Teneika Goosby believes in God, so she said “give me that one” to the Hamilton County staffer offering the “In God We Trust” license plate option, she recalled Tuesday morning. Mary Yarber was just as sure. She was born again, she said, and wants the world to know about Jesus.
Sarah Stone was coaxing her children into a shopping cart nearby in a Brainerd shopping center parking lot. She elected not to have “In God We Trust” on her license plate, having found it an uninspiring way to demonstrate her Christian faith.
When Tennessee vehicle owners all got the new blue license plates throughout 2022, they also generally chose — online, or at the registration office — whether they would choose the version that says “In God We Trust” or the version that does not.
State lawmakers introduced the option in 2017 with Tennessee’s old license plates and saw incremental gains in the proportion of plates that say those words, as people got new cars or had other reasons to get new plates.
But the mass change-out for all drivers in 2022 led, according to state data, to a major jump in “In God We Trust” plates on Tennessee roads. In both Hamilton County and wider Tennessee today, about three out of every five standard license plates say “In God We Trust,” state data shows.
Many religions have gods, but the license plates are generally the work of Christian lawmakers who in statehouses throughout the U.S. have worked, with particular verve of late, to introduce into public spaces symbols connecting their faith to political life.
For those who believe religion has no place in government, the policies can have an aspect of menace: They seem designed to make future, more forceful conservative Christian legal pushes go down easier — a suspicion intensified by leaked conservative political playbooks seeming to endorse that very strategy.
Yet roughly 15 interviews conducted by the Chattanooga Times Free Press of random motorists suggest many Tennesseans don’t have strong feelings about the “In God We Trust” plates at all. Several shoppers celebrated the plates, and no one strenuously objected to them.
Some don’t even know what their own plates say. One man said he opted not to to have “In God We Trust” on his license plate. When shown that his license plate did say “In God We Trust” on it, he threw his hands up and got in his car.
Secret code
On the new blue plates, the words “In God We Trust” — the national motto — are displayed in small letters around the tri-star design. The motto is hard to discern from afar.
But the religiosity of a plate can be discerned by whether its alphanumeric code begins with letters (no motto) or numbers (motto). The subtle distinction between the two configurations has led to online criticism that the government is trying to separate the godly from the godless with a hidden code.
Officials say using both number-first and letter-first plates simply gives them more configurations available without duplicates.
Tennessee offers more than 200 specialty plates, which generally come with an additional fee. Particularly common ones list military honors. Others benefit groups like Trout Unlimited or area universities. On Dec. 31, 2022, Hamilton County had nearly 1,000 active Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library plates, state data shows.
But the standard blue plates make up the overwhelming majority of active license plates in Tennessee. Among those, between 2018 and 2021, the proportion registered in Hamilton County that said “In God We Trust” increased from 6% to 16%, state data shows.
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‘In God We Trust’: Phrase now adorns 3 in 5 license Tennessee license plates
In 2022, Tennessee swapped to blue plates, which meant more eligible plate holders had an occasion to opt for the “In God We Trust” option. By year’s end, 63% of blue plates registered in Hamilton County said “In God We Trust,” according to the state. This approximates the overall Tennessee average.
Surrounding rural counties had higher “In God We Trust” rates. According to state data, 70% of the blue plates registered in Bradley County had the motto at the end of 2022. In Marion county? 78%. Sequatchie: 81% Franklin: 88%.
Urban centers, by contrast, had far lower rates. Only 31% of eligible plates in Shelby County had “In God We Trust” on them at the end of 2022, according to the data. Nashville’s Davidson County had only 22% at the same point.
‘Under God’
The U.S. in the late 1700s adopted an unofficial motto of E Pluribus Unum: Out of many, one.
Amid the carnage of the Civil War, Christian-minded officials inscribed “In God We Trust” on coins. A hundred years later, as leaders framed a burgeoning Cold War as a clash of civilizations with godless communists, U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower put the phrase on cash and made it the official national motto — not long after adding “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance.
Debates over the place of religious symbols in government are nothing new. But Geoffrey Blackwell, litigation counsel at the New Jersey-based American Atheists Legal Center, said the wave of laws proposed around the nation in recent years have seemed less concerned with protecting religious liberty than imposing religious beliefs on others.
In 2018, Tennessee lawmakers mandated that “In God We Trust” be prominently displayed in public schools, echoing legislation passed in several other states in recent years, from Arkansas to Florida to, this month, Louisiana. A lawmaker sponsoring the Tennessee bill said the motto and founding documents are the cornerstones of freedom, The Tennessean reported.
