The Cross in the Mojave

There's a cross at a remote location in the Mojave desert that sits on public land. Rather like the cross on the top of Mt Soledad in coastal San Diego, it has been the subject of court case and argument and efforts to preserve it as a war memorial by ingenious land swaps making the few square feet beneath it technically "private". The Mojave cross case recently went before SCOTUS. Writing in the NY Times, Stanley Fish explains,

In the latest chapter of this odd project of saving religion by emptying it of its content, Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for a plurality in Salazar v. Buono, ordered a district court to reconsider a ruling that Congress had impermissibly promoted religion by devising a plan designed to prevent the removal of a cross standing in the Mojave National Preserve.

This is the one thing BP and I really argue about (and in over 15 years, have never managed agreement). She insists that a cross is a sign of the dead, and not limited to Christian symbolism. I, a non-Christian, say that's not the case, and it is an overtly Christian symbol that excludes those who are not Christian.

Fish goes on,

Kennedy denies that the “emplacement” of the cross was accompanied by any intention “to promote a Christian message.” .... Therefore, Kennedy reasoned, Congress had no “illicit” intention either; it merely sought a way to “accommodate” (a term of art in Establishment Clause jurisprudence) a “symbol often used to honor and respect those whose heroic acts, noble contributions and patient striving help secure an honored place in history for this Nation and its people.”

BP would agree with Kennedy. In a majority Christian culture, she points out that the cross has acquired secular meaning as well, particularly to honor war dead. Beneath those crosses, row on row, she argues that there are a lot of non-believers (and I'm sure she's right about that). But Fish argues that it is not a both/and, as BP argues, and instead he thinks it's a somewhat dishonest attempt at either/or:

It has become a formula: if you want to secure a role for religious symbols in the public sphere, you must de-religionize them....The game being played here by Kennedy (and many justices before him) is “let’s pretend.” Let’s pretend that a cross that, as Kennedy acknowledges, “has been a gathering place for Easter services since it was first put in place,” does not breathe Christianity. Let’s pretend that Congress, which in addition to engineering a land-swap for the purpose of keeping the cross in place attached a reversionary clause requiring that the “memorial” (no cross is mentioned) be kept as it is, did not have in mind the preservation of a religious symbol. Let’s pretend that after all these machinations a “reasonable observer” who knew all the facts would not see the government’s hand, but would only see the hands of private parties. (This is what I call the “look, ma, no hands” argument.) Let’s pretend that there will be many who, if the cross were removed, would think that the government had conveyed “disrespect for those the cross was seen as honoring.” ....

Yet, Fish points out that you can never really remove the Christian from the cross.

The trouble with pretending is that it involves a strain; keeping the pretense going is hard, and the truth being occluded often peeks through, as it does when Kennedy protests that the Establishment Clause “does not require eradication of all religious symbols in the public realm” and adds that “the Constitution does not oblige government to avoid any public acknowledgment of religion’s role in society.”

But I thought that the cross was not, at least in this instance, a religious symbol and that the issue was not government acknowledging religion, but government honoring its dead. At moments like this, the mask slips and the plurality’s real concern — “to foster the display of the cross” (Stevens ) — is revealed for all (who had no doubt already spied it beneath the subterfuge) to see. The Christian and conservative Web sites that welcomed the decision as a blow for Christianity and against liberalism knew what they were looking at.

Either this particular cross is an overtly Christian symbol, or it is a transcendent symbol of the dead. You can't argue that it's simply a memorial and then say "besides, it's okay to acknowledge religion." Consistency, please! One or the other. And it's clear which one it is, in a dominantly Christian culture that considers its religious symbols generalizable to all. That's completely understandable, but sometimes I think that Christians don't realize how VERY Christian this country is and the myriad of little ways that non-Christians can feel left behind. So to speak. ;-)

Now, I am mildly annoyed by the cross on Mt Soledad, which I see every day. Although they call it a "war memorial" it's called the Easter Cross on the maps, which underlies its purpose: a marker of Christianity. BP points out that if it were on a private church on that hilltop, it wouldn't annoy me, even if it were the exact same cross. What's the difference, she asks? But it's not on a church, it's on public land, I reply. (Technically they have sold a few square feet of the land to make it private, but that's clearly just a ruse). On a church, it would be a private display of faith, which I completely support as free speech even if I don't agree. On public land, it's still a display of faith, one that I'm at some level as a taxpaying citizen, forced to support. BP argues that there is a historical context to it, as the cross was erected in a time (30s) when the majority Christian view was more...dominent? generalizable? I'm not nearly annoyed enough to agree with lawsuits to remove it, which I consider just this side of frivolous, but as a principle of the thing, I understand the instinct.

I think it is interesting that the majority of Christians see the cross as a symbol that goes beyond Christianity where as most non-Christians see it only as a Christian symbol. My wife and I adore each other but we just cannot see a cross in the same way.

Red state, blue state, and family values

How is it that states with the most liberal viewpoints (same sex marriage, major Obama supporters) do better in "family values" (low divorce rates, low rates of teen childbirth) than states with more "traditional" views? Just what are family values anyway?
This new book sounds fascinating: Red Families v. Blue Families: Legal Polarization and the Creation of Culture. From the review by Jonathan Rauch:

Cultural conservatives revel in condemning the loose moral values and louche lifestyles of "San Francisco liberals." But if you want to find two-parent families with stable marriages and coddled kids, your best bet is to bypass Sarah Palin country and go to Nancy Pelosi territory: the liberal, bicoastal, predominantly Democratic places that cultural conservatives love to hate......

