When Secular Ideals and Religious Ideals Converge
I am not sure how I feel about this article at Slate, but it's an interesting attempt to gauge a judicial trend. Authors Avi Schick and Shaifali Puri claim that church-state jurisprudence has been derailed by a new line of reasoning, one that says of religious expression: if it is the same as other common secular expressions (like providing for the poor, visiting the sick...) it doesn't deserve special protection for being religious.
The court's rationale is that when accompanied by a passel of nonreligious items, otherwise religious symbols are cleansed of religious significance. But just as a stone bearing the commandment that "Thou shalt have no other gods before me" is no less a declaration of religious belief because it stands next to a plaque with the phrase "We hold these truths to be self-evident," a religious mandate to visit the sick is not magically transformed into a secular value simply because an atheist may feel compelled to do the same.
...
The insistence that religious conduct is essentially secular where it is consistent with any behavior that is also compelled by secular concerns might look like a convenient way to avoid determining the degree of religious expression or activity that government may tolerate. But it deprives both the court and the public of any principled way to reconcile the tensions in the Constitution.