Wren Cross Removal is Official Censorship

Does American democracy offend you? Then burn the flag—that’s free expression guaranteed.
Do decency laws cramp your style? Then sue for your porn—against censorship unlawful.
Does the sight of a Christian symbol anger you? Then banish it in the name of tolerance—the First Amendment need not apply.

I heard it all began with a letter from a disgruntled somebody. Or was it a prospective student who fled the Wren Chapel and its dreaded cross screaming, “My eyes, my eyes, they burn!” Who knows? We do know that Gene R. Nichol, President of the College of William and Mary and former ACLU leader, continues to stubbornly stand by his no-cross-unless-asked-for policy. He formulated his policy on his belief that the cross in the historic Anglican chapel makes other-faith people feel unwelcome in contradiction to the “best values of the College.”

But Mr. Nichol’s deceptively altruistic policy violates much worse than feelings.

Some people don’t see this as an important issue. Indeed some, like Kate Perkins (Richmond Times Dispatch December 18th op-ed), see this as a “cosmetic battle” over an “anachronism” that fails to follow the higher road to love people and serve God. But these two choices are not mutually exclusive—they compliment one another. While I do not doubt Ms. Perkins’ sincerity of faith, I think she and many people, having been seduced by Mr. Nichol’s flowery rhetoric, do not comprehend what is ultimately at stake: our religious freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment.

Despite this threat, proponents of Mr. Nichol’s policy remind us that William and Mary is a state institution and as such church-state separation must be rigorously enforced. The over-used legal argument of “separation of church and state” has been a favorite chisel of the ACLU and its allies to remove Christian symbols and to stop public expressions of faith. This argument has been used so often over the years that people think it is in the Constitution. It isn’t.

In 1802, Thomas Jefferson came up with the phrase “wall of separation of church and state” in a letter to the Danbury Baptist Church to allay the congregation’s fear that the government would try to regulate religious expression. Jefferson wrote “that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between church and state.” The “wall” was not meant to stop religion from public life but to stop the government’s interference with it.

The infamous 1947 Everson case mutated Jefferson’s idea to the ACLU mantra we have today. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black wrote that the First Amendment had erected a wall between church and state. Despite numerous subsequent rebuttals from constitutional scholars and Supreme Court decisions, the ACLU has used the 1947 opinion to shut down public religious expression and remove symbols from public view.

The First Amendment will not be wiped out by a band of Capital-storming Bolsheviks who will rip it away from 300 million Americans in one day. Rather, it is stripped of its power by methodically chipping away religion, specifically Christianity, from America’s religious history and replacing Judeo-Christian values with secular ones.

The Wren cross controversy is not a matter of insensitivity to members of a diverse university as Mr. Nichol has asserted. It is official censorship. To challenge the presence of the symbol of the College’s cultural and historical roots from which said values are derived smacks of anti-Christian bias.

But the chips are small and people, like frogs in steadily heating water, won’t notice the tiny erosions of our religious freedoms until it’s too late. How many steps are there from here to a totalitarian denial of the First Amendment?

The cross is only a two-foot portable brass object in one small chapel on one campus of thousands in America. But given the stakes, I protest one little piece at a time to help preserve one of America’s most cherished and important freedoms.