Massachusetts Court's Ruling Against Quincy's Saint Statues Wrongly Treats Religious Commemoration as Establishment
Source: Andrea Picciotti-Bayer. "Massachusetts Court: Town Can't Build Statues Of Christian Heroes." September 1, 2026. thefederalist.com
The Gist
The author argues that a Massachusetts court was wrong to stop the city of Quincy from putting up statues of Catholic saints to honor police and firefighters, because merely honoring religious figures tied to tradition isn't the same as the government establishing a religion. She warns this ruling could set a dangerous precedent that lets courts strip nearly any religiously-connected monument or name from public life.
Conclusion
The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court erred in blocking Quincy's statues of St. Michael and St. Florian, because commemorating religious figures tied to civic tradition does not constitute government establishment of religion.
Premises
- The court blocked the statues without any evidence of coercion, church funding, or discrimination—only because the statues are new, large, and closely affiliated with Catholicism.
- A test that singles out religious iconography for special scrutiny (while secular civic murals face no such review) is not neutral but hostile toward religion.
- American civic tradition has long commemorated religious figures and symbols (Junipero Serra statues, Ten Commandments friezes at SCOTUS, religious place names) without this being treated as establishment of religion.
- The court's reasoning—that a statue might 'convey' implicit government support for a religion—has no limiting principle and could be used to challenge other religiously-associated monuments, such as statues of Martin Luther King Jr.
- The U.S. Supreme Court has moved away from the Lemon test's suspicion-based framework toward a history-and-tradition approach that takes seriously the nation's religious heritage, and the Massachusetts court is regressing from this trend.
- Legal scholars (McConnell and Witte) have warned that nothing in the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights supports importing a Lemon-style test the U.S. Supreme Court has already abandoned as unworkable.
Assumptions
- Neutrality toward religion requires treating religious and secular expression evenhandedly rather than subjecting religious expression to heightened scrutiny.
- The absence of coercion or discrimination is sufficient to establish that no Establishment Clause violation occurred.
- Historical practice of religious commemoration in American civic life is itself evidence of constitutional permissibility, not merely evidence of past tolerance for entanglement.
- The primary motivation behind the ACLU's challenge and the court's ruling is ideological hostility to religion rather than a good-faith constitutional concern.
- Analogies between the Quincy statues and other commemorations (MLK, Junipero Serra, place names) are sufficiently similar to support the slippery-slope concern.