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.
Posts Tagged ‘The cross and the courts’
Crossing the sacred secular
posted by Geneviève ZubrzyckiCrossed signals and grave misunderstandings
posted by Greg Johnson
In Sunday school I learned that the cross points to the empty tomb. Given how easily theological concepts jump the tracks when translated for the benefit of eight-year-olds, this now strikes me as pretty fair representation of a core idea central to most Christianities: the crucifixion makes sense only in light of the resurrection. . . . Moreover, the resurrection conveys a Christian theory of death en nuce and metonymically—for some, of course, it would be better to say metaphorically. In any case, whether by way of vague aspiration, an expected apocalypse, or simply due to a learned literary sensibility, most Christians take the resurrection to be the proper model for death—that is, death is recognized precisely through overcoming it. Celestial destinations are in mind. Terrestrial stopping points—graves—are thus temporary and incidental.
This model of death, as signified by the cross, could not be more different from that held by people indigenous to the U.S., including American Indians and Native Hawaiians.
The cross: more than religion?
posted by Winnifred Fallers Sullivan
On Wednesday, April 28, 2010, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its decision in Salazar v. Buono, its latest effort to specify what the establishment clause of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution requires of the government with respect to religious objects on public lands.
The object of its concern on this occasion is an eight foot white cross standing on a rock outcropping on a federal preserve in the Mojave Desert, first placed there in 1934 by the Death Valley post of the VFW, and denominated a national WWI memorial by Congress in 2002. The legal issue before the Court was whether the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals had properly affirmed a District Court ruling that the 2004 congressional act transferring the acre of land containing the cross to the VFW was illegal. . . .
The six opinions presented in Salazar v. Buono display various views on how the law of injunctions should be applied to the facts. All agree, however, that the District Court’s original decision—finding display of the cross on federal land to be an unconstitutional establishment of religion—is res judicata (that is, “the thing is decided,” and is no longer reviewable). Along the way, however—partly perhaps because, as some of them said, the law of injunctions is not very interesting to them—many of the justices, both at oral argument and in their written opinions, couldn’t resist offering opinions on the public meaning of the cross.
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