44 members of the U.S. Congress (3 senators and 41 representatives) have signed onto a friend of the court legal brief by a pro-theocracy Christian organization founded by televangelist Pat Robertson. The brief urges the court to dismiss a lawsuit by an organization of non-religious Americans. That lawsuit seeks to end the preferential promotion of Christianity at the new Capitol Visitors Center in Washington D.C. through the prominent engraving of pro-Christian slogans “In God We Trust” and “One Nation Under God” in the walls of the Center.

The legal briefing makes little sense, managing to unravel its own argument almost from the start, claiming of the slogans that “These expressions simply echo the sentiments found in the Declaration of Independence and recognize the undeniable truth that our freedoms come from a source higher than the state. These sentiments were adopted for the express purpose of reaffirming America’s unique understanding of this truth.”

Of course, the Declaration of Independence is not a founding legal document. It is merely a composition intended to publicize the positions of the Continental Congress before any legal framework for the independent American states had been formed – indeed, long before actual independent sovereignty had been achieved.

The obvious contradiction in the brief filed by Pat Robertson’s organization is that the group defends the slogans as representations of a particular religious faith, which the 44 signing members of Congress, all Christians, recognize as “undeniable truth”, but which is quite clearly denied by the group of non-religious Americans filing suit.

The brief claims that the posting of Christian slogans on an official government building paid for by Congress is justified because of some kind of “unique” religious status of the United States of America. Yet, the highest law of the land, the Constitution of the United States of America, recognizes no religious identity for the nation, and mentions no religious rationale for the founding of the nation. On the contrary, the Constitution requires that there be no religious test for any public office, and in the very first clause of the very first amendment, forbids any establishment of religion through Congress.

The engraving of particularly Christian slogans on the Capitol Visitors Center obviously violates both the spirit and the letter of the first amendment. The 44 members of Congress who signed Pat Robertson’s legal brief ought to remember that they have sworn to uphold the Constitution, not to promote one religious group to the detriment of everybody else.