LOS ANGELES — After six decades of Nativity scenes in Santa Monica’s Palisades Park in California, there will be no displays of the Madonna and child this year.

A federal judge in Los Angeles on Monday denied a request from a nonprofit group to temporarily block Santa Monica’s ban on unattended displays in the park. The City Council passed the measure on the heels of a dispute last winter over atheist displays that outnumbered traditional Christian scenes.

“It’s a sad day for freedom of speech and freedom of religion when a very small group of people with an ideological ax to grind succeed in censoring the greatest story ever told,” said Hunter Jameson, the head of the Santa Monica Nativity Scenes Committee, which brought the lawsuit. “It’s even sadder when a city government like the City Council in Santa Monica goes along with this effort to trample on freedom of expression.”

A series of 14 Nativity scenes had been a mainstay in the park since the 1950s. But in recent years, Damon Vix, a local atheist who objected to the religious scenes’ presence on public property, began to erect his own signs in the park with messages like “Religions are all alike — founded upon fables and mythologies,” a quotation from Thomas Jefferson.