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,” Daniel O. Conkle, Robert H. McKinney Professor of Law, Nelson Poynter Scholar, and Adjunct Professor of Religious Studies at Indiana University Bloomington, wrote on “The Establishment Clause and Religious Expression in Governmental Settings: Four Variables in Search of a Standard.” In the article, “Dan Conkle takes his cue from Justice Breyer’s Van Orden concurrence, exploring the possibility that we might abandon the search for a rule-based approach to evaluating government religious expression under the Establishment Clause and instead adopt a more flexible standard that would consider four variables: the degree to which the government’s religious expression involves coercion or aggressive imposition of a religious message, the nature and specificity of the expression (e.g., prayer vs. affirmation, sectarian vs. nonsectarian), the traditional character of the expression, and the degree to which the expression might be seen as private rather than public. While Conkle remains ambivalent about whether such a standard-based approach would be jurisprudentially wise, he demonstrates its utility in explaining the pattern of the Supreme Court’s decisions on government religious expression.” - From Introduction by William P. Marshall, Vivian E. Hamilton and John E. Taylor.