515 U.S. 753 (1995)

CAPITOL SQUARE REVIEW AND ADVISORY BOARD et al.
v.
PINETTE et al.

No. 94-780.

United States Supreme Court.

Argued April 26, 1995. Decided June 29, 1995. CERTIORARI TO THE UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE SIXTH CIRCUIT

*755 *755 *756 Scalia, J., announced the judgment of the Court and delivered the opinion of the Court with respect to Parts I, II, and III, in which Rehnquist, C. J., and O'Connor, Kennedy, Souter, Thomas, and Breyer, JJ., joined, and an opinion with respect to Part IV, in which Rehnquist, C. J., and Kennedy and Thomas, JJ., joined. Thomas, J., filed a concurring opinion, post, p. 770. O'Connor, J., filed an opinion concurring in part and concurring in the judgment, in which Souter and Breyer, JJ., joined, post, p. 772. Souter, J., filed an opinion concurring in part and concurring in the judgment, in which O'Connor and Breyer, JJ., joined, post, p. 783. Stevens, J., post, p. 797, and Ginsburg, J., post, p. 817, filed dissenting opinions.

Michael J. Renner argued the cause for petitioners. With him on the briefs were Betty D. Montgomery, Attorney General of Ohio, and Christopher S. Cook, Andrew S. Bergman, Simon B. Karas, and Andrew I. Sutter, Assistant Attorneys General.

Benson A. Wolman argued the cause for respondents. With him on the brief were David Goldberger, Barbara P. O'Toole, Steven R. Shapiro, and Peter Joy.^[*]

*757 Justice Scalia announced the judgment of the Court and delivered the opinion of the Court with respect to Parts I, II, and III, and an opinion with respect to Part IV, in which The Chief Justice, Justice Kennedy, and Justice Thomas join.

The Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, made binding upon the States through the Fourteenth Amendment, provides that government "shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion." The question in this case is whether a State violates the Establishment Clause when, pursuant to a religiously neutral state policy, it permits a private party to display an unattended religious symbol in a traditional public forum located next to its seat of government.

I

Capitol Square is a 10-acre, state-owned plaza surrounding the statehouse in Columbus, Ohio. For over a century the square has been used for public speeches, gatherings, and festivals advocating and celebrating a variety of causes, both secular and religious. Ohio Admin. Code Ann. § 128-4— 02(A) (1994) makes the square available "for use by the public . . . for free discussion of public questions, or for activities of a broad public purpose," and Ohio Rev. Code Ann. § 105.41 (1994), gives the Capitol Square Review and Advisory Board (Board) responsibility for regulating public access. To use the square, a group must simply fill out an official application *758 form and meet several criteria, which concern primarily safety, sanitation, and noninterference with other uses of the square, and which are neutral as to the speech content of the proposed event. App. 107-110; Ohio Admin. Code Ann. § 128-4—02 (1994).

It has been the Board's policy "to allow a broad range of speakers and other gatherings of people to conduct events on the Capitol Square." Brief for Petitioners 3-4. Such diverse groups as homosexual rights organizations, the Ku Klux Klan, and the United Way have held rallies. The Board has also permitted a variety of unattended displays on Capitol Square: a state-sponsored lighted tree during the Christmas season, a privately sponsored menorah during Chanukah, a display showing the progress of a United Way fundraising campaign, and booths and exhibits during an arts festival. Although there was some dispute in this litigation regarding the frequency of unattended displays, the District Court found, with ample justification, that there was no policy against them. 844 F. Supp. 1182, 1184 (SD Ohio 1993).

In November 1993, after reversing an initial decision to ban unattended holiday displays from the square during December 1993, the Board authorized the State to put up its annual Christmas tree. On November 29, 1993, the Board granted a rabbi's application to erect a menorah. That same day, the Board received an application from respondent Donnie Carr, an officer of the Ohio Ku Klux Klan, to place a cross on the square from December 8, 1993, to December 24, 1993. The Board denied that application on December 3, informing the Klan by letter that the decision to deny "was made upon the advice of counsel, in a good faith attempt to comply with the Ohio and United States Constitutions, as they have been interpreted in relevant decisions by the Federal and State Courts." App. 47.

