IF you listened to Justice Anthony M. Kennedy of the Supreme Court and his fellow conservatives on the bench this week, you might think the court’s 5-4 decision in the case of Town of Greece v. Galloway was no big deal. So what if a town in upstate New York typically opens its council meetings with prayers that acknowledge “the saving sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross”?

If you listened to the people who shepherded the case as it ascended the judicial hierarchy, however, the decision represents one of their biggest victories to date. It “wasn’t just an answer on prayer — it was an answer to prayer!” read a statement by the Family Research Council. The council is one of a host of organizations guided by the religious liberty advocacy group the Alliance Defending Freedom that backed the defendants with legal resources.

To understand why the case’s backers were so cock-a-hoop, you must first know something about the long game being played by the religious right. The goal is to get back to a “soft” establishment of religion in America — that is, a system in which formal guarantees of religious freedom and the official separation of church and state remain in place, but one religion is informally or implicitly acknowledged as the “approved” religion of the majority and a legitimate basis for public policy.

This was more or less the situation in the United States during the first half of the 19th century. In 1811, the New York Supreme Court upheld a conviction for blasphemy (the archetypal union of church and state) on the grounds that the state had an interest in punishing offenses to the religious sensibilities of the Protestant majority. Back then, nativist Protestants imposed their version of the Bible in public schools, while Catholics rioted in protest and placed their children in parochial schools.