The Crosses We Bear

I really didn’t want to write another column about Antonin Scalia, but sometimes the crazy fruit is so low-hanging that you can’t help but pick it. Witness Justice Scalia during oral arguments in the latest case involving a religious monument on government property.

The dispute revolves around a big, white cross that was placed on federal land in the Mojave Desert as a memorial to the American World War I dead. A lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union reminded the court that there are ways of honoring all American soldiers, not just the Christians. Incredulous, Scalia responded, “The cross is the most common symbol of the resting place of the dead.” The ACLU lawyer, whose father and grandfather were Jewish war veterans, retorted that he has never seen a cross in Jewish cemeteries. Getting frustrated, Scalia replied, “I don’t think you can leap from that to the conclusion that the only war dead that that cross honors are the Christian war dead.”

Why do so many defenders of government-sponsored religious messages resort to arguing that the symbols of their faith are either secular or meaningless? Scalia is a devout Roman Catholic; he has said that a judge should quit his job if it requires him to violate his religious morality. But he is so committed to upholding the right of the Christian majority to use government property as if it were church grounds that he willfully denies the significance of his faith’s most important symbol (well, maybe second to the Jesus fish).

But enough about Scalia—at least for two weeks. I shouldn’t get too worked up about governmental cross-and-creche displays, even though they seem clearly unconstitutional. Over the last 50 years, we have rebuilt the most important sections of the wall between church and state: We’ve eliminated prayer from public schools, protected the teaching of evolution, and removed blatantly sectarian displays from the classroom and the courthouse. I don’t think we need to abolish “In God We Trust” from our currency—or take down every cross in the desert—in order for secularists to claim victory in the battle for the public square.

Instead, we should turn our attention to reforming Americans’ prejudices. In particular, bias against atheists sometimes causes tangible disadvantages, not just symbolic slights. For instance, judges in child-custody hearings sometimes discriminate against non-religious parents, unconstitutionally punishing their lack of faith. Such cases are surprisingly common: UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh documented 25 instances between 2000 and 2005, and that includes only the cases that reached appeals courts. In many other cases, we can be sure, judges take religion into account but do not say so in their rulings. A legal victory can get rid of explicit discrimination; it will take more than that to address the sort that hides away in hearts and minds.

Unfortunately, the notion that non-religious people are somehow unfit is not limited to child-custody hearings. Even as the number of Americans claiming no religion has risen to historic highs (12 percent, according to Gallup), polls show that a majority of Americans would not even consider voting for atheist candidates for president. Nor, apparently, for other offices: Congressman Pete Stark (D-CA) is the only admitted atheist holding national office. It may seem superficial, but these things matter. Imagine if we snapped our fingers and every item on NOW’s and the NAACP’s agendas were suddenly realized, except that there remained only 17 female senators and one black one. Wouldn’t you still say that progress requires improvement in those numbers?

Of course, there are probably many closeted nonbelievers serving in Congress, but that only proves the point: In many parts of the United States, disbelief is a social handicap that one is better off keeping secret. Those who criticize strident atheists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens never stop to think that they’d be strident too if they knew that half of all Americans hold unfavorable views of their group—more than for any other minority.

But are Dawkins and Hitchens the best weapons we have in the battle against anti-atheist discrimination? They seem unlikely to convince many fence-sitters, but that’s not their only goal. Their calls to arms might empower nonbelievers to reveal and express themselves, and thus to normalize atheism among the general public. Perhaps, then, the next generation of Supreme Court justices won’t be unable to imagine how a cross might seem exclusive. We’ll know we’ve made real progress when American Apparel starts to make “Legalize Atheist” T-shirts.

Sam Barr ’11 is a government concentrator in Dunster House. His column appears on alternate Mondays.