As the publisher of an Internet "newspaper," my mailbox fills up with pieces from all sorts of organizations and individuals. I receive several pieces a week from the Christian Coalition, commenting on political events and pushing the cause de jour, calculated to arose the fear of the true believers towards spectre of godless liberalism and secular humanism that is destroying this Christian nation.

Today, the primates of the Christian Coalition directed their wrath towards the Supreme Court, which handed down two cases on public display of the Ten Commandments, one prohibiting the display of the Ten Commandments in a courthouse, the other one allowing them to be displayed on the Texas state capitol grounds.

In McCreary County, Kentucky v. ACLU, the court held that a copy of the Ten Commandments, framed in gold, and posted in a high-traffic area of the county courthouse, together with the expressed intent of the county governing body to affirm the religious nature of the display, was an unconstitutional violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, and upheld the district court's preliminary injunction ordering the county to remove it.

In Orden v. Perry, however, the court ruled just the opposite. A large stone monument on the Texas capitol grounds containing the Ten Commandments together with an eye inside of a pyramid, the Star of David and the Greek letters Alpha and Omega, was "passive" and therefore not in violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.

Both cases were 5-4 with Sandra Day O'Conner as the swing justice.

Oddly enough, while the Christian Coalition bitterly condemned McCreary County, it failed to mention Orden, a classic example of seeing the glass half-empty.

Church-state jurisprudence has always been unsatisfactory. The Supreme Court over the years has found it impossible to consistently develop workable rules that can guide judges through this difficult and highly emotional litigation. Today, it failed once again to establish consistent guiding principles, stating that the issue had to be decided case by case.

My theory is that the law as we understand it has never dealt well with institutions and practices that preceded the development of the written law -- like marriage, religion and war. When the clash is unavoidable, as in a divorce case, the outcome is never completely satisfactory, as any judge can testify. A judge, in all of his or her wisdom, cannot through the law put back together family relationships that are broken or settle a church fight.

The Christian Coalition is just one example of the countless movements in our history that attempted, and often succeeded, in usurping the civil authority. When they succeeded, it was usually not for long. Probably the most brilliant of those victories was the Puritan revolution in England, which abolished the monarchy, executed the king and established the reform faith as the established church. The Puritan-dominated parliament, however, shortly dissolved into anarchy and was ended by Oliver Cromwell, who ruled England as an absolute dictator. Shortly after Cromwell died, the monarchy was revived, the Stuart kings returned, and the Puritan dream of a nation dominated by the righteous ended in failure and disappointment.

The founding fathers drafted the Constitution and the Bill of Rights with first-hand knowledge of how the established churches had for centuries oppressed the people of Europe, and they were determined not to let it happen here. They wanted no witch-burnings or inquisitions in this new republic. When right-wing evangelicals claim that the founders did not intend state and church to be separated, they are incorrect. The founders were seeped in the philosophy of the Enlightenment, having studied such luminaries as Locke, Voltaire, Montesquieu, Bayle and Diderot. They learned from these writers a faith in human reason and a healthy skepticism towards the claims of ecclesiastical authority. Having defeated the British with their established church, they were not about to be dictated to by clergymen of any ilk.

James Madison, who can justly be called the father of the Constitution was very clear about this:

I must admit moreover that it may not be easy, in every possible case, to trace the line of separation between the rights of religion and the Civil authority with such distinctness as to avoid collisions & doubts on unessential points. The tendency to a usurpation on one side or the other, or to a corrupting coalition or alliance between them, will be best guarded agst by an entire abstinance of the Govt from interference in any way whatever, beyond the necessity of preserving public order, & protecting each sect agst trespasses on its legal rights by others. -- Letter from James Madison to Reverend Adams (1832), in 9 The Writings of James Madison, 1819-1836, at 484 (Gaillard Hunt ed., 1910)

I will go even further: Religion, and particularly the Christian religion, has succeeded in this nation because of, and not in spite of, the separation of church and state. In countries with an established church, or which have a history of an established church, religion languishes. There is nothing so inimical to the flourishing of the faith than enforced observance, which invariably becomes in short order an empty exercise. The third temptation of Christ was the lure of earthly power, which he refused. The religious right appears to be pursuing earthly power with all its might. It is setting itself up for a nasty fall.