Rauch points out that traditional family life was built on early marriages, and the ability of low-skilled men to get jobs with little education. But the global economy changed the game, by demanding high levels of skill and education, and the sexual revolution decoupled sex from children. Women entered the workforce and could postpone child bearing; liberalization of divorce laws made it easier to break up a marriage and gave women options and independence.

Red America still prefers the traditional model. In 2008, when news emerged that the 17-year-old daughter of the Republican vice presidential nominee was pregnant, traditionalists were reassured rather than outraged, because Bristol Palin followed the time-honored rules by announcing she would marry the father. They were kids, to be sure, but they would form a family and grow up together, as so many before them had done. Blue America, by contrast, was censorious. Bristol had committed the unforgivable sin of starting a family too young. If red and blue America seemed to be talking past one another about family values, it's because they were.

.... Blue norms are well adapted to the Information Age. They encourage late family formation and advanced education. They produce prosperous parents with graduate degrees, low divorce rates, and one or two over-protected children.

Red norms, on the other hand, create a quandary. They shun abortion (which is blue America's ultimate weapon against premature parenthood) and emphasize abstinence over contraception. But deferring sex in today's cultural environment, with its wide acceptance of premarital sex, is hard. ....Moral traditionalism fails to prevent premarital sex and early childbirth. Births precipitate more early marriages and unwed parenthood. That, in turn, increases family breakdown while reducing education and earnings.....

This really rings true, as we look at the faces of the angry TeaBaggers protesting change. When we hear the Palinistas, they are not speaking in the measured mature voices of educated people considering evidence and argument and complexity. They are emotional voices of protest, trying to return to a simple tradition that probably never really was. They are being left behind.

I was talking to J., a 20ish friend of my stepdaughter's. She grew up in a poor, rural community and was glad to escape to move to the city and study for her cosmetology license. (Another of Stepdaughter's friends, F., escaped a similar home town by joining the Navy. ) J's home town was scenically beautiful, but economically depressed after the lumber mills closed. Not for them the information superhighway, challenging jobs, travel and books and reading that most of us enjoy. No expectation of college, no office jobs, no nice car. No big city, edgy bands, dance clubs or new people to meet either. People who can leave, do--like J., and F., who don't plan to return. But J's high school classmates who stayed have few options. THey work dead-end jobs with little money, if they work at all, smoking pot and having sex, and having babies. And fulminating against socialism and that black man in the White House as they wait for their checks or food stamps in a world where progress has literally passed them by.

When J told me about her home town, I wondered: how do we bring them along? There are no jobs there; like many depressed communities that have lost mills, mines, and plants, there's no place for them to go. The modern world has cut out the traditional blue collar worker, who made a solid living in manufacturing or resource extraction. A family structure dependent on traditional views of women, sex, and divorce cracks asunder as those views change, but trying to turn the clock back to the sexual mores of the 50s isn't going to work as a remedy. People can't make a life or a family flipping burgers for minimum wage at MacDonald's. High tech companies and high tech jobs aren't going to relocate into these communities. As Rauch points out, the gap between Them and Us is self-enforcing, and growing . And they aren't going away or getting better. No wonder they are so angry.

The new Catholicism?

From the New Republic:

These are obviously dark days for the Roman Catholic Church. For over a decade, the U.S. church has been assailed by abuse charges and devastated by the resulting litigation. The Vatican used to console itself with the belief that this was a peculiarly American crisis, but, this year, similar abuse cases have arisen all over Europe ...

It appears it was easier to take, when it was viewed as "those Americans"--and then we find coverups at all levels, in all countries. This just exacerbates an ongoing tension.

For years, [the Catholic] core has been migrating away from Europe, heading southward into Africa and Latin America. Some Church observers have remarked that the Vatican is now in the wrong location: It’s 2,000 miles too far north of its emerging homelands....

And the converts are always more fanatical than those who converted them. We see some of this in the US. Catholicism is on the decline in the northeast, for example, where the names are Irish, and the only thing that keeps its numbers robust is a steady stream of third world migrants.

In part, European Catholicism has been declining because of a general trend toward secularization and religious indifference. ...Media coverage of the abuse and the Vatican's mangled response will also provide ample ammunition for those who want to keep religion out of the political realm. European opponents of the Church will find it much easier to silence the Vatican's voice in future legislation concerning issues like abortion, gay marriage and adoption, or reproductive technologies.... Indeed, as the crisis quickens the wane of Europe's Catholic influence, it will help solidify the Church's new roots in the south. Membership there will continue to burgeon, and Church's hierarchy will increasingly be paved with southern clerics.

That smaller, purer church Pope Benedict wanted is unlikely to be European. The next Pope will probably be Latin American, maybe even African. Just as seen in the Anglican Communion, this will lead to a distinct religious fervor that is culturally at odds with the historical home of the faith. But this will affect Roman Catholicism differently, given its hierarchical structure. The awkward splits in the Anglican Communion will look positively graceful compared to the likely feeling of liberal American Catholics when they find themselves holding a Global South lion by the tail. How will the Roman Catholic faith and its practice change when the Roman history and western culture become irrelevant to those in charge?

Steam Special

What I did this weekend: hung out waiting for a classic steam locomotive to go by, pulling a special train from LA to San Diego. Meet Santa Fe 3751:



See posts at my Surfliner Stories blog. And a great story in the LA Times!