushing environmentalism, defined by statute to mean "the belief in the importance of honoring and conserving the Earth’s resources, minimizing the impact of individual human beings on the Earth, and understanding one’s personal duty to inspire others to honor and conserve resources and to minimize human impact on Earth." In my hypothetical, schools were required to stage day-long Earth Day celebrations every year, praising nature and inspiring conservation, and teachers had to begin each school day with a "solemnification exercise" that included "a recitation enforcing the values of environmentalism along with a set of symbolic gestures," with this example, described in the state law:

On a small table, the teacher unfolds a green cloth to reveal a twig, a small stone, an egg, and a small box of good soil. The teacher opens the box, takes out a bit of soil and sprinkles it on the stone, egg, and twig, and says: "This is our Earth, which is given to us, to love and preserve, for all time." The students then repeat that phrase aloud, and the teacher carefully closes the box, rewraps the items, and puts them away.

My hypothetical environmentalism, like Kwanzaa, is at least a religion substitute, in that it attempts to capture the children's idealism and spiritual longings and to direct them into a particular ideology. It employs the devices of traditional religion: songs of celebration, symbolic gestures and rituals, incantations. In the case of Kwanzaa, based on what I've read, it was originally designed as an alternative to Christmas. And the 7th of the 7 principles of Kwanzaa is:

Imani (Faith): To believe with all our hearts in God, our people, our parents, our teachers, our leaders, and the righteousness and victory of our struggle.

Presumably the God part is watered down for school purposes, but watering down religion is a problem in itself.

ADDED: I see that at something called "The Official Kwanzaa Web Site" — what makes it "official"? — the "Imani/Faith" principle has no "God." It is otherwise word-for-word the same as what I've quoted above. Without God, the statement of faith is puzzling: believe with all your heart in our people and the righteousness of our struggle. That sounds like the worst of what governments have done grabbing at the hearts of young people.