*Sigh*
This is one of those debates that seems to come up every few months on the CFC forums. Against my better judgement I'll step into this one.
In the wider Western context the separation of Church and State dates back to Friedrich Barbarossa's "Drang nach Südden" and his struggles with Pope Alexander III over primacy in Europe. Effectively, the post-Roman collapse Europeans had been trying since Charlemagne to re-establish a Christian empire, Roman-style, in Europe but hadn't quite gotten it right. One of the biting questions about this empire was who should ultimately be supreme ruler of it - the secular emperor who achieved his position through conquest and blood lines, or the Pope? In other words, should ultimate power rest with the church or the state? Should there be a difference between the two? With Friedrich's failed attempts to bring Italy under his sway, the two remained separate. The Protestant reformation of the 16th and 17th centuries led to two centuries of warfare between Catholics and Protestants, culminating in the big finale of the Thirty Years War, leaving a lot of people in Europe wondering if religion was all it's cracked up to be.
This was the mindset of the first English settlers to the Americas. The English Civil War, Oliver Cromwell's tyranny and the so-called "Bloodless Revolution" of 1688 left a deep impression on English colonists, who created a movement called "Deism" in the Enlightenment. American Deists' beliefs were simply that though they believed strongly in God, they distrusted religions as imperfect human attempts to define and understand God. They looked at the Catholic Church of their day as a bloated, corrupt bureaucracy that wanted power and Earthly wealth. They were committed Protestants who believed Henry VIII's separation from the Catholic Church was absolutely necessary but they also saw the resulting Church of England - the Anglicans - as having become just as corrupt as the Catholics had been. The lesson they drew from the Anglican experience was that when religion is mixed with government, the inevitable result is corruption of/by both. This is a source of confusion for many modern American religious extremists, who can't seem to bridge that understanding between the American Founding Fathers' being quite devoted to God (except for atheists like Ben Franklin) but yet distrusting religion. Modern American Christian fundamentalists love to quote ad nauseum religious citations from the Founding Fathers without reading the context in which those remarks were made.
The American Constitution was framed therefore with a strict division between state and religion, quite simply. It was not intended to be anti-religious, but it was saying simply that while religion has its place in society, that place is not in the government. Anyone can practice whatever religion they want in the country, but they do not have the right to force anyone else to practice that religion, and especially commensurate with that aspect the government is not allowed to endorse or in any way support any particular religion. This is why, in rather clear form, putting a religious monument on government property in the U.S. is unconstitutional. One can erect a monument to the Ten Commandments on private property, on a church, on a private organization's property - anywhere (abiding by local building codes)
except government property. This is an aspect of American society that mystifies me; American religious zealots have this convoluted logic that says they should be able to put their religious symbols anywhere and everywhere they want, disregarding the Constitution and local laws, and if they can't impose their religious views in this way on others then
it is an abridgement of their religious rights. Since their religion says they must prosyletize, any attempt to stop them from doing so, all laws be damned, is against their rights. WTF? That's circular logic.
The aspect of Separation of Church and State you seem to be missing is that it is not about majorities, it's about
all of society. Clearly, even if they are a minority, there are
some people in that town who do not want such religious symbols on their public property - and it is their public property as much as it is those who want it there. This would be a clear case of a majority enforcing their religious beliefs on a community against the will of some in that community. This is taking place in a microcosm of small-town Alabama and makes much more sense in a place like New York or California where diversity is extreme, but the law is universal within the United States and is clear: a government cannot support or endorse any religion. Putting a religious monument on government property is a de facto tacit endorsement for that religion. Again, the Constitution is not anti-religion, it simply makes a clear distinction between the public (government) and private (non-government) practice of it.
The Alabama case you are alluding to is clear-cut. the Constitution says no; it's that simple. Move the monument somehwre else onto private property, or have local interested townspeople get a collection together and buy a small but prominent piece of land where it can be put on display.
This the Constitution protects as religious expression. Putting it on government property was a no-brainer, obviously intended to provoke just such a national response in the same spirit as the John Scopes trial in Tennessee in 1925. The sight of an Alabama Supreme Court Justice refusing to uphold the law he is supposed to represent - i.e., refusal to do his job - seriously undermines the credibility of his court, and in almost any other country in the West he would have been drummed out of the court in disgrace. If he doesn't believe in the laws he is working for, then perhaps a career change is in order. He does not have the luxury of selectively upholding only the laws he likes. He should be fired. I have met some people from Alabama in my travels and they've seemed to me to be upright, intelligent and modern people, but unfortunately this kind of idiocy re-enforces old stereotypes about religion-bludgeoned school-deprived backwoods hicks. I am reminded of the last few lines of the Neil Young song:
What are you doing Alabama?
You got the rest of the union
to help you along
What's going wrong?