The Supreme Court this past summer handed down rulings in three closely watched, eagerly anticipated, and—as it happened—not surprising cases: In Van Orden v. Perry

, a bare five-Justice majority announced that the 44-year-old Ten Commandments monument on the grounds of the Texas State Capitol did not unconstitutionally “establish” religion. A different, but no less narrow majority concluded in McCreary County v. ACLU that a different, less longstanding Ten Commandments display lacked a “secular purpose” and so did violate the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause. And in Cutter v. Wilkinson, a refreshingly unanimous Court declared that the federal Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act—which, among other things, requires prisons receiving federal funds to go beyond the Free Exercise Clause’s requirements in accommodating inmates’ religious practices—does not unconstitutionally privilege religion....