Why We Told the Massachusetts High Court Not to Mess with St. Michael

Quincy v. Koch

Was ever a legal precedent more aptly named than the Lemon test?
 
For decades, courts struggled under the precedent of Lemon V. Kurtzman, a three-pronged framework which asked whether a government action on a public religious expression had a “secular purpose,” a “primary effect” on religion, or created “excessive entanglement.” In theory, this sounds manageable. In practice, it proved anything but.
 
Protect The 1st is urging the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court to reject this outdated and unworkable legal standard that threatens both religious liberty and free speech. At stake is whether the court will breathe new life into this long-discredited Lemon test – or instead follow the Supreme Court’s more grounded approach rooted in history and tradition. 
 
The case arises from a dispute in Quincy, Massachusetts, where the city plans to install statues of Saints Florian and Michael at a public building for its firefighters and police department. These figures are not only religious icons – they are also historically associated with firefighting and protection, roles that resonate directly with first responders. Yet plaintiffs argue that their presence would send an exclusionary message.
 
A lower court agreed, applying the Lemon test to block the statues. That decision illustrates exactly why Lemon has been abandoned: it invites subjective judgments, inconsistent outcomes, and legal confusion.
 
As our brief explains, judges across the ideological spectrum have criticized Lemon as unworkable and subject to manipulation – a judicial Ouija board capable of producing almost any result a court prefers.
 
The U.S. Supreme Court itself ultimately discarded the test, noting that it had “invited chaos” in Establishment Clause jurisprudence. The Supreme Court saw that courts were applying Lemon to reach contradictory conclusions on nearly identical facts. Religious displays were upheld in one case and struck down in another. Government support for certain educational materials was permitted in one instance and forbidden in the next. Even within a single case, courts could reach inconsistent conclusions about similar displays.
 
This unpredictability puts a serious burden on citizens and public officials. Local governments should not need a team of constitutional lawyers to determine whether a statue honoring firefighters is lawful. Yet under Lemon, that is precisely Quincy’s situation.
 
Massachusetts courts have long recognized that clarity and predictability are essential to the rule of law. The state’s high court has repeatedly favored clear standards over vague, malleable tests in areas ranging from criminal procedure to property rights. The reason is simple: People must be able to understand the law in order to follow it.
 
The same principle applies here. When the rules governing religion in public life are unclear, the result is not neutrality. The result is hesitation, self-censorship, and the unnecessary exclusion of religious expression from the public square.
 
That outcome undermines the First Amendment’s twin guarantees of no establishment of religion and no prohibition on its free exercise. An overly aggressive approach to disestablishment can chill speech and suppress lawful expression, particularly when it comes to longstanding traditions and symbols with both religious and secular meaning.
 
In short, the First Amendment does not require that any public expression with some religious resonance should be treated like a vial of smallpox. Massachusetts should follow the path of the Supreme Court by discarding the Lemon test and restoring clarity to a legal standard Bay Staters can follow.

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