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LYNCH v. DONNELLY

Supreme Court of the United States Argued October 4, 1983 Decided March 5, 1984

Full case name: LYNCH, MAYOR OF PAWTUCKET, ET AL. v. DONNELLY, ET AL. 
CERTIORARI TO THE UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE FIRST CIRCUIT

Docket #: No. 82-1256

Citations: 465 U.S. 668; S. Ct. 1355 (1984)

Prior history: Judgment for plaintiff Donnelly, et al, 525 F. Supp 1105 (D.R.I. 1981); affirmed, 691 F2nd 1029 (1st Cir. 1982); cert. granted, 460 U.S. 1080 (1983); reversed for Lynch, Mayor of Pawtucket, et al., 104 S. Ct. 1355 (1984)

Holding Notwithstanding the religious significance of the creche, the City of Pawtucket did not violate the Establishment Clause by displaying a creche as part of a larger display celebrating the Christmas season and not for the purpose of advancing or endorsing a specific religion.

Court membership Chief Justice: Warren Burger Associate Justices: Rhenquist, White, Powell, O’Connor, Brennan, Marshall, Blackmun and Stevens

Case opinions BURGER, C. J., delivered the opinion of the Court, in which WHITE, POWELL, REHNQUIST, and O'CONNOR, JJ., joined. O'CONNOR, J., filed a concurring opinion, post, p. 687. BRENNAN, J., filed a dissenting opinion, in which MARSHALL, BLACKMUN, and STEVENS, JJ., joined, post, p. 694. BLACKMUN, J., filed a dissenting opinion, in which STEVENS, J., joined, post, p. 726.

Laws applied U.S. Const. amend. I

Lynch v. Donnelly, 465 U.S. 668; S. Ct. 1355 (1984), decided by the Supreme Court of the United States in 1984, reversed the decisions of two lower courts and found that the City of Pawtucket’s tradition of including a nativity scene as part of its annual Christmas holiday display did not violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.

Background

The city of Pawtucket, Rhode Island, had a 40-year tradition of setting up its Christmas display on the property of a local nonprofit organization. The display featured a variety of traditional Christmas symbols, including a crèche or Nativity scene (with images of the Infant Jesus, Mary and Joseph, angels, shepherds, kings, and animals, all ranging in height from 5" to 5') surrounded by other well-known secular symbols of Christmas, such as a wishing-well, reindeer, a Christmas Tree, Santa Claus and candy-striped poles.

In 1981, a group of local Pawtucket residents and individual members of the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit at the Rhode Island Federal District Court, claiming that the city’s ownership and display of religious symbols was a violation of the Establishment Clause because it constituted an endorsement of religion.

Court Decision

Chief Justice Warren Burger lead a 5-4 majority in finding that the City of Pawtucket could constitutionally continue to display a crèche with its Christmas display.

Chief Justice Burger's opinion for the Court in Lynch began by expanding on the theme that America has a religious heritage pronounced in the Supreme Court’s earlier decision of Marsh v. Chambers, where legislative chaplains and the tradition of offering prayers in the sessions of the legislatures were upheld. The Supreme Court cited Justice William O. Douglas’ observation in Zorach v. Clauson, 343 U.S. 306 (1952), that "[w]e are a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being…" and gave examples of accepted religious symbols, such as the national motto "In God We Trust," the affirmation "one nation under God" in the pledge of allegiance, and the recognition of both Thanksgiving and Christmas as national holidays.

In this context, the majority of the Supreme Court decided that the city's inclusion of the creche in its Christmas display had a legitimate secular purpose in recognizing "the historical origins of this traditional event long [celebrated] as a National Holiday," and that its primary effect was not to advance religion:

The display is sponsored by the city to celebrate the Holiday and to depict the origins of that Holiday. These are legitimate secular purposes. The District Court's inference, drawn from the religious nature of the creche, that the city has no secular purpose was, on this record, clearly erroneous.

The majority opinion found, moreover, that the benefit to religion bestowed by the display of the crèche in this context was "indirect, remote, and incidental...."

O’Connor’s Concurring Opinion

Justic Sandra O’Connor, in addition to joining the majority opinion in Lynch, rendered a concurring opinion, setting forth her views on how to read the Establishment Clause. The Establishment Clause, according to Justice O’Connor, prohibits government from advancing religion affecting person's standing in the political community. This principle can be violated in two ways: First, is “excessive entanglement” with specific religious institutions. The second is government endorsement or disapproval of a specific religion, which sends a message to non-adherents that they are outsiders, and an accompanying message to adherents that they are insiders, of the political community. This second prong is sometimes referred to as the "Endorsement Test." In Lynch, according to Justice O’Connor, Pawtucket’s display of a crèche in the context of a larger season celebration constituted neither an excessive entanglement with a specific religion nor an endorsement of a specific religion in such a way that religious people would feel specially favored, or non-adherents feel disfavored, by the City.

