Here’s what Supreme Court conservatives are ignoring in their crusade to protect religion

Thomas Jefferson coined the metaphor of a “wall of separation between church and state.” Ironically, the Supreme Court conservatives who supposedly want to tie the Constitution to its 18th-century origins ignore this central constitutional principle.

Jefferson’s point, embodied in the First Amendment’s prohibition of any “law respecting an establishment of religion,” was that the government should be secular. Religion’s place should be in our private lives, homes and houses of worship.

Unfortunately, the current conservative majority on the Supreme Court is obliterating any notion of a wall separating church and state. They are aggressively protecting the First Amendment right to freely exercise religion while ignoring the Establishment Clause.

Two years ago, the court ruled that religious schools can’t be held liable when they discriminate against teachers of secular subjects on the basis of age or disability. Last year, the court held that a city violated the free exercise of religion when it required that social service agencies placing children in foster care refrain from discrimination based on sexual orientation.

In June, the court held that Maine violated the First Amendment when it provided subsidies for private secular education but not for religious instruction in rural areas without public schools. A few days later, the court held that a school system violated the free exercise and free speech rights of a high school football coach by prohibiting him from engaging in prayer on the field after games, ignoring a half century of precedents prohibiting prayer in public schools.

In that ruling, the court overruled a legal test used since 1971 to determine whether the Establishment Clause was violated. Under this test, governments could not constitutionally take actions that have no secular purpose; that work primarily to advance or inhibit religion; or that exhibit excessive entanglement with religion.

Instead, the current court found that “the line that courts and governments must draw between the permissible and the impermissible” must take account of history and “the understanding of the Founding Fathers.” From this perspective, the government violates the Constitution only if it coerces religious participation. Religious symbols are now allowed on government property, and governments apparently may fund religious schools without restriction.

The justices haven’t been shy about admitting that’s what they’re doing. In a recent speech at Notre Dame Law School’s Religious Liberty Initiative in Rome, Justice Samuel Alito declared that “religious liberty is under attack.” He lamented the increasing secularization of society and paraphrased a quote from St. Augustine’s “Confessions” — “Our hearts are restless until we rest in God” — closing with the promise that “the champions of religious liberty, who go out as wise as serpents and as harmless as doves, can expect to find hearts that are open to their message.”

There is no basis for Alito’s claim that religion is under attack. Enforcing the separation of church and state does not amount to hostility to religion. Rather, it recognizes the importance of a secular government. But Alito and his fellow conservatives on the high court reject this for the sake of aggressively advancing religion.

This approach is likely to continue in the coming term of the court, when it is expected to consider whether a person has a right to violate state law by discriminating based on sexual orientation.

The answer should be clear: Free exercise of religion does not provide an exemption from anti-discrimination laws. But no one expects the court to reach that conclusion.

The court is overruling decades of decisions to dramatically expand protections for religion and read the Establishment Clause out of the Constitution.

Shortly before leaving the court, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor powerfully observed: “Those who would renegotiate the boundaries between church and state must therefore answer a difficult question: Why would we trade a system that has served us so well for one that has served others so poorly?”

The conservative justices have no answer to this question.