Two weeks later, having been unsuccessful in its effort to obtain administrative relief from the Board's decision, the Ohio Klan, through its leader Vincent Pinette, filed the present *759 suit in the United States District Court for the Southern District of Ohio, seeking an injunction requiring the Board to issue the requested permit. The Board defended on the ground that the permit would violate the Establishment Clause. The District Court determined that Capitol Square was a traditional public forum open to all without any policy against freestanding displays; that the Klan's cross was entirely private expression entitled to full First Amendment protection; and that the Board had failed to show that the display of the cross could reasonably be construed as endorsement of Christianity by the State. The District Court issued the injunction and, after the Board's application for an emergency stay was denied, 510 U. S. 1307 (1993) (Stevens, J., in chambers), the Board permitted the Klan to erect its cross. The Board then received, and granted, several additional applications to erect crosses on Capitol Square during December 1993 and January 1994.

On appeal by the Board, the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit affirmed the District Court's judgment. 30 F. 3d 675 (1994). That decision agrees with a ruling by the Eleventh Circuit, Chabad-Lubavitch v. Miller, 5 F. 3d 1383 (1993), but disagrees with decisions of the Second and Fourth Circuits, Chabad-Lubavitch v. Burlington, 936 F. 2d 109 (CA2 1991), cert. denied, 505 U. S. 1218 (1992), Kaplan v. Burlington, 891 F. 2d 1024 (CA2 1989), cert. denied, 496 U. S. 926 (1990), Smith v. County of Albemarle, 895 F. 2d 953 (CA4), cert. denied, 498 U. S. 823 (1990). We granted certiorari. 513 U. S. 1106 (1995).

II

First, a preliminary matter: Respondents contend that we should treat this as a case in which freedom of speech (the Klan's right to present the message of the cross display) was denied because of the State's disagreement with that message's political content, rather than because of the State's desire to distance itself from sectarian religion. They suggest *760 in their merits brief and in their oral argument that Ohio's genuine reason for disallowing the display was disapproval of the political views of the Ku Klux Klan. Whatever the fact may be, the case was not presented and decided that way. The record facts before us and the opinions below address only the Establishment Clause issue;^[1] that is the question upon which we granted certiorari; and that is the sole question before us to decide.

Respondents' religious display in Capitol Square was private expression. Our precedent establishes that private religious speech, far from being a First Amendment orphan, is as fully protected under the Free Speech Clause as secular private expression. Lamb's Chapel v. Center Moriches Union Free School Dist., 508 U. S. 384 (1993); Board of Ed. of Westside Community Schools (Dist. 66) v. Mergens, 496 U. S. 226 (1990); Widmar v. Vincent, 454 U. S. 263 (1981); Heffron v. International Soc. for Krishna Consciousness, Inc., 452 U. S. 640 (1981). Indeed, in Anglo-American history, at least, government suppression of speech has so commonly been directed precisely at religious speech that a free-speech clause without religion would be Hamlet without the prince. Accordingly, we have not excluded from freespeech protections religious proselytizing, Heffron, supra, at 647, or even acts of worship, Widmar, supra, at 269, n. 6. Petitioners do not dispute that respondents, in displaying their cross, were engaging in constitutionally protected expression. They do contend that the constitutional protection *761 does not extend to the length of permitting that expression to be made on Capitol Square.

It is undeniable, of course, that speech which is constitutionally protected against state suppression is not thereby accorded a guaranteed forum on all property owned by the State. Postal Service v. Council of Greenburgh Civic Assns., 453 U. S. 114, 129 (1981); Perry Ed. Assn. v. Perry Local Educators' Assn., 460 U. S. 37, 44 (1983). The right to use government property for one's private expression depends upon whether the property has by law or tradition been given the status of a public forum, or rather has been reserved for specific official uses. Cornelius v. NAACP Legal Defense & Ed. Fund, Inc., 473 U. S. 788, 802-803 (1985). If the former, a State's right to limit protected expressive activity is sharply circumscribed: It may impose reasonable, content-neutral time, place, and manner restrictions (a ban on all unattended displays, which did not exist here, might be one such), but it may regulate expressive content only if such a restriction is necessary, and narrowly drawn, to serve a compelling state interest. Perry Ed. Assn., supra, at 45. These strict standards apply here, since the District Court and the Court of Appeals found that Capitol Square was a traditional public forum. 844 F. Supp., at 1184; 30 F. 3d, at 678.

