One would be forgiven for thinking of America as a Christian, or at the very least a Judeo-Christian, society, either in its present incarnation or in the historical foundation of its past. After all, Christianity is certainly not alien to the culture: even in their secularized versions, Christian holidays like Easter and Christmas are widely celebrated. The question of the ability of Christian sects to pray openly in schools, while anathema in certain parts of the U.S., still remain an open and debated question in other corners of the country. References to God abound throughout the fabric of American culture: the celebration of the holidays, in the Pledge of Allegiance, the expected attendance of the nation’s preeminent elected officials at the annual National Prayer Breakfast, and even on the U.S. currency. Whether these references are necessarily to the Triune God of Christianity is less clear, but a majority of Bible-believing Christians in the country would not dispute that point at the very least.
Even a founder of the country like Thomas Jefferson, who despite the many years that have passed since his death, managed to make headlines recently when he was rather respectfully if not ceremoniously removed from New York’s City Hall, was no shrinking violet when it came to professing his admiration for liberty:
“What country before ever existed a century and half without a rebellion? And what country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.”
Jefferson can well be given credit for his commitment. Even as his friends from among the French aristocracy began to face the wrong side of the guillotine, he remained undeterred, writing to William Short in 1793:
"My own affections have been deeply wounded by some of the martyrs to this cause, but rather than it should have failed, I would have seen half the earth desolated. Were there but an Adam and an Eve left in every country, and left free, it would be better than as it now is.”
Liberty and Sacralized Space
In different forms, the Texas Capitol Building in Austin, Texas and the U.S. Capitol Building in Washington, D.C. both have at the top of their domes a statue of Liberty, personified as a woman. Respectively, these buildings house the offices of legislators for the state of Texas and the members of the U.S. Congress.
However, these buildings are not simply office buildings. Certainly, they do not look like ordinary office buildings. Legislation is passed here — laws are enacted. It is certainly notable that the legislators do not simply use dual-factor authentication, encryption, and security protocols to vote over Zoom or rent their offices to visit constituents and lobbyists from a WeWork building.
No: these buildings are set apart. When a substantial majority of the Democratic members of the Texas House left the state in the summer of 2021 in light of proposed legislation that would make changes to voting processes, they had to leave the building and then leave the state. An available option to enforce quorum was to arrest any member of the House upon sight in Texas and forcibly detain them inside the Texas Capitol building. I do not italicize the latter phrase for its shock value (one need not) but to highlight the need for the members to remain within the premises in order to “count” as “present.”
Clearly, the premises of these buildings are important, not only to legislators, but to the people as well. Protests or rallies happen here: it is very common that a “march” is made to legislative buildings, with the march, rally, or protest climaxing in front of this legislative building.
To all appearances, it is difficult to escape the impression that these buildings are sacralized. These are buildings that live in a space of ritual. Legislators convene; then, they recess; constituents gather; lobbyists stalk the halls; and armed enforcement officers guard the premises. These buildings are for certain activities, and certain activities only, and only at certain, prescribed times. All of these activities are explored up to their boundaries and no more. Legislators who leave the space functionally do not exist outside it as legislators. Any exploration or use of the space that is not in a manner befitting the desired decorum is strongly discouraged and is seen as transgressive.
If these legislative buildings hold the qualities of ritualized space that more resembles a house of worship than an office building, then what, exactly, is being worshipped?
As with most houses of worship, we would want to look around at the figures that surround the space. It is not the marble on the floor — no one seems to pay any attention to that beyond noticing the loud clopping of heels against the unforgiving rock. The artwork on the walls seems rather interchangeable with the art on the walls of any museum showing an exhibition roughly in the timeframe of 1750 even up to 1950 and it is difficult to argue that anyone pays much attention to it. The rooms seem largely dated and hold no striking features; they do not feel much more interesting than that of a Baptist church constructed in the post-war boom.
But even a Baptist church, devoid of any iconography in nod to its iconoclastic ancestry, might find itself with at least one icon that has not been smuggled in, but rather placed outside. One would not be surprised to find atop even the most strident of Baptist churches a steeple with a plain, unadorned cross.
However, in part thanks to staunch advocates for the separation of church from state like Jefferson, buildings associated with state or federal government infrastructure in the U.S. will not see any recent religious symbols atop, in a bid to ensure the founders’ desire for the separation of church and state in order to maintain a distance from the establishment of any state religion, at the very least at a federal level. One cannot find a U.S. government building that has at the top of its dome a Star of David, a pentagram, a crescent moon, an om, or a cross.
It certainly is not the case, though, that the dome — the highest point — of these buildings are bare. Instead, at the highest point, where the eye is drawn, is a statue of liberty, incarnated as the pagan goddess Libertas. Libertas holds a torch and a sword: a weapon of war and a flame to lead forward. Symbolically, to place Libertas at the top of the dome seems to suggest that she represents the highest value, the highest ideal to which to be aspired. It could also be read to suggest that she is being worshipped at the space she stands atop.
