The Immanent Frame

In her essay on Salazar v. Buono, Winni Sullivan ponders why crosses present such a difficulty for the modern, secular nation-state, and she questions the degree to which religious myths and symbols have been supplanted by those of nationalism.  “Has secularization failed?” she asks.  Sullivan posits that religious symbols’ ability to connect the universal and the particular is at the root of their success.  Yet the ambiguity of both the Mojave cross and the commentaries made by various judges in evaluating the case point to the layered religious and secular meanings of the symbol at that particular site and in U.S. society more generally.  Perhaps a more expansive definition of civil religion can trace how the same symbol moves across “religious” and “secular” contexts, depending on the site, event, or time in which it is deployed.  In Poland, for example, the cross is and is not religious, although it is always sacred.  Indeed, this ambiguity, the ability to pivot in different directions, may help account for the cross’s social force.