Dissenting Opinion

Justice Brennen, joined by Justices Stevens, Marshall and Blackmun, wrote a dissent in which he argued that a life-sized display depicting the biblical description of the birth of Christ, the central figure of Christianity, is patently unconstitutional. To the dissenters, the majority’s opinion failed to follow previous Court decisions related to the Establishment clause because they found the holiday of Christmas “agreeable.”

Pawtucket's maintenance and display at public expense of a symbol as distinctively sectarian as a creche simply cannot be squared with our prior cases. And it is plainly contrary to the purposes and values of the Establishment Clause to pretend, as the Court does, that the otherwise secular setting of Pawtucket's nativity scene dilutes in some fashion the creche's singular religiosity, or that the city's annual display reflects nothing more than an "acknowledgment" of our shared national heritage. Neither the character of the Christmas holiday itself, nor our heritage of religious expression supports this result. Indeed, our remarkable and precious religious diversity as a Nation, which the Establishment Clause seeks to protect, runs directly counter to today's decision.

The dissent also argued strenuously that the use of such religious displays were clear violations of the tests used by the Court to determine if something violates the separation of church and state. The “primary effect” of including a Nativity scene in the display, the dissent found, is to “place the government’s imprimatur of approval on the particular religious benefits exemplified by the crèche.”

Brennan found as “offensive” what he called the majority opinion’s new "plastic reindeer rule" – where a religious display is made acceptable so long as there are enough secular symbols to create a balance.

Significance

In this decision, the Supreme Court specifically refused to adopt an absolutist stance regarding the separation of church and state. According to Chief Justice Burger, the Establishment Clause does not demand a "strict separation of church and state," but instead demands accommodation between the two:

The Court has sometimes described the Religion Clauses as erecting a "wall" between church and state…. The metaphor has served as a reminder that the Establishment Clause forbids an established church or anything approaching it. But the metaphor itself is not a wholly accurate description of the practical aspects of the relationship that in fact exists between church and state. No significant segment of our society and no institution within it can exist in a vacuum or in total or absolute isolation from all the other parts, much less from government.

In County of Allegheny v. ACLU, 492 U.S. 573 (1989), the only Supreme Court crèche case following Lynch, the Court found unconstitutional a crèche placed on the staircase of the Allegheny County Courthouse and distinguished Lynch by noting, among other factors, that that there was a banner proclaiming “Gloria in Excelsis Deo,” a phrase that was deemed overt praise advancing the Christian religion. In the same opinion, the Court refused to find unconstitutional the display of a menorah (a symbol celebrating the Jewish holiday of Chanukah) as it was standing next to a Christmas tree and was a symbol of the season and not an endorsement of religion.

Similary, the Supreme Court, in the Decalogue cases, have struggled with the use of the Ten Commandments as a symbol of America’s religious heritage. McCreary County v. ACLU of Kentucky, 545 U.S. 844 (2005), and Van Orden v. Perry, 545 U.S. 677 (2005), decided on the same day by the Supreme Court, resulted in different conclusions as to whether the use of the Ten Commandments on public grounds is unconstitutional. In both cases, Justice Breyer appears to have been the swing vote. His concurring opinion in the Van Orden case, holding a monument displaying the Decalogue constitutional, is key. He found that any inquiry “requires us to consider the context of the display.” Justice Bryer then finds, consistent with the facts and holding of Lynch, that the 40-year history of the monument was an important factor: “Those 40 years suggest that the public visiting the capitol grounds has considered the religious aspect of the tablets' message as part of what is a broader moral and historical message reflective of a cultural heritage.”

Amicus Briefs

Rex Lee, the Solicitor General of the United States, filed an amicus brief in favor of the City’s position. Others who filed favoring the City’s position include the Coalition for Religious Liberty et al. by James J. Knicely and John W. Whitehead; for the Legal Foundation of America by David Crump; and for the Washington Legal Foundation by Daniel J. Popeo, Paul D. Kamenar, and Nicholas E. Calio. Briefs of amici curiae arguing for affirmance of the lower courts’ holdings were filed for the American Jewish Committee et al. by Samuel Rabinove; and for the Anti-Defamation League of B'Nai B'rith et al. by Justin J. Finger, Alan Dershowitz, Meyer Eisenberg, Jeffrey P. Sinensky, Nathan Z. Dershowitz, and Marc Stern.

See Also (Articles on Wikipedia)

Establishment Clause

County of Allegheny v. ACLU

Van Orden v. Perry

McCreary v. ACLU

References

Crabb, Kelly C., Religious Symbols, American Traditions and the Constitution, BYU L. Rev. 509-562 (1984).

Myers, Richard S., The establishment clause and the nativity scenes: a reassessment of Lynch v. Donnelly, 77 Ky L.J. 61 (1988).