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Far from sending a troubling message, as Justice Alito contends, removing unconstitutional crosses maintained by the government on government land would send a clear and simple message: In the United States, the Constitution rules.

#ExposeChristianSchools was launched shortly after it was reported that Karen Pence was teaching at a Christian school that excludes LGBTQ students and teachers. It quickly went viral with many sharing their own stories of surviving Christian schooling.

The recently concluded Vatican summit on sexual abuse in the church was framed in the same old top-down way that’s at the heart of the problem. Lay people, both women and men, experts in the law, psychology, and theology were excluded. What could be more wrong with this picture?

It seems like American Christians might be alarmed to learn that the nation they hold in regard is confiscating Bibles, criminalizing evangelization, and torturing believers.

Every court to decide on such a cross has said that it must come down or be moved to private property, but the conservative Supreme Court majority may rule in its favor. Have we simply forgotten how well separation of church and state has worked?

The army inquires about soliders’ faiths because it doesn’t assume the people dying to defend this nation are Christian. When one views the cross in that light, it seems antithetical to the ideals for which those same soldiers fought.

According to a retired attorney for the DOD, “When you proselytize as a commander…you necessarily send doubts to the subordinates that you oversee about your impartiality and thus degrade good order and discipline, and in turn degrade combat capability.”

Much of the discussion of white evangelicals laments the loss of their moral standing, but such criticisms suffer under the misunderstanding that white evangelicalism in the United States has somehow devolved from a once salutary moral vision to brute political opportunism.