American Legion v. American Humanist Association. There’s something attractive in the names of the parties in the Supreme Court’s recent decision on church and state. Both organizations, the veterans’ group formed after World War I and the secular humanists’ group founded decades later, want to tell you how American they are.

And they are locked in the longstanding debate over the meaning of the first clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion,” it reads, “or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”