Petitioners do not claim that their denial of respondents' application was based upon a content-neutral time, place, or manner restriction. To the contrary, they concede—indeed it is the essence of their case—that the Board rejected the display precisely because its content was religious. Petitioners advance a single justification for closing Capitol Square to respondents' cross: the State's interest in avoiding official endorsement of Christianity, as required by the Establishment Clause.

III

There is no doubt that compliance with the Establishment Clause is a state interest sufficiently compelling to justify *762 content-based restrictions on speech. See Lamb's Chapel, supra, at 394-395; Widmar, supra, at 271. Whether that interest is implicated here, however, is a different question. And we do not write on a blank slate in answering it. We have twice previously addressed the combination of private religious expression, a forum available for public use, content-based regulation, and a State's interest in complying with the Establishment Clause. Both times, we have struck down the restriction on religious content. Lamb's Chapel, supra; Widmar, supra.

In Lamb's Chapel, a school district allowed private groups to use school facilities during off-hours for a variety of civic, social, and recreational purposes, excluding, however, religious purposes. We held that even if school property during off-hours was not a public forum, the school district violated an applicant's free-speech rights by denying it use of the facilities solely because of the religious viewpoint of the program it wished to present. 508 U. S., at 390-395. We rejected the district's compelling-state-interest Establishment Clause defense (the same made here) because the school property was open to a wide variety of uses, the district was not directly sponsoring the religious group's activity, and "any benefit to religion or to the Church would have been no more than incidental." Id., at 395. The Lamb's Chapel reasoning applies a fortiori here, where the property at issue is not a school but a full-fledged public forum.

Lamb's Chapel followed naturally from our decision in Widmar, in which we examined a public university's exclusion of student religious groups from facilities available to other student groups. There also we addressed official discrimination against groups who wished to use a "generally open forum" for religious speech. 454 U. S., at 269. And there also the State claimed that its compelling interest in complying with the Establishment Clause justified the content-based restriction. We rejected the defense because *763 the forum created by the State was open to a broad spectrum of groups and would provide only incidental benefit to religion. Id., at 274. We stated categorically that "an open forum in a public university does not confer any imprimatur of state approval on religious sects or practices." Ibid.

Quite obviously, the factors that we considered determinative in Lamb's Chapel and Widmar exist here as well. The State did not sponsor respondents' expression, the expression was made on government property that had been opened to the public for speech, and permission was requested through the same application process and on the same terms required of other private groups.

IV

Petitioners argue that one feature of the present case distinguishes it from Lamb's Chapel and Widmar: the forum's proximity to the seat of government, which, they contend, may produce the perception that the cross bears the State's approval. They urge us to apply the so-called "endorsement test," see, e. g., County of Allegheny v. American Civil Liberties Union, Greater Pittsburgh Chapter, 492 U. S. 573 (1989); Lynch v. Donnelly, 465 U. S. 668 (1984), and to find that, because an observer might mistake private expression for officially endorsed religious expression, the State's content-based restriction is constitutional.

We must note, to begin with, that it is not really an "endorsement test" of any sort, much less the "endorsement test" which appears in our more recent Establishment Clause jurisprudence, that petitioners urge upon us. "Endorsement" connotes an expression or demonstration of approval or support. The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary 818 (1993); Webster's New Dictionary 845 (2d ed. 1950). Our cases have accordingly equated "endorsement" with "promotion" or "favoritism." Allegheny, supra, at 593 (citing cases). We find it peculiar to say that government *764 "promotes" or "favors" a religious display by giving it the same access to a public forum that all other displays enjoy. And as a matter of Establishment Clause jurisprudence, we have consistently held that it is no violation for government to enact neutral policies that happen to benefit religion. See, e. g., Bowen v. Kendrick, 487 U. S. 589, 608 (1988); Witters v. Washington Dept. of Servs. for Blind, 474 U. S. 481, 486-489 (1986); Mueller v. Allen, 463 U. S. 388 (1983); McGowan v. Maryland, 366 U. S. 420 (1961). Where we have tested for endorsement of religion, the subject of the test was either expression by the government itself, Lynch, supra, or else government action alleged to discriminate in favor of private religious expression or activity, Board of Ed. of Kiryas Joel Village School Dist. v. Grumet, 512 U. S. 687, 708-710 (1994); Allegheny, supra. The test petitioners propose, which would attribute to a neutrally behaving government private religious expression, has no antecedent in our jurisprudence, and would better be called a "transferred endorsement" test.

