Some readers asked: Why aren’t references to various pagan gods on government symbols (Athena on the California seal, Pomona on the L.A. County seal) also unconstitutional, if crosses are unconstitutional?
Well, there’s no “pagan exemption” as such to the Establishment Clause, but recall that the current Establishment Clause test on this is basically (with some exception) the “endorsement” test: Would a reasonable, well-informed observer perceive the speech as endorsing religion generally, or a certain religion in particular?
Pagan religions have very few current adherents (there has been something of a revival, but I suspect that very, very few people actually believe in them), and a long history as basically cultural referents. All reasonable, well-informed observers, I think, would see the pagan referents as trying to tie to this cultural tradition, rather than as endorsing paganism or even religiosity generally. (Some people might still be offended by the use of the pagan symbolism, but the test isn’t whether they’re offended; it’s whether a reasonable, well-informed observer would see the symbol as an endorsement of religion.)
A cross or a creche, on the other hand, might plausibly be seen as an endorsement of religion. Even a symbol of a minority religion — such as Judaism or Islam — might sometimes be seen as something of an endorsement, at least of religiosity generally. But a symbol of a basically dead religion, especially one whose symbols are almost always used for purposes other than the religious, can’t be seen this way. (Of course, one can think that this is the wrong result, because the endorsement test is the wrong test. But it is the result that an evenhanded application of the endorsement test would call for.)
However — and here the pagan symbolism analogy might indeed be helpful — even the symbols of live religions sometimes do have primarily historical or cultural meanings. That’s clearest in city names (Los Angeles, Sacramento, Santa Fe, Providence), and it’s also true of the cross on the L.A. County seal, which in context is most reasonably seen as symbolizing L.A.’s religious history.
So Athena on a seal doesn’t violate the endorsement test because these days she’s almost never used as an endorsement of paganism, and a reasonable observer would thus almost never see her as such an endorsement. A cross on the L.A. county seal doesn’t violate the endorsement test because, in this particular context, a reasonable observer would see it as a historical reference, not an endorsement of Christianity.
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