Must the public square be secular?

The city commissioned the statues in 2023 to honor police officers and firefighters, for whom St. Michael and St. Florian have long served as traditional symbols of courage, protection, and sacrifice. In response, a group of Quincy residents, backed by the ACLU of Massachusetts and the Freedom From Religion Foundation, sued to block their installation on the grounds that placing images of saints at a municipal building would amount to an unlawful government endorsement of religion.

In October, Superior Court Judge William Sullivan ruled for the plaintiffs, issuing an injunction that keeps the statues in storage pending appeal. The state's Supreme Judicial Court has now agreed to take the case, setting the stage for a consequential ruling on how much Massachusetts law requires the public square to be scrubbed of religious imagery and what the religious equality guaranteed by the state Constitution actually requires.

The plaintiffs argue that installing statues of St. Michael and St. Florian would violate Article 3 of the Massachusetts Constitution, part of the section known as the Declaration of Rights, which forbids the state from elevating one religious group over another. Placing figures associated with Catholicism at the entrance to a municipal building, they say, would amount to precisely that sort of unconstitutional preference.

But Article 3 was written to prevent religious subordination, not religious visibility. Its core command is that no religious sect or denomination may be rendered inferior to another "by law" — that government may not compel belief, mandate worship, impose religious tests, levy church taxes, or treat citizens unequally based on faith. It does not say, and it was never understood to mean, that public life must be purged of anything that might carry religious meaning.

From the beginning, Massachusetts rejected that cramped view of religious liberty. John Adams, the principal author of the state constitution, saw no contradiction between freedom of conscience and the legitimacy of religion in civic life. The document begins with a preamble that acknowledges "the goodness of the great Legislator of the universe" for the people's liberties. Article 3 speaks unabashedly of "piety, religion, and morality" as supports of good government. None of this was thought to establish a church or to reduce dissenters to second-class status. It reflected a basic truth the founding generation took for granted: Freedom of religion does not require freedom from religion.

Yet that is the leap the Quincy lawsuit invites the courts to make — and that Judge Sullivan approved. The claim is not that anyone will be forced to pray beneath the statues, fund a church, or profess a creed. It is that merely encountering figures with religious associations at a government building is itself a constitutional injury.

In his ruling, Sullivan concluded that the statues' religious meaning overrides any other significance they might have. He dismissed the city's explanation that the figures honor first responders as "self-serving" semantics — because Michael and Florian are saints, they could function only as religious symbols, regardless of their longstanding connection with policing and firefighting.

More striking was the court's treatment of harm. Sullivan credited the plaintiffs' claim that merely encountering the statues at a government building could impose "emotional and psychological hurdles" on residents, making them feel unwelcome or unsure whether they would be treated equally. The test is no longer whether the government has coerced belief or imposed unequal legal status but whether someone might feel burdened by what they see. That is not neutrality. It is a theory of religious liberty so unmoored that it would require remaking civic space as Massachusetts has always understood it.

The implications of that theory are hard to miss. There is plenty of religious imagery on public land and buildings in Massachusetts, much of it more overtly devotional than the statues at issue in Quincy. The Supreme Judicial Court itself sits beneath a sculpture of Moses, clad in a tallis (a Jewish prayer shawl) and holding a scroll with the Ten Commandments. Another statue in the same building depicts "Religion" in the form of a woman with a Bible and a cross. Over the Dartmouth Street entrance of the Boston Public Library is a carving of Minerva, the Greek goddess of wisdom.

From the Ether Monument in Boston's Public Garden to the John Bridge statue on Cambridge Common to the National Monument to the Forefathers in Plymouth, biblical and religious imagery abounds in public spaces across the Commonwealth. These have always been understood as part of the state's history and civic culture — acknowledgments of the moral and religious sources that shaped public life, not commands to worship or believe. No one has ever thought these displays amounted to an establishment of religion or subordinated nonbelievers to second-class citizens.

Judge Sullivan acknowledged this long record but brushed it aside as the residue of "petty bigotries of the past." If the Supreme Judicial Court lets that reasoning stand, Quincy's statues will be only the first items on a much longer list. A constitutional theory that treats the patron saints of police officers and firefighters as a form of injury would require a comprehensive audit of the Commonwealth's public spaces to identify which monuments, carvings, and symbols must be condemned not for what they do but for how they might make someone feel.

A pluralistic society does not promise to shield citizens from anything they might find unfamiliar or unsettling. It promises equal treatment under the law for people of many beliefs, even when civic space reflects traditions they do not share. The Massachusetts Constitution was written to secure that kind of pluralism — one that distinguishes between coercion and exposure, between legal subordination and symbolic presence.

The statues of St. Michael and St. Florian sit in a storage facility solely because someone might find them objectionable. If the Supreme Judicial Court agrees that this is what the Constitution requires, the public square will be stripped of any vocabulary that honors sacrifice and service by referencing things beyond the state. That is not religious equality. It is its inversion: a rule that treats anything identifiably religious as, by definition, unwelcome. John Adams would have found such an outcome unthinkable. So should the Commonwealth's highest court.

Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe, from which this is reprinted with permission.

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