Petitioners rely heavily on Allegheny and Lynch, but each is easily distinguished. In Allegheny we held that the display of a privately sponsored crèche on the "Grand Staircase" of the Allegheny County Courthouse violated the Establishment Clause. That staircase was not, however, open to all on an equal basis, so the county was favoring sectarian religious expression. 492 U. S., at 599-600, and n. 50 ("The Grand Staircase does not appear to be the kind of location in which all were free to place their displays"). We expressly distinguished that site from the kind of public forum at issue here, and made clear that if the staircase were available to all on the same terms, "the presence of the crèche in that location for over six weeks would then not serve to associate the government with the crèche." Ibid. (emphasis added). In Lynch we held that a city's display of a crèche did not violate the Establishment Clause because, in context, the *765 display did not endorse religion. 465 U. S., at 685-687. The opinion does assume, as petitioners contend, that the government's use of religious symbols is unconstitutional if it effectively endorses sectarian religious belief. But the case neither holds nor even remotely assumes that the government's neutral treatment of private religious expression can be unconstitutional.

Petitioners argue that absence of perceived endorsement was material in Lamb's Chapel and Widmar. We did state in Lamb's Chapel that there was "no realistic danger that the community would think that the District was endorsing religion or any particular creed," 508 U. S., at 395. But that conclusion was not the result of empirical investigation; it followed directly, we thought, from the fact that the forum was open and the religious activity privately sponsored. See ibid. It is significant that we referred only to what would be thought by "the community"—not by outsiders or individual members of the community uninformed about the school's practice. Surely some of the latter, hearing of religious ceremonies on school premises, and not knowing of the premises' availability and use for all sorts of other private activities, might leap to the erroneous conclusion of state endorsement. But, we in effect said, given an open forum and private sponsorship, erroneous conclusions do not count. So also in Widmar. Once we determined that the benefit to religious groups from the public forum was incidental and shared by other groups, we categorically rejected the State's Establishment Clause defense. 454 U. S., at 274.

What distinguishes Allegheny and the dictum in Lynch from Widmar and Lamb's Chapel is the difference between government speech and private speech. "[T]here is a crucial difference between government speech endorsing religion, which the Establishment Clause forbids, and private speech endorsing religion, which the Free Speech and Free Exercise Clauses protect." Mergens, 496 U. S., at 250 (opinion *766 of O'Connor, J.).^[2] Petitioners assert, in effect, that that distinction disappears when the private speech is conducted too close to the symbols of government. But that, of course, must be merely a subpart of a more general principle: that the distinction disappears whenever private speech can be mistaken for government speech. That proposition cannot be accepted, at least where, as here, the government has not fostered or encouraged the mistake.

Of course, giving sectarian religious speech preferential access to a forum close to the seat of government (or anywhere else for that matter) would violate the Establishment Clause (as well as the Free Speech Clause, since it would involve content discrimination). And one can conceive of a case in which a governmental entity manipulates its administration of a public forum close to the seat of government (or within a government building) in such a manner that only certain religious groups take advantage of it, creating an impression of endorsement that is in fact accurate. But those situations, which involve governmental favoritism, do not exist here. Capitol Square is a genuinely public forum, is known to be a public forum, and has been widely used as a public forum for many, many years. Private religious speech cannot be subject to veto by those who see favoritism where there is none.

The contrary view, most strongly espoused by Justice Stevens, post, at 806-807, but endorsed by Justice Souter and Justice O'Connor as well, exiles private religious speech to a realm of less-protected expression heretofore *767 inhabited only by sexually explicit displays and commercial speech. Young v. American Mini Theatres, Inc., 427 U. S. 50, 61, 70-71 (1976); Central Hudson Gas & Elec. Corp. v. Public Serv. Comm'n of N. Y., 447 U. S. 557 (1980). It will be a sad day when this Court casts piety in with pornography, and finds the First Amendment more hospitable to private expletives, see Cohen v. California, 403 U. S. 15, 26 (1971), than to private prayers. This would be merely bizarre were religious speech simply as protected by the Constitution as other forms of private speech; but it is outright perverse when one considers that private religious expression receives preferential treatment under the Free Exercise Clause. It is no answer to say that the Establishment Clause tempers religious speech. By its terms that Clause applies only to the words and acts of government. It was never meant, and has never been read by this Court, to serve as an impediment to purely private religious speech connected to the State only through it soccurrence in a public forum.

