The Supreme Court’s decision last week in favor of the so-called Peace Cross in Bladensburg, Md., is a welcome result that will have far-reaching impact for perceived religious symbols on public lands across the country and, perhaps more centrally, Americans’ ever-evolving relationship with issues between church and state.
Not being lawyers, but rather architects with particular focus on forms of constructed space that give comfort to the soul, our interest in the Peace Cross case has never been the legal standards of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment — which prohibits government from “establishing” a religion — but rather the question of whether the court would respect the historical intentions of the Bladensburg community to honor its war dead in a once-common tradition or instead set them aside in favor of the broader “cultural evolution” of more modern generations.
We are heartened that the Justices have rejected the protests of three self-described humanists claiming that a Latin cross in a public park offends them. The untold thousands interred beneath similar markers at Arlington and other publicly maintained military cemeteries across the country and their families should rest easier for the court’s wisdom in recognizing cultural traditions which many made the ultimate sacrifice to preserve.
The Constitution has never been interpreted to mean that you cannot have any mention of religion or display of religious symbols in public spaces or in public proceedings. That is not, historically, how things have been understood, and one look no further than the many examples of “In God We Trust” on U.S. currency or the many federal, state, and municipal oaths that conclude with the phrase “So help me God” for proof.
Similarly, the use of specifically religious symbolism to remember the dead is a nearly universal fact of human existence globally. At the same time, a primary function of architecture — especially public, monumental, memorial architecture — is to provide spaces where we remember who we are, where we come from, and the social and cultural experiences we share. In the case of the Peace Cross, the court’s majority has shown the appropriate regard for our built history, and the common memory it concretizes, maintaining a bond that brings generations together and make us whole as a people.
Their brilliance was in looking at the Peace Cross through 1925 eyes (when the Peace Cross was installed) and respecting that the significance of something is not given by architects, or historians, or even judges, but by the people.
In today’s atmosphere of political intolerance and divided ideological camps, it is vitally important that we recognize why things were done as they were in the first place. The intention of the Peace Cross was not to offend anybody; the thinking was not “let’s put a cross up to kind of baptize everybody.” It was meant to celebrate and memorialize the lives of 49 young men of Prince George’s County (including four African American soldiers and a Medal of Honor recipient) who died during World War I, and its design in the form of a Latin cross only reflected the nationwide trend at the time. We should respect earlier generations’ expressions of civic unity, particularly when they were genuine, reverential, and well-meaning.
Otherwise, we would surrender any expectation that similar gestures we might make in 2019 will continue to be respected in 2119. And then what? If you set out to erase all history, you’re eventually going to erase what happened an hour ago, leaving us no memory at all … only the grim prospect an enormous, homogenized population living an Orwellian future characterized by everything and nothing, everybody and nobody.
This, even more than its impact on subsequent interpretations of the First Amendment and the separation of church and state, is what makes the Peace Cross a “landmark” case. By ruling that the memorial can stay, the Supreme Court has honored the hopes of the community that created it to be transcendental, to say these souls are not gone, only disappeared, and they live on in our collective memory.
Julio Bermudez is professor and director of the Cultural Studies and Sacred Space concentration in the School of Architecture and Planning at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. Travis Price is founder and principal of Travis Price Architects in Washington and author of The Mythic Modern: Architectural Expeditions into the Spirit of Place.
