The cross is the central symbol of the Christian faith. This fact would seem to be indisputable.
After the Roman Empire was Christianized, emperors put crosses on the reverse of their coins. Byzantine rulers did the same thing, and during the Middle Ages, Crusader armies carried the cross aloft in their wars against Islamic battalions.
The cross is instantly recognizable as a symbol of the Christian faith to people all over the world, Christian and non-Christian. For believers, it is a powerful symbol that invokes a communion of followers who transcend state boundaries and political constructs.
Believers rally to the cross, while detractors denounce it. Few are neutral on its meaning.
How strange, then, to hear Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia opine recently that the cross isn’t necessarily a religious symbol and that it can be used to represent all of the nation’s war dead.
During oral arguments in Salazar v. Buono on Oct. 7, the bombastic justice insisted that an 8-foot cross atop a rock outcropping in the Mojave Preserve in California is not a Christian symbol at all.
“It’s erected as a war memorial,” the justice argued. “I assume it is erected in honor of all of the war dead. The cross is the most common symbol of the resting place of the dead.”
Many Americans would heartily disagree. The preserve is owned by the federal government, and the presence of the cross there offends many Americans, who say a sectarian symbol has no place on publicly owned property.
When a federal appeals court ordered that the cross be removed, Congress intervened, first passing a bill designating the area a national memorial and, second, conveying one acre of land under the cross to the Veterans of Foreign Wars.
The land deal was clearly a ruse designed to keep the cross in place. Anyone traveling within the preserve would assume that the land under the religious symbol is part of the preserve. After all, it sits among 1.6 million acres of federal property.
Furthermore, the designation of the land as a national memorial means that the display must be maintained to honor veterans. If for some reason the VFW abandons the area, the land reverts to the federal government.
In light of this, it is absurd to contend, as U.S. Solicitor General Elena Kagan did during the argument, that the federal government is no longer involved in this situation.
The government is hardly a disinterested party when an area has been designated a national memorial. Such status is rarely granted. These sites include South Dakota’s Mount Rushmore, the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C., and the Flight 93 crash area in Pennsylvania. Of course the government has an interest in these sites. It maintains them, after all!
In this case, the federal government has established a national memorial that is topped with the symbol of one religion – and insists that this somehow honors all veterans.
Non-Christian groups know better. That’s why the Military Association of Atheists and Freethinkers, the American Muslim Armed Forces and Veterans Affairs Councils, the Muslim American Veterans Association and the Jewish War Veterans of the United States filed friend-of-the-court briefs asking the high court to order the cross removed.
While these organizations respect the sacrifice Christian veterans made for our nation, they know the cross does not represent all of the brave men and women who died to keep us free.
It’s especially galling to hear Scalia arguing that the cross need not be a religious symbol. In media interviews, Scalia often promotes himself as an avenger of the Christian faith. In one notorious speech, he even bragged about being a “fool for Christ.”
A man as devout as Scalia should realize that stripping sectarian symbols of their religious meaning is dangerous – and deeply offensive to believers.
If his theory were adopted, the cross could be secularized and used by government officials in a parade of stupefying “civil religion” exercises. Like “In God We Trust” on the money and “under God” slipped into the Pledge of Allegiance, government manipulation of the cross could become just another excuse to promote a generic religiosity that has the hallmarks of real faith but none of it sincerity or vitality.
How is this good for religion in America?
A religious symbol that is unique to one faith cannot honor all of our veterans, and the cross has no business ever being appropriated by the state.
The Supreme Court should nullify the sham land swap in the Mojave desert and order that the cross be removed from the preserve. In doing so, the high court will in no way be manifesting “hostility toward religion,” as the Religious Right would have Americans believe.
Rather, the justices will be honoring religion by doing it a great favor and placing the power and meaning of the cross into the hands of its rightful owners: America’s Christian community.
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