The Statue “Seated on Many Waters”
The Statue of Liberty that now resides off the coast of New York has a long tortured history from its initial conceptualization to its final realization and installment on the island. Given to the United States by the French in celebration of the centennial of the United States, this relationship seems to recognize the cross-influence of Marianne (Libertas in her French incarnation) with Liberty (Libertas in her American incarnation). Long promised, France raised money to fund the construction of the statue of Liberty, even in an economic depression. Schoolchildren across France competed to raise money to fund this statue.1
This was money well-spent to evangelize worship of Libertas. Libertas now had another statue — another incarnation in the world — and would now stand raise the light “by the golden door,” so that immigrants across the world would come to the shores of the United States to disembark on Ellis Island and understand this country as some sort of aspiration to Libertas, as they would all but clutch the hem of her flowing garments and pray for rivers of money, wealth, and abundance to flow forth from her power down to their wearied bones.
Ever Thus to Tyrants?
Since its inception, the state seal of Virginia has seen a woman, a breast bare, standing with her foot on a fallen man, his crown displaced. The woman carries a sword and a spear, which are down, suggesting that she no longer needs them: she has vanquished the man. The man lies on the ground, defeated, his crown toppled. The motto of the state of Virginia is emblazoned across the bottom: sic semper tyrannis, “ever thus to tyrants.” Presumably, the tyrant is the man on the ground.
However disturbing it might be that schoolchildren in the state of Virginia might have to look at this blatant image of revolution, violence, and death as part of the normal course of the state, it is also important to notice the position of the woman, Libertas, here. She is standing, victorious. She seems content in her victory. She does not bend over to pick up the crown; nor is she wearing it. Libertas will not assume the role of queen. From the perspective of anti-monarchist American colonists, this may be a point in Libertas’ favor. She strikes one as egalitarian, friend of plebs urbana and rustica. She has toppled the tyrant-king on the ground, but will not install herself as monarch.
In the image in and of itself, she does not propose or suggest an alternative political structure. This posture may make the viewer wonder what is the issue with a pagan goddess, if she is simply acting as an intermediate, as someone representing the spirit of change, and she does not seize the crown? She is no queen, one might argue. As such, she cannot have authority over anyone. Without authority, she is simply harmless, and the populi are made safe from the tyrant by this benevolent, intermediary force.
However, in refusing to take on the king’s crown, she perhaps assumes even more power than she otherwise would, all the while allowing the viewer to be deceived about her power. Her power is even strengthened when it lays hidden. After all, who has more power — the one who openly wields it or the one who uses it only in secret?
Liberty Enthroned in the Highest Court of the Land
Yesterday, Politico scooped a draft opinion from the U.S. Supreme Court which would overturn a landmark abortion ruling in Roe v. Wade. The merits or demerits of abortion aside, this particular release did not have a salutary effect on the nation’s ongoing cold civil war.
The photo that ran with the viral article, shown above, is of a crowd, appearing mostly female, gathered in front of the U.S. Supreme Court building, either protesting or supporting abortion. We might be drawn to the foreground of the image: the posters, the clothing, the expressions, the mood, but we would be missing the heart of the issue with pagan goddesses in America.
Above the crowd, enthroned at the apex of the entrance of the building — the highest point that draws the eye — is a carved image of Liberty, this time wearing a crown. On either side of her are Order and Authority, “guarding” her. According to the Supreme Court website, Chief Justice Charles Evan Hughes said at the laying of the cornerstone for the current building in 1932, “The Republic endures and this is the symbol of its faith.” The latter part is significant: the Chief Justice styled the Supreme Court building as an expression of religious faith.
The Architect of the Capitol notes: “The architect of the Supreme Court, Cass Gilbert of New York City, drew upon the classical Roman temple form as the basis for the Court's new building.” Like the sacralized spaces of legislative buildings in America, the U.S. Supreme Court does not convene in any normal building, or even a larger but less striking structure such as a courthouse. Instead, the Justices promulgate edicts forth for the land from a building that was deliberately styled, at great expense and labor, as a Roman temple (where, it must be stressed, sacrifice was conducted) and at which top the goddess Liberty sits, seemingly commanding the space and certainly watching the spectacle unfold on the grounds beneath her.
Lies We Tell Ourselves
America seems to be in the grip of a neo-pagan cult to Libertas, a notion borrowed from Greco-Roman tradition by her founders, few of whom were practicing Christians as anyone in flyover country would recognize them today, and maintained by the inertia of institutions across the sands of time ever since.
Worship to Libertas, a pagan goddess, does not confer real freedom. The Roman Empire, well-practiced in the slave trade business until overtaken by the Christian virus, permitted the open worship of Libertas, even by slaves. The pragmatic Roman mind saw no fault with both holding slaves and permitting the worship of a goddess who might promise freedom. The two were not mutually exclusive.
Worship is garnering up of power and resources. To worship someone or someone is to give them resources, some form of attention — and attention is power. Indeed, the tension around liberty only increases the amount of attention and worship that the goddess Libertas receives. Arguments about freedom, choice, safety, and health, are all the same argument: about liberty. But this