SECULAR PURITANS FEAR SOMEWHERE, SOMEHOW SOMEONE IS DEVOUT: Greg Weiner’s paraphrase of H.L. Mencken’s famous crack about Puritans is found in the former’s excellent essay today on Law & Liberty concerning the Supreme Court’s Bladensburg Cross decision.

Weiner offers lots of good sense, including this: “Secularists need not snuff the approach of tyranny in every expression of ‘Merry Christmas,’ and Christians need not interpret the greeting ‘Happy Holidays’ as a war on Christmas. Both need the self-confidence to believe they can flourish on their merits without a conquest of the political.”

But what if the “constitutional morality” that encouraged such prudential tolerance as Wilmoore Kendall and George Carey argued came to us via The Federalist Papers is beyond restoration?