Saturday, January 13, 2007

Wren Cross: Compromise Is Not Enough

The following piece was published in the December 23 issue of the Virginia Gazette in an edited form.

University president Gene Nichol has been creating quite a big stink in the College of William and Mary community. Last October, he had made a unilateral decision to quietly banish the Wren Chapel’s two-foot brass cross to a closet until it was requested—a reversal of the original policy which allowed the removal of the cross from the altar during secular or other activities that did not appreciate its presence. His decision had received both praise and wrath; praise for his sensitivity and social enlightenment and wrath for his discrimination against the Christian history of the College. In response to the uproar among concerned community members, he has offered to replace the cross on Sundays. This gesture of compromise is still unacceptable.

Mr. Nichol based his decision on his belief that the Christian icon creates an atmosphere of exclusivity and intolerance that he sees as contrary to the values of the university in this multicultural age of assentation. Out of sight, out of mind—his policy, formulated in the name of diversity, inclusiveness and sensitivity, attempts to erase the memory of the Christian influence on the university’s development and even the university’s reason for being. The chapel seems to have become a battleground between the secularist agenda and legitimate traditional history. Despite the pretty words the president has used to mitigate outrage at his policy, suspicion about the politics remains.

Mr. Nichol’s reasons for removing the 100 year old cross seem to be more controversial than the act itself. Reactions in the blogosphere and commentaries in several regional newspapers have ranged from hailing him as courageous for standing on Jeffersonian principles to criticizing him for indulging his own secular agenda. Mr. Nichol has been very careful to avoid overtly arguing separation of church and state, instead blurring the notion with educationally ingrained political correctness: “And though we haven’t meant to do so,” said Mr. Nichol to the William and Mary Board of Visitors, “the display of a Christian cross—the most potent symbol of my own religion—in the heart of our most important building sends an unmistakable message that the Chapel belongs more fully to some of us than to others; that there are, at the College, insiders and outsiders; those for whom our most revered place is meant to be keenly welcoming, and those for whom presence is only tolerated.”

His colleague Melvin Ely, Professor of History and Black Studies, writing to the editor of The Flat Hat, was more transparent: “I respect tradition and am not inclined to tamper with it lightly. Yet I also believe that, in avoiding the implicit establishment of a particular religion by the state, the president is conforming to Jefferson’s Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom and to the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution at, what I would remind readers, is a state institution.” Evidently, the mere presence of a religious symbol in the public space constitutes the official establishment of the religion, thereby creating a situation where one religion is acceptable and the others, be they faith-based or secular, only tolerated. But even a cursory reading of the 1786 Virginia Act for Establishing Freedom of Religion shows that Jefferson’s goal was to abolish governmental coercion that employed “temporal punishments” and “civil incapacitations” to force loyalty to a governmentally supported church. The presence of symbols does not a religion endorse.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit decided a similar case in the 2005 American Civil Liberties Union of Kentucky v. Mercer County. The ACLU demanded the removal of a Ten Commandments display from a Mercer County, Kentucky courthouse charging it signified state endorsement of a religion. An Alliance Defense Fund press release reported that in its decision, the court wrote: "the ACLU makes repeated reference to 'the separation of church and state.' This extra-constitutional construct has grown tiresome. The First Amendment does not demand a wall of separation between church and state." The court went on to note that the ACLU's argument that the Ten Commandments are religious does not answer the question of whether the display actually endorses religion. The ACLU, the court said, "erroneously-though perhaps intentionally" equates merely recognizing religion as government endorsement of religion. "To endorse is necessarily to recognize, but the converse does not follow." The parallel between the two situations is clear.

If church-state separation isn’t the driving force behind the decision, then perhaps the pressure of secularism is. Reiterating the president’s view, one Wren building employee told me that as an evolving institution—socio-political evolution presumably—the Wren Chapel as part of the university must evolve too, for it is not a museum “frozen in amber.” If this were the case, she reasoned, the historic rules that denied the admission of women and African-American students should stand. But changes like these do not violate any of what the altar cross stands for and stands against. History is frozen in amber and must not be revised to accommodate those social philosophies that would minimize or eradicate the historic record of Christian influence on this campus and in this country. The former policy clearly solved the problems of offended sensibilities without revising the historic significance of the Chapel. The new policy, despite his latest offer, accomplishes the opposite.

Even if we give Mr. Nichol the benefit of the doubt and accept that his goal is only and genuinely a concern for people’s feelings, then we must realize that neither the Constitution nor adulthood guarantee that an individual will not see things that are disagreeable. The removal of the cross will not satisfy those who determine to be offended at the sight of Christianity. But we cannot develop public policy on the basis of feelings. If we did, the only logical response in the Chapel’s case would be to rip out the altar, sever the pews from the floor, tear down the wall plaques that refer to scripture and the Lord and rename it the Wren Multipurpose Room.
The final question remains: will political correctness erase the noble history of the Wren Chapel or will reason preserve it? As Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”