The Supreme Court’s ruling allowing the town of Greece, New York, to open its meetings with a prayer addresses a question that has long bedeviled — no pun intended — the question of religious freedom in America. It is not so much the question of prayers at government meetings. That was decided long ago, in a case called Marsh v. Chambers, which permitted the unicameral legislature of Nebraska to be opened with a prayer. Or even earlier, at the outset of the Revolution, when Samuel Adams stood up against objections to a public prayer and Reverend Duche delivered his prayer for the Revolution. Town of Greece, we predict, will be remembered for putting paid the idea of a generic God.

This is because the plaintiffs tried to advance their case by focusing their objections not on prayer at a public meeting per se but on the overtly Christian nature of the prayers that were being offered at the town meetings of Greece. “They sought,” the Court said in its official summary of the case, “to limit the town to ‘inclusive and ecumenical’ prayers that referred only to a ‘generic God.’” What in blazes, we’re tempted to ask, does that mean? In truth, though, we have an idea, and it’s not so outside of our tradition. George Washington, in the prayer ending his famous letter welcoming the Jews to America, referred to God as the “father of all mercies.”

It’s a courtesy that persons offering a prayer often extend when they are in the presence of other faiths. Jews are particularly sensitive on the point, owing to the first two of the Ten Commandments. To be placed in a position where they might be praying to a God other than Abraham’s, that is a serious breach. No doubt Jews are not the only ones with such sensitivities. But no one in Greece, New York, was asking any Jew or others desiring to stand apart to make such a prayer. Nor were they being excluded from offering their own prayers. And requiring prayers to be generic would risk its own fundamental constitutional violations.

This was marked in a concurrence by Justice Alito, who was joined by The Great Scalia. He used the concurrence to deal directly with the principal dissent, which was written by Justice Kagan. We were disappointed in her opinion, particularly because of the magnificent rejoinder she gave during her confirmation hearing. That was when she was asked by Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina where she was on Christmas Eve (she is the only Justice to have been asked that question in the history of the Republic); “You know, like all Jews,” she famously replied, “I was probably in a Chinese restaurant.” She turned much less cheerful in Town of Greece.

“If the Town Board had let its chaplains know that they should speak in non-sectarian terms, common to diverse religious groups, then no one would have valid grounds for complaint,” she carped. She went on to note that “priests and ministers, rabbis and imams give such invocations all the time.” It shouldn’t have had to fall to Justices Alito and Scalia to point out that to require nonsectarian prayer would not only run headlong into “a long history of contrary congressional practice” but would pose real danger. “Must a town screen and, if necessary, edit” — or, we’d add, write — “prayers before they’re given?”

Now that would be a government establishment. It can’t be where even Justice Kagan wants to go. There are those who would insist that no prayer would be better than generic prayer. But no prayer would have its own dangers. These dangers were well understood by the Founders of America, George Washington first among them. The point was one of the last he made to his countrymen. He did it in his Farewell Address, with the famous words: “Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.” Even, it turns out, if the exclusion were to be required in a small town like Greece, New York.