Let's put that another way: Most mainstream Americans, even today, think pretty highly of God. The secular intelligentsia is of another mind. That's clearly what counts around here. Anyway, it counts in argumentation before the federal courts, which have for 40 years been diligently misreading the First Amendment, construing it less as a protection for religious practice than as an impenetrable barrier to religious expression.
The secular intelligentsia so thoroughly controls the federal courts, not to mention the mass media, that word of this usurpation rarely leaks out. Ordinary Americans -- the likes of Judge Roy Moore -- must bear with the standard imputation that religion disturbs, rather than entrenches and enriches, the social peace.
Dedicating the Ten Commandments monument a couple of years back, Judge Moore reflected that its purpose was to remind the courts of Alabama and their officers that "to establish justice, we must invoke the favor and guidance of Almighty God."
He could have asked, innocently enough, what else there is to invoke. The ever-shifting standards of the federal judiciary? God might have been good enough for the founders; he was certainly good enough for the generality of political leaders who succeeded them (e.g., Abe Lincoln). He isn't quite good enough -- alas! -- for the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals or the Southern Poverty Law Center. But, then, as Robert Bork observes in a book out next month: Judges "are enacting the agenda of the cultural left."
The Ten Commandments may not be their thing. Paratroopers -- that's another matter.