A federal judge last year dismissed a Nashville parent’s subsequent lawsuit. The judge cited past court precedent, finding that the national motto, despite its mention of God, has developed a secular, patriotic purpose and that displaying it in government spaces does not violate the constitutional prohibition on the establishment of a national religion.
A sympathetic U.S. Supreme Court has significantly weakened the legal barriers preventing the government and its representatives from promoting a particular faith. In a notable 2022 decision, the high court ruled a school district in the state of Washington violated a football coach’s free speech when, seeking to comply with a clause in the First Amendment prohibiting state establishment of religion, it tried to stop him from praying with players at midfield after games.
As Middle Tennessee State University professor John Vile wrote in a summary of the consequential decision, the conservative majority rejected a longstanding test courts had used to adjudicate if the church-state line is crossed. The majority of justices said the coach was acting as a private individual and that no one was forced to participate in his prayer sessions. Dissenting justices argued the coach, a district employee, was using his position to inject religion into a public school event and that students could have felt an element of coercion that violated their own religious freedom.
State Sen. Rusty Crowe, R-Johnson City said he reviewed relevant court decisions when he sponsored a bill this year to put “In God We Trust” on the Tennessee state seal, too. It passed with bipartisan support. In an email statement, he said the motto denotes that the economic and political prosperity of the nation is in God’s hands.
That law likely would not have faced much legal scrutiny even a few years ago, but with the law governing the separation of church and state increasingly unsettled, conservative Christian lawmakers nationwide are probing new terrain — and the outcomes remain uncertain.
Texas lawmakers this month passed a bill letting public schools have chaplains in addition to school counselors; the Texas House is mulling another bill, passed in the state Senate, that would mandate the display of the Ten Commandments in every classroom.
Matter of choice
Rather than giving drivers an option, Mississippi in 2019 began issuing a default license plate that said “In God We Trust,” drawing a lawsuit from in-state plaintiffs and the American Atheists Legal Center, which argued the state was compelling drivers to endorse a religion they may not believe in.
Mississippi leaders pledged to defend the license plate. But the Mississippi Free Press this month reported that a newly designed plate without “In God We Trust” is now set to supplant the short-lived godly version.
Tennessee lawmakers originally planned, like Mississippi, to put “In God We Trust” on every standard plate but ultimately opted to give drivers a choice. For Blackwell, that outcome is not particularly objectionable — though he’s wary nonetheless. Few people would bother to fight a non-mandatory “In God We Trust” option, he said, and once everyone accepts that it’s fine because the state has been doing it for a decade or two, it becomes harder to challenge in court.
That, in turn, opens the door for further religious measures, he said, referring to the strategy outlined in Project Blitz. The political playbook — which was in subsequent editions renamed — was produced by the influential Congregational Prayer Caucus Foundation, which says it works to further religious freedom.
A 2018 edition of the strategy listed three major categories of model legislation, distinguished in part by the projected strength of opposition the bills would face. Category one and two bills, the strategic document said, highlight the place of Christianity in U.S. history. Lawmakers might, for example, declare a Christian Heritage Week, or consider a “National Motto License Display Act.” It cited Tennessee’s law as an example.
Category three bills would have the greatest immediate effect in terms of protecting religious liberties but would also face fiercer opposition, the document said. Some such model bills aim to hold more space for religion in public schools. One model bill would encourage sex between married men and women. Another clarifies that it does not seek to limit or deny a person’s right to adopt but would prohibit making adoption agencies violate their sincerely held religious beliefs — evoking conflicts that have flared when state-funded religious adoption agencies have refused service to same-sex couples, or, in a recent Tennessee case, a Jewish couple.
Better safe
Tennesseans overwhelmingly believe in God, according to the Pew Research Center, and about 3 in 4 say they are highly religious. Still, people’s license plates do not necessarily reflect their personal beliefs.
At the Brainerd shopping center on Tuesday, one Pentecostal man, passionate about the King James Version of the Bible, didn’t have the “In God We Trust” license plate. Another man, Sean Steinhart, didn’t know his car displayed the words “In God We Trust,” but when they were pointed out on his plate, he looked on with approval.
Another man, who declined to give his name for fear of retaliation from his God-loving employer, didn’t have “In God We Trust” on his car. But, though he was no believer, he did have the words on his truck.
He recalled that the staffer at the registration office seemed keen on the idea of him getting a plate with “In God We Trust” on it. The staffer had the power to make the bureaucratic transaction challenging. So, he thought, why not get it? — “A better safe than sorry kind of thing,” he said — just to move the process along.
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