Context is everything.

Byline: The Register-Guard

As it grapples with the legality of state-sanctioned displays of the Ten Commandments, the U.S. Supreme Court has a timely opportunity to clarify guidelines defining the constitutional boundaries between church and state.

Such clarification is desperately needed, because this is not just a dispute about whether the Ten Commandments can be seen as the foundation of Western law in addition to being a pointedly religious canon. The battle over governmental manifestations of religion - from prayer in public schools to Christmas decorations at City Hall - has become for advocates on both sides a no-surrender campaign in the culture war. The ever-widening chasm can be bridged, but only if the court offers the adversaries common-sense compromises that respect their deeply held beliefs.

Many conservative American Christians are determined to overcome what they believe is a concerted secular effort to eradicate every aspect of religion from public life. They decry efforts to remove the words "under God" from the Pledge of Allegiance and ban posting the Ten Commandments in public build- ings.

Emboldened by the re-election of the devoutly religious President Bush, Christian advocates have taken the offensive in an effort to affirm the legitimacy of religious symbols in public places. Often asserting that the United States was founded by deeply religious people who acknowledged rights conferred by a "creator" in the Declaration of Independence, Christian activists maintain that their secular opponents misread the First Amendment.

The Establishment Clause of the First Amendment never uses the words "separation of church and state." It simply says "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." Christian activists often cite this as Exhibit A in the case for allowing liberal opportunities for state-sanctioned religious expression. The Establishment Clause, they argue, is primarily concerned with preventing creation of an official state religion, such as the Church of England.

The scholarship devoted to debating this question is encyclopedic, and the quest for resolution is not aided by the remarkably contradictory opinions of the nation's found- ers. Thomas Jefferson's writings alone have produced equally per- suasive arguments for both sides of the debate.

Courts have tended to interpret the Establishment Clause as a broad proscription against church-state communion, so much so that Christian activists accuse the Supreme Court of promoting secularism at the expense of religious freedom. If a religious symbol in a public institution was seen as endorsing a specific religious faith and having no secular purpose, it received a hostile reception from the court.

However the Supreme Court rules in the current Ten Commandments cases, the justices will be endeavoring to balance the interests of a fantastically diverse, pluralistic society. Acknowledging the role the Ten Commandments may have played in guiding the development of our system of laws is one thing. Erecting a monument in front of a public courthouse emblazoned with "I am the Lord thy God. Thou shalt have no other gods before me," is quite another.

What often seems lost in the passionate advocacy for state-sanc- tioned religious expression is that the expressions being defended are invariably Judeo-Christian. Does anyone expect a similarly vigorous defense would arise if, upon entering the new federal courthouse in Eugene, the first thing visitors encountered was a huge granite tablet inscribed with the Five Pillars of Islam? Or in the center of the courtyard fountain at Eugene's City Hall stood a shrine to the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism?

Do those examples lack relevance because we're a Christian nation? We're also a nation of 6.2 million American Jews, 5.4 million American Mormons, 4.6 million American Muslims, 2.9 million American Buddhists and 1.1 million American Hindus. We are this nation, every bit as much as we are a nation of Christians who practice their Christianity in a thousand different ways. The Ten Commandments are expressed and interpreted differently depending on whether one is reading the Protestant, Catholic or Jewish ver- sions.

There is no disagreement that the First Amendment provides Americans with a heritage of religious freedom that is the envy of the world. The best way to protect that freedom is to be scrupulously mindful of the context in which religious values are expressed by government institutions, recognizing that even in a Christian nation, Christianity is not the national religion.