Cite as: 515 U. S. 753 (1995)
Opinion of Scalia, J.
display did not endorse religion. 465 U. S., at 685-687. The opinion does assume, as petitioners contend, that the government's use of religious symbols is unconstitutional if it effectively endorses sectarian religious belief. But the case neither holds nor even remotely assumes that the government's neutral treatment of private religious expression can be unconstitutional.
Petitioners argue that absence of perceived endorsement was material in Lamb's Chapel and Widmar. We did state in Lamb's Chapel that there was "no realistic danger that the community would think that the District was endorsing religion or any particular creed," 508 U. S., at 395. But that conclusion was not the result of empirical investigation; it followed directly, we thought, from the fact that the forum was open and the religious activity privately sponsored. See ibid. It is significant that we referred only to what would be thought by "the community"—not by outsiders or individual members of the community uninformed about the school's practice. Surely some of the latter, hearing of religious ceremonies on school premises, and not knowing of the premises' availability and use for all sorts of other private activities, might leap to the erroneous conclusion of state endorsement. But, we in effect said, given an open forum and private sponsorship, erroneous conclusions do not count. So also in Widmar. Once we determined that the benefit to religious groups from the public forum was incidental and shared by other groups, we categorically rejected the State's Establishment Clause defense. 454 U. S., at 274.
What distinguishes Allegheny and the dictum in Lynch from Widmar and Lamb's Chapel is the difference between government speech and private speech. "[T]here is a crucial difference between government speech endorsing religion, which the Establishment Clause forbids, and private speech endorsing religion, which the Free Speech and Free Exercise Clauses protect." Mergens, 496 U. S., at 250 (opin-
765
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