Since petitioners' "transferred endorsement" principle cannot possibly be restricted to squares in front of state capitols, the Establishment Clause regime that it would usher in is most unappealing. To require (and permit) access by a religious group in Lamb's Chapel, it was sufficient that the group's activity was not in fact government sponsored, that the event was open to the public, and that the benefit of the facilities was shared by various organizations. Petitioners' rule would require school districts adopting similar policies in the future to guess whether some undetermined critical mass of the community might nonetheless perceive the district to be advocating a religious viewpoint. Similarly, state universities would be forced to reassess our statement that "an open forum in a public university does not confer any imprimatur of state approval on religious sects or practices." Widmar, 454 U. S., at 274. Whether it does would henceforth depend upon immediate appearances. Policymakers *768 would find themselves in a vise between the Establishment Clause on one side and the Free Speech and Free Exercise Clauses on the other. Every proposed act of private, religious expression in a public forum would force officials to weigh a host of imponderables. How close to government is too close? What kind of building, and in what context, symbolizes state authority? If the State guessed wrong in one direction, it would be guilty of an Establishment Clause violation; if in the other, it would be liable for suppressing free exercise or free speech (a risk not run when the State restrains only its own expression).

The "transferred endorsement" test would also disrupt the settled principle that policies providing incidental benefits to religion do not contravene the Establishment Clause. That principle is the basis for the constitutionality of a broad range of laws, not merely those that implicate free-speech issues, see, e. g., Witters v. Washington Dept. of Servs. for Blind, 474 U. S. 481 (1986); Mueller v. Allen, 463 U. S. 388 (1983). It has radical implications for our public policy to suggest that neutral laws are invalid whenever hypothetical observers may—even reasonably —confuse an incidental benefit to religion with state endorsement.^[3]

*769 If Ohio is concerned about misperceptions, nothing prevents it from requiring all private displays in the square to be identified as such. That would be a content-neutral "manner" restriction that is assuredly constitutional. See Clark v. Community for Creative Non-Violence, 468 U. S. 288, 293 (1984). But the State may not, on the claim of misperception of official endorsement, ban all private religious speech from the public square, or discriminate against it by requiring religious speech alone to disclaim public sponsorship.^[4]

*770 * * * Religious expression cannot violate the Establishment Clause where it (1) is purely private and (2) occurs in a traditional or designated public forum, publicly announced and open to all on equal terms. Those conditions are satisfied here, and therefore the State may not bar respondents' cross from Capitol Square.

The judgment of the Court of Appeals is

Affirmed.

Justice Thomas, concurring.

I join the Court's conclusion that petitioners' exclusion of the Ku Klux Klan's cross cannot be justified on Establishment Clause grounds. But the fact that the legal issue before us involves the Establishment Clause should not lead anyone to think that a cross erected by the Ku Klux Klan is a purely religious symbol. The erection of such a cross is a political act, not a Christian one.

There is little doubt that the Klan's main objective is to establish a racist white government in the United States. In Klan ceremony, the cross is a symbol of white supremacy and a tool for the intimidation and harassment of racial minorities, Catholics, Jews, Communists, and any other groups hated by the Klan. The cross is associated with the Klan not because of religious worship, but because of the Klan's practice of cross burning. Cross burning was entirely unknown to the early Ku Klux Klan, which emerged in some Southern States during Reconstruction. W. Wade, The Fiery Cross: The Ku Klux Klan in America 146 (1987). The practice appears to have been the product of Thomas Dixon, whose book The Clansman formed the story for the movie, The Birth of a Nation. See M. Newton & J. Newton, The Ku Klux Klan: An Encyclopedia 145-146 (1991). In the book, cross burning is borrowed from an "old Scottish rite" (Dixon apparently believed that the members of the Reconstruction Ku Klux Klan were the "reincarnated souls of the *771 Clansmen of Old Scotland") that the Klan uses to celebrate the execution of a former slave. T. Dixon, The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan 324-326 (1905). Although the cross took on some religious significance in the 1920's when the Klan became connected with certain southern white clergy, by the postwar period it had reverted to its original function as an instrument of intimidation. Wade, supra, at 185, 279.

