Officials in Quincy, Massachusetts, built bronze statues of St. Michael the Archangel and St. Florian to place outside a new public safety building for police and firefighters as they capture something ordinary civic plaques cannot, “courage that runs toward danger rather than from it, patrons those professions have invoked for centuries.”
But they cannot be used because, according to a decision from the state Supreme Judicial Court, they are Christian.
A report at the Federalist warns that if the ideology is left standing, it will cause much damage across America.
The court didn’t dispute that the images represent courage beyond the average.
But it claimed they could convey “implicit government support” for Catholicism, meaning there would be a “subordination of other religions.”
The report found that the result is a “powerful new tool” for the ACLU to scrub religious references from public life.
And it did so by “inventing an injury nobody has suffered.”
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Quincy wanted to put two ten-foot bronze statues outside its new public… pic.twitter.com/MZlaBAfW2L
— M.A. Rothman (@MichaelARothman) September 1, 2026
In the case, there was no evidence “the city coerced anyone into worship, funded a church, or discriminated against a resident.”
The court’s negative ruling found that the images are “closely affiliated with a particular religion.”
“That’s the entire violation,” the report said.
However, the report explained, “Neutrality means treating religious and secular expression evenhandedly, not treating religious expression as inherently suspect the moment it appears on public property. A test that singles out statues for scrutiny because they are ‘closely affiliated with a particular religion,’ while a mural of secular civic virtues would draw no such review, is not neutral toward religion. It is hostile to it. Courts are not supposed to treat the mere visibility of a particular faith’s iconography as a harm. When they do, they have crossed from neutrality into disapproval.”
The report then pointed out that Martin Luther King Jr. was an ordained Baptist minister while he fought for civil rights.
That fight, “at its core,” was a “theological one grounded in the imago Dei. Cities across the country have erected statues of him in the decades since his assassination. Under the court’s reasoning, how long before someone argues that an MLK statute, freshly installed and unmistakably tied to his identity as ‘reverend,’ conveys government endorsement of Christianity … .”
The city argued against the idea that the religious identity of a historical figure is disqualifying, the report said.
“Statues of Junipero Serra, stained glass windows in old courthouses, the National Cathedral hosting state funerals, Ten Commandments friezes on the Supreme Court’s own courtroom walls — all of it exists because the founding generation understood that acknowledging religion’s role in shaping civic virtue is not the same as establishing a church,” the report said.
The Massachusetts ruling simply said an image that “might” convey the wrong message to the wrong observer is reason to trash history.
That’s even though, “Historians and legal scholars across the ideological spectrum increasingly acknowledge that religious conviction was not incidental to the republic’s creation but constitutive of it.”
The report turned to analysis: “A city honoring its police officers and firefighters with the patron saints those men and women have invoked for generations is not establishing a religion. It is telling the truth about where a tradition of protection comes from.”
