ABSTRACT

Various backpedaling Christians have argued, sometimes successfully, that the cross of Jesus is not really a religious image, but merely a traditional cemetery adornment or a historical marker indicating Spanish settlement in America. The Supreme Court famously promoted this effort to secularize Christian symbols with its "plastic reindeer rule" in the Pawtucket, Rhode Island, case in 1984. A city-owned Nativity scene on private property was allowed because images of Santa Claus, reindeer, a clown, a teddy bear, and an elephant somehow detoxified the Christian content of the creche. A case involving Jersey City, New Jersey may one day allow the court to extricate itself from reindeer-mindedness and do what Justice Kennedy so sensibly suggested. When the ACLU sued over the city's creche and menorah, the city tried the conventional reindeer strategy, adding some trivial secular symbols.