Politics & Power Quote by Michael Newdow

Newdow frames the fight with a word that does a lot of quiet work: “infusing.” It’s not “allowing” religion, not “teaching about” religion, not even “endorsing” religion. “Infusing” implies seepage, saturation, something administered into a public body until the boundary between civic and sectarian disappears. For a constitutional lawyer, that’s the point: move the argument away from vague talk about “tradition” or “values” and toward a cleaner image of state action crossing a line.

The syntax is telling, too. “This issue is whether or not” narrows the battlefield into a binary. That’s litigation language: reduce the emotional sprawl into a justiciable question a court can answer. Parentheses around “schools” read like a strategic aside, as if the speaker is simultaneously zooming into the most legible example (children, classrooms, compelled audiences) and signaling that the principle could travel beyond that setting. Schools are where government is least plausibly “neutral,” because attendance is mandatory and authority is absolute. If religion enters there with official backing, it doesn’t look like private expression; it looks like state catechism with homework.

The subtext is a critique of soft coercion: you don’t need a theocracy to produce religious pressure; you just need a public institution to bless one faith’s language and rituals as normal. In the post-9/11 era, amid “culture war” skirmishes over prayer, pledges, and identity politics, Newdow’s line stakes an unpopular but lucid claim: the Establishment Clause isn’t about hostility to religion. It’s about keeping the government from treating belief as a civic requirement.