The police, to do their job well, rely on trusting, positive relationships between officers and the public they serve. Those relationships are strained when the police decide that it is part of their job to promote belief in God. We all must be able to trust that the police will respond to our needs the same regardless of our religious beliefs, and it’s more difficult to trust that this will happen when the police themselves take a religious position.
Usage by the Supreme Court[edit]
The first use of the term in a Supreme Court opinion is in Justice Brennan's dissenting opinion in Lynch v. Donnelly, 465 U.S. 668 (1984).
...I would suggest that such practices as the designation of "In God We Trust" as our national motto, or the references to God contained in the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag can best be understood, in Dean Rostow's apt phrase, as a form a "ceremonial deism," protected from Establishment Clause scrutiny chiefly because they have lost through rote repetition any significant religious content. [emphasis added, citations omitted]
In Elk Grove Unified School District v. Newdow, 542 U.S. 1 (2004). Justice O'Connor, concurring in the opinion, invoked the term in her analysis of the nature of the phrase "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance, saying in part
There are no de minimis violations of the Constitution – no constitutional harms so slight that the courts are obliged to ignore them. Given the values that the Establishment Clause was meant to serve, however, I believe that government can, in a discrete category of cases, acknowledge or refer to the divine without offending the Constitution. This category of "ceremonial deism" most clearly encompasses such things as the national motto ("In God We Trust"), religious references in traditional patriotic songs such as "The Star-Spangled Banner", and the words with which the Marshal of this Court opens each of its sessions ("God save the United States and this honorable Court"). These references are not minor trespasses upon the Establishment Clause to which I turn a blind eye. Instead, their history, character, and context prevent them from being constitutional violations at all. [emphasis added, citations omitted]
Professor Martha Nussbaum at the University of Chicago Law school stated in 2008 that "'Ceremonial Deism' is an odd name for a ritual affirmation that a Deist would be very reluctant to endorse, since Deists think of God as a rational causal principle but not as a personal judge and father." [1]
