The Ten Commandments.
The Cross
The Star of David
The Crescent and Star.
Those are the words I put on the board.
Are these religious symbols or secular? I asked the Con-Law class.
The cross was definitely a religious symbol.
So what is a huge concrete cross doing on City land overlooking San Francisco, I asked.
"Do you want to change the name of San Francisco?" asked Matt, a student.
He had me.
He'd made the perfect point.
Of course not. What's the difference?
When Fray Junipero Serra established his chain of California missions a day's march apart, from San Diego to Los Angeles, to Santa Barbara, to San Juan Capistrano, to San Juan Bautista, to Carmel, to San Francisco, to San Rafael, (along with a few I left out, like San Benito) he was setting up religious forts, churches, hostels, farms, factories, garrisons, and homes, all rolled into one.
There was no separation of church and state in the Spanish tradition of the Conquistadores, the Dons, the Padres, who came to do good and to do well. Church and state were one, for all intents and purposes.
The cross was still the cross, but Nuestra Seniora de Los Angeles was now LA. San Francisco de Asis is now SF. Their airports are LAX and SFO, respectively.
When we think of LAX or SFO, we don't necessarily think of the God of the Catholics.
What happened?
The religion was washed out, for most people. Devout Christians and the historically minded might disagree, but the names of these cities as religious symbols, icons, have been denatured.
What other religious symbols have become secularized?
"Santa Claus," said one student.
Christmas, said another referring to the commercialization of the market driven holiday in America which tends to drown out its religious basis.
The cross when large, gold, diamond encrusted, and worn on a gold chain by a Gangsta Rock Star brandishing a hand gun, said another.
"Oh, you mean, Bling Bling," said the professor, to invited applause for being so with it.
The Ten Commandments had not been denatured or secularized for Justice Antonin Scalia, however, who is both historically minded and devotedly Catholic.
When the Texas attorney-general argued that it was no violation of the principle of separation of church and state to permit the sculpture of the Ten Commandments to appear prominently on display on the grounds of the state school, the U. of Texas, because they no longer meant anything in a religious sense, but were just washed out symbols of law, Scalia told the A-G that if Texas won on that theory it would have won a Pyrrhic victory. Texas would have thrown out the baby to save the bath water.
That's what I call being hauled up short by a superior power.
It makes you think as to what we're doing here.
Religious symbols, such as the names of San Francisco and Los Angeles, come from the Christian religion, named by priests, at a time when religion partnered with state.
But the world has turned over a few times since those days, and the population has grown and changed.
It would be crazy to change the names of these cities these days for reasons of separation of church and state. It would be crazy to remove the icons of the law and lawgivers of the past from the chamber of the Supreme Court, or the Court's Christmas Party, or the daily invocation, "God bless this honorable Court."
Why?
This is the hard part.
It is nearly impossible, given the mixture of religious symbols and state practice, to separate the two. To some extent, as Justice O'Connor has pointed out, religious language and reference lends dignity and formality to public occasions of state. It would be foolish to use everyday language for solemn public occasions when we need to come up to a higher level of consciousness.
The language of religion helps us to do that, just as the architectural language of the great cathedrals of Europe, such as Chartres, which at least I have the advantage of having visited, inspires a hush of apparent reverence even among non-believing tourists. Our own important public buildings owe some debt to church architecture, just as they owe a debt to the Greeks and the Romans.
What to do.
"It's just so hard to know where to draw the line," said Justice O'Connor during oral argument. The Ten Commandments cases had been argued the day before. The reason its so hard is because it is impossible to articulate a principled line between church and state. It would be like trying to cut up a marble-cake into its chocolate and vanilla components. It can't be done.
Oh, what to do!
The onliest thing you can do is to proceed on a case-by-case basis.
San Francisco and Los Angeles get to keep their names.
In God We Trust Stays.
The Christmas Tree and Santa Claus, along with the Christmas Party stay.
But asking the people to say "We pray this in Jesus name," is out, except in church.
Like that.
The Ten Commandments?
It's both, religious and secular.
Context counts.
Who is doing what to whom counts.
Timing counts.
If a representative of the religious right, today, wants to set up the Ten Commandments in a courthouse, its suspect. If Junipero Serra set up his Christian missions when Spain ruled California, that's history. They're well worth visiting, incidentally, especially the one in Carmel. Flowers, architecture, history, spirituality, the works. Beautiful. And next to the sea.
I don't see how the Court can do better than to do this.
We inherited the religious symbolism and display it, but we don't force people to swallow it. They can ignore it until they can no longer. That's what the famous Barnette case stands for, and what Mr. Newdow's "Under God" protest was about. He lost because the tide was against him, of public opinion, however theoretically correct his position was. Not enough people had "under God" stick in their craws. If and when enough attitudes change, so may the Court. That appears about as the Court could, or should do.
The Court is the Great Follower, recall. It leads by following, always a few steps and a few years behind, until one day it is ready to leap, as in Brown v. Board, the 1954 public school integration case. Like the tectonic plates suddenly shifting, the nation experienced a magnitude 8 temblor whose aftershocks still reverberate.
Scalia was right. It would be foolish to forget the role of religion in the foundation not only of the nation, but of its values.
I know as well as you that many crimes have been committed in the name of religion.
As we continue our climb out of the muddy swamp of our history and tradition, we have to pick and choose what to keep and what to jettison. Teaching our religious heritages, and there are many strands to this line, is one way. Preserving the symbols as reminders of the good and the bad is also good. In Washington and San Francisco we have a museum and a memorial, respectively (at the Palace of the Legion of Merit in SF) to the Nazi genocide of Jews, even though they did not happen here. Probably because they did not happen here. We have no museum to our own atrocities, slavery, and Jim Crow, yet. Give us time.
What the Court could do, is to repeat the principles that the nation exists to protect and to serve all of its people, to provide a free space in the world where all religions are free to practice, and that none can expect government to endorse or prefer one over the other.
But what about the above symbols? The city names? We can make distinctions. That's what lawyers do. It is the Common Law practice, and process, from before there was much statute law in the mother country, England.
We're simply going to have to pick and choose, and there's going to have to be a certain amount of subjective judgment involved in the process. The Court is going to have to remain in the business of reading the national tea-leaves of will.
And so we will muddle on, unless and until we get far enough down the road that, our minds on other business, we'll see that the other guy's symbols no longer make that much difference to us. They've been watered down, except for those few in that specific tradition represented, and no longer stick in the craw of the rest of us. The best example I can think of is the "In God We Trust" on the quarter.
Quarters are most useful for feeding parking meters, but not much good for getting out the parishioners on Friday evening, Saturday morning, or Sunday, are they?
***
This site provides an animated sketch-map of the California Missions listing in order of date of founding the name and location. I could have sworn that Nuestro Senora la Reina de Los Angles (later Los Angeles, then just plain L.A.) was the name of a mission, but it doesn't appear on this map.
It looks like I was right.
