An article from the Fall 2007 symposium issue of the West Virginia Law Review, Volume 110, on “The Religion Clauses in the 21st Century.” The symposium was convened by the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy and the West Virginia University College of Law on October April 12 and 13, 2007.

As part of the series of papers from the symposium panel “Government Religious Expression,” Frederick Gedicks, the Guy Anderson Chair & Professor of law, J. Reuben Clark Law School, Brigham Young University, and Roger Hendrix, President, Hendrix Consulting, wrote on “Uncivil Religion: Judeo-Christianity and the Ten Commandments.” “The principal papers here both take their starting points from the Supreme Court’s fractured decisions in McCreary County v. ACLU of Kentucky and Van Orden v. Perry. In their contribution, Gedicks and Hendrix explore the implications of Justice Scalia’s arguments in his McCreary County dissent that the Establishment Clause allows government to endorse monotheism. They show that Justice Scalia’s position is the latest attempt to invoke a Judeo-Christian “civil religion” as a force that can unify a diverse nation, but argue that this project is doomed to failure because the changing demographics of religion in the United States make it increasingly difficult to believe that a Judeo-Christian civil religion – or any civil religion – can produce unity rather than division. This is all the more true, they suggest, because the supposedly inclusive symbols of American civil religion are increasingly understood to carry sectarian messages associated with conservative forms of Christianity.” - From Introduction by William P. Marshall, Vivian E. Hamilton and John E. Taylor.