To be sure, the cross appears to serve as a religious symbol of Christianity for some Klan members. The hymn "The Old Rugged Cross" is sometimes played during cross burnings. See W. Moore, A Sheet and a Cross: A Symbolic Analysis of the Ku Klux Klan 287-288 (Ph.D. dissertation, Tulane University, 1975). But to the extent that the Klan had a message to communicate in Capitol Square, it was primarily a political one. During his testimony before the District Court, the leader of the local Klan testified that the cross was seen "as a symbol of freedom, as a symbol of trying to unite our people." App. 150. The Klan chapter wished to erect the cross because it was also "a symbol of freedom from tyranny," and because it "was also incorporated in the confederate battle flag." Ibid. Of course, the cross also had some religious connotation; the Klan leader linked the cross to what he claimed was one of the central purposes of the Klan: "to establish a Christian government in America." Id., at 142-145. But surely this message was both political and religious in nature.

Although the Klan might have sought to convey a message with some religious component, I think that the Klan had a primarily nonreligious purpose in erecting the cross. The Klan simply has appropriated one of the most sacred of religious symbols as a symbol of hate. In my mind, this suggests that this case may not have truly involved the Establishment Clause, although I agree with the Court's disposition because of the manner in which the case has come *772 before us. In the end, there may be much less here than meets the eye.

Justice O'Connor, with whom Justice Souter and Justice Breyer join, concurring in part and concurring in the judgment.

I join Parts I, II, and III of the Court's opinion and concur in the judgment. Despite the messages of bigotry and racism that may be conveyed along with religious connotations by the display of a Ku Klux Klan cross, see ante, at 771 (Thomas, J., concurring), at bottom this case must be understood as it has been presented to us—as a case about private religious expression and whether the State's relationship to it violates the Establishment Clause. In my view, "the endorsement test asks the right question about governmental practices challenged on Establishment Clause grounds, including challenged practices involving the display of religious symbols," County of Allegheny v. American Civil Liberties Union, Greater Pittsburgh Chapter, 492 U. S. 573, 628 (1989) (O'Connor, J., concurring in part and concurring in judgment), even where a neutral state policy toward private religious speech in a public forum is at issue. Accordingly, I see no necessity to carve out, as the plurality opinion would today, an exception to the endorsement test for the public forum context.

For the reasons given by Justice Souter, whose opinion I also join, I conclude on the facts of this case that there is "no realistic danger that the community would think that the [State] was endorsing religion or any particular creed," Lamb's Chapel v. Center Moriches Union Free School Dist., 508 U. S. 384, 395 (1993), by granting respondents a permit to erect their temporary cross on Capitol Square. I write separately, however, to emphasize that, because it seeks to identify those situations in which government makes "`adherence to a religion relevant . . . to a person's standing in the political community,' " Allegheny, supra, at 594 (quoting *773 Lynch v. Donnelly, 465 U. S. 668, 687 (1984) (O'Connor, J., concurring), the endorsement test necessarily focuses upon the perception of a reasonable, informed observer.

I

"In recent years, we have paid particularly close attention [in Establishment Clause cases] to whether the challenged governmental practice either has the purpose or effect of `endorsing' religion, a concern that has long had a place in our Establishment Clause jurisprudence." Allegheny, supra, at 592. See also Lamb's Chapel, supra, at 395; School Dist. of Grand Rapids v. Ball, 473 U. S. 373, 390 (1985) (asking "whether the symbolic union of church and state effected by the challenged governmental action is sufficiently likely to be perceived by adherents of the controlling denominations as an endorsement, and by the nonadherents as a disapproval, of their individual religious choices"). A government statement "`that religion or a particular religious belief is favored or preferred,' " Allegheny, supra, at 593 (quoting Wallace v. Jaffree, 472 U. S. 38, 70 (1985) (O'Connor, J., concurring in judgment), violates the prohibition against establishment of religion because such "[e]ndorsement sends a message to nonadherents that they are outsiders, not full members of the political community, and an accompanying message to adherents that they are insiders, favored members of the political community," Lynch, supra, at 688 (O'Connor, J., concurring). See also Allegheny, supra, at 628 (O'Connor, J., concurring in part and concurring in judgment); Wallace, supra, at 69 (O'Connor, J., concurring in judgment). Although "[e]xperience proves that the Establishment Clause . . . cannot easily be reduced to a single test," Board of Ed. of Kiryas Joel Village School Dist. v. Grumet, 512 U. S. 687, 720 (1994) (O'Connor, J., concurring in part and concurring in judgment), the endorsement inquiry captures the fundamental requirement of the Establishment Clause when courts are called upon to evaluate