On Nov. 18, a federal district judge ruled that Chief Justice Roy S. Moore of the Alabama Supreme Court had 30 days to remove a monument of the Ten Commandments from the back of the Alabama State Courthouse rotunda. Justice Moore had placed the monument there about 18 months ago, prompting a lawsuit from the Southern Poverty Law Center on behalf of Steve Glassroth, a lawyer in Montgomery, Ala., whose business often took him to courthouse.

In the federal judge's view, any such recognition of the God of Judaism and Christianity represents an "establishment" of religion in violation of the First Amendment. The monument's removal-deadline will arrive on Wednesday. It is still standing at the moment.

Naturally, Justice Moore disagrees with the logic of the federal judge's ruling. He noted in open court that America's Founders had no trouble with the God now deemed out of bounds. The Virginia Declaration of Rights (1776) and the Virginia Act for Establishing Religious Freedom (1786), to take only two examples, appealed to a God who created the mind free, to whom, as creator, each human owes worship--although only as conscience directs--and who endowed us with the right to religious liberty.

Does any other God except the God of Judaism and Christianity fit these characteristics and guarantee religious liberty? In any case, from the founding generation until about 50 years ago, American institutions and courts supposed that this God was the God of the Jewish and Christian Bible, to whom the Founders referred as "Creator," "Judge," "Providence" and "Divine Governor of the universe."

The federal judge acknowledged this history but argued that, today, we see more clearly that rights are endowed also in Muslims, Buddhists, atheists and indeed all humans. (But of course the Founders affirmed this universality, too, in their doctrine of natural rights.) The judge noted various Supreme Court precedents arguing that the government ought not show favoritism.

It sounds reasonable, but before we leap to agree with the federal judge it might be useful to make some distinctions. On the outside wall of the Federal Court House in Montgomery--where the trial took place--is a large statue of Artemis, described in the court's brochure as "the Greek goddess of justice." No one asserts that the statue represents an establishment of religion. The mere stone embodiment of Artemis' image obliges no one's conscience. Similarly, the stone embodiment of a page from Exodus puts no obligation upon the conscience of anyone who chooses not to accept that text as authoritative.

Even if one does not take the Ten Commandments literally, as a gift by the Almighty to Moses, one may take them as a symbol of the higher law reached by reason itself ("Laws of Nature and Nature's God," as the Declaration of Independence has it). Such a higher law has been seen--by Americans from James Wilson of Pennsylvania, a founding father, to Martin Luther King Jr.--as informing man-made law and holding it to a standard beyond the power of states or nations to abrogate. Nature's law, in this view, anchors a republic such as ours against the shifting tempests of political fortune.

But even if the Ten Commandments monument, for some people, stands for less than that, or nothing at all, it is hardly an imposing presence. Only four feet high, it sits at least 90 feet from the front entrance of the Alabama State Court House, all the way across the towering rotunda. It is impossible at that distance even to make out what it is, let alone what is written on it. To read it, one must step close, and of course no one is obliged to do so.

This discreet positioning accords with the beauty of our forebears' conception of religious liberty, a liberty, they believed, derived from the Almighty himself: The ground of American liberties can be held as a truth by most citizens, respected by all, freely rejected by some and commended for its unique merits to newcomers--but never forced on the conscience of anyone. And that is what Chief Justice Moore believes that his silent monument does.

Is it reasonable to call it an establishment of religion? When all the relevant distinctions have been made, it is difficult to see how it can be.

Michael Novak is the George Frederick Jewett Scholar in Religion, Philosophy, and Public Policy at AEI. He was an expert witness for the defense in Glassroth v. Moore.