In a small, religious town in Rhode Island, a local student complained about a prayer displayed on a banner at her public high school. The prayer, unsurprisingly, makes direct reference to “Our Heavenly Father.” On Jan. 11, a judge ruled that it was unconstitutional for the banner to hang in the school. However, the community continues to resist the ruling. This lawsuit, while directly affecting a small number of people, is indicative of an ongoing intersection of religion and public spheres that should remain secular, such as public schools and, to a certain extent, politics.

This isn’t the first time the specific issue addressed in this court case has come up. In 2010, a family filed a complaint with the American Civil Liberties Union. A school committee formed to hear the complaint. The committee, which included several religious leaders, agreed that the banner should be “taken down or altered.” However, a meeting for the community at large ended in a majority vote to keep the banner for “cultural and historical reasons.”

A student wrote the prayer in 1963, a different time by anyone’s standards. Is the banner part of school history? Perhaps. There’s no reason someone shouldn’t preserve it in a different context. But “historical and cultural value” shouldn’t take precedence over the rule of law. Publicly displaying a prayer in a public school and defending it so virulently sends a very specific message: Screw separation of church and state. People make the same claim about the “historical importance” of the Confederate flag, which flew over the South Carolina State House until it was removed in 2000.

The relative offensiveness of a prayer and a flag that almost inevitably evokes racism (or states’ rights, depending on your interpretation) is obviously different; it would be specious to claim otherwise. But the underlying principle is the same: an attempt to rationalize an inappropriate public display by citing cultural significance. There’s no need to destroy every Confederate flag or prohibit people from displaying them in museums or on their houses. Similarly, there’s no reason to prohibit people from praying freely or displaying prayers in their homes. There are simply appropriate occasions for everything.

In this case, that particular line of reasoning seems flimsy, if only because of the intense emotionality surrounding the lawsuit and the overtly religious nature of the banner. The teenaged girl who complained continues to be bullied for her involvement. Unless that town is full of amateur historical enthusiasts, I call bologna. The banner could be easily altered to remove references to God and make it a secular statement of moral values, a compromise that the community at large seems unwilling to accept.

Now consider the macrocosmic level of national politics. Religion inevitably creeps into election processes. This isn’t necessarily wrong in itself, but it does indicate that perhaps religion and state are not as separate as they should be. One question at Thursday’s Republican debate asked how religion would influence each candidate’s decisions while in office. The question was designed to reassure voters. “Reassure” means different things to different demographics, however. It’s one thing to be guided by your religion with regard to ethical questions; one function of religion is to make practitioners more compassionate and ethical human beings. Christian values can usually be reconciled with generally accepted secular principles of morality. When Mitt Romney references God as a guiding force in his life, that doesn’t bother me.

Some issues, however, are hard to tease away from religion. Opposition to gay marriage, for example, is almost always rooted in some kind of religious argument. Politicians, particularly on the national level, should be able to balance their personal beliefs with the needs of a secular democracy. Going back to the debate, Newt Gingrich cited an “increasingly aggressive war against religion and in particular against Christianity,” supposedly perpetrated by liberal academia and the media, as part of the reason he was running. At least he substituted in “liberal media” for “Protocol of the Elders of Zion” or “damn commies.” Apart from sounding somewhat paranoid and decidedly pompous, Newt’s answer tells me that he is not interested in doing what’s best for America as a whole but rather in doing what’s best for his Christian America. To me, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich represent what happens when religion bleeds too far into the political spectrum. The prayer banner is a tangible result of that kind of thinking.

A prayer banner in a lone high school is perhaps not significant in itself. It is, however, symptomatic of a larger conflict between church and state, which by all rights should have been settled a long time ago by the Constitution.