Do the license plates in Tennessee allow cops to determine which drivers are atheists?
That rumor has been floating around for months, and it has some validity to it, but the full story makes the whole situation seem far less conspiratorial.
Some background is helpful here. In 2017, Republicans in the state’s legislature passed a law allowing drivers to get license plates with the words “In God We Trust” on them. They actually wanted to mandate those words on license plates, but when told that could lead to a lawsuit, they made it optional. Anyone getting a new license plate could choose between a secular template or a religious one.
(Should those words be on license plates? Absolutely not. But legally, they could get away with it, so they did. Welcome to the South.)
That, however, created a logistical problem for the state, because it meant there were now two different kinds of license plates on the road. It was therefore possible for two cars to have the same license plate numbers because they were using different designs, but those differences weren’t always clear from a distance. Bad news all around.
So Tennessee officials did something that Florida, Indiana, South Carolina, and Utah have all done in the past when confronted with the same dilemma: They said that the old plates would continue to have a combination like AAA-#### (three letters followed by four numbers) while the new “In God We Trust” plates would go ###-AAAA. That made it a lot easier for police officers (and anyone else) to make an accurate identification if needed.
“For administrative and inventory purposes, the ‘In God We Trust’ plate is issued as a unique plate class with a specific configuration format,” Tennessee Department of Revenue Director of Communications Kelly Cortesi told Knox News. “This helps prevent duplicate issuance of sequences between the two different plate types.”
It also had a mathematical benefit: While there were millions of combinations available with the old design—more than the number of people in Tennessee—the new plate opened the door to even more options, which gave the state a lot more leeway in assigning numbers. This wasn’t the primary motivation behind the change, but it didn’t hurt.
The inadvertent problem with all this is that it was now a lot easier to identify who had a religious plate and who didn’t. Kind of. There are plenty of religious people in Tennessee who don’t want “In God We Trust” on their license plates and (I assume) plenty of atheists who might get the IGWT plates because they think it’ll help them avoid suspicion.
Whatever the case, one point bears repeating: This has been going on since 2017.
Earlier this year, Tennessee redesigned their license plates altogether. Anyone renewing their plates from this point forward will get a new plate with a blue background instead of the old green one. The “In God We Trust” option is still available to anyone who wants it.
Nothing has fundamentally changed.
When those new plates appeared, however, some people wrongly thought that’s when the alphanumeric differences went into effect. They believed Tennessee officials had purposely created a system to quickly identify who was religious (and conservative) and who wasn’t.
While it’s true the combinations make it easier to tell who has the “In God We Trust” plates, there’s no reason to believe there’s any conspiracy afoot. Seriously. No conspiracy. Great headlines, but no conspiracy.
It’s not like just a few lone atheists in the state have secular plates either. Tennessee drivers are pretty evenly split when it comes to who’s getting the religious plate and who isn’t:
About 54% of the new blue plates issued statewide between the start of the year and April 22 have featured “In God We Trust,” according to data from the state Department of Revenue.
…
Drivers in Fentress County this year have requested the highest percentage of In God We Trust plates with 98.1% and Van Buren County is close behind with 97.7%.
Davidson County has the largest margin of drivers opting for the standard plates at 86.1%. Madison County is a distant second with 66.7% so far.
No surprise there. Some rural counties love their religious license plates, but those counties were likely homogenous to begin with. Other counties aren’t seeing a rush to get them. Which means trying to figure out who’s religious or non-religious by glancing at their plates is a fairly pointless activity.
I understand why there may be fear. But in terms of reasons to distrust cops, the worry that they may come after you because you chose one license plate design over another is extremely low on the list. More importantly, there hasn’t been a single story about Tennessee cops using this system to target certain drivers.
Until that happens, there’s no reason to get paranoid.