Oct. 14 (Bloomberg) -- U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, that towering intellect of the conservative legal movement, sounded appallingly ignorant last week.

The question centered on the constitutionality of a Christian cross on government land to memorialize the American dead of World War I.

Scalia first suggested during oral argument that the cross is fine because it’s less a religious symbol than the “most common” marker for graves.

Can he be serious?

Scalia didn’t stop there. When an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer pointed out that crosses never appear in Jewish cemeteries, Scalia reverted to bully mode.

“I don’t think you can leap from that to the conclusion that the only war dead that that cross honors are the Christian war dead. I think that’s an outrageous conclusion,” Scalia declared.

Did he believe his own words?

He “seems to evaporate the real meaning of the cross,” says the Reverend John Pawlikowski, who teaches social ethics at the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago and directs its Catholic-Jewish studies program. The priest finds that surprising, given Scalia’s devotion to Catholicism.

Scalia not only diluted the sacred meaning of the cross to Christians but brushed off the religious convictions of everyone else.

Hundreds of thousands of non-Christians served in World War I. Jews alone accounted for 250,000, or about 5 percent of the troops deployed. To memorialize them, Muslims and other non- Christians who gave their lives for their country with a Christian cross doesn’t honor them. For many of their families, it insults them.

Either Scalia is willfully ignorant or completely disingenuous.

A Big Deal

Though I can’t imagine he is one of them, clearly there are Christians who honestly don’t see what the big deal is about.

They believe most church-state disputes are political correctness run amuck, obstacles to the free exercise of religion, the result of an erroneous parsing of constitutional language or some combination of those three.

Why get so worked up over a cross in the Mojave Desert or school-sponsored prayer in classrooms? Most Americans are Christians, after all, and the rest of us should simply get used to it.

This column is for them.

I make no attempt to say which religion, if any, is the True One. Nor do I discount the abundant good works of people of faith. I’m in no position to say which religions have been the most violent or most tolerant toward non- believers. There is a lot of finger-pointing to go around.

Viewing the Controversy

The point is to try to offer the majority a minority way of viewing the controversy.

For starters, imagine the reaction if prayers spoken by public officials at government events declared that we still await the coming of the Messiah. The first coming.

That would be blasphemy to many Americans, and clearly unconstitutional. However certain Christians are that Jesus was the Messiah, Jews are just as certain he wasn’t.

Yet we are considered hypersensitive if we (yes, we) cringe when someone prays for us in the name of Jesus Christ.

(In my inter-faith family, spoken prayers now end like this: In Jesus’ name some of us pray.)

So let’s say that as a minority, you learned long ago to slough off that sort of thing, realizing people are well-meaning when they pray and intend no offense.

Resort to Violence

And yet, as a minority you know that discounting other people’s religion has a rather nasty history. Through millennia, Christians have been seeking out non-believers for conversion or worse. Periodically, they resort to violence.

Under the banner of Christianity and the sign of the cross, Christians for centuries tortured and murdered those who refused to convert. They did it to Jews and Muslims during the Crusades and to those whose conversions were deemed insincere during the Spanish Inquisition.

Christians have chased Jews out of their native countries, driven religious practices underground, moved Jews into ghettos, forced attendance at conversion services and destroyed synagogues, shops and homes, all out of religious conviction.

As for the Holocaust, Adolf Hitler killed 6 million Jews for racial, not religious, reasons, it’s true. But how did he get so far?

“Christian anti-Semitism provided an indispensible seedbed for the success of Nazism on the popular level,” writes Pawlikowski.

No Holocaust

I don’t equate a cross in the American desert with the Holocaust. Nor do I hold my contemporaries responsible for the acts of their ancestors, and I know that many Christians have throughout history risked their own skins to save Jews. The Catholic Church and some denominations have acknowledged and even denounced their intolerant pasts.

But even today, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints vicariously baptize the Jewish dead among others who in life chose not to join the church.

Mormons see the practice as bestowing a blessing, which the soul can accept or reject. They have baptized thousands of Holocaust victims, not to mention Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, scientist Albert Einstein, artist Marc Chagall, lyricist Irving Berlin and Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, according to genealogist Bernard Kouchel.

Jewish outrage prompted some curtailing of the practice, but not an end to it.

There is nothing government can do about that, nor should it. But if you want to begin to understand why Jews get nervous if government favors a religion, it’s all a part of the picture.

What unsettles me more than a cross in the Mojave is the realization that millions of Americans don’t understand why it might be worrisome.

For a Supreme Court justice to convey such ignorance is, to use his word, outrageous.

(Ann Woolner is a Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions expressed are her own.)

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To contact the writer of this column: Ann Woolner in Atlanta at awoolner@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: October 14, 2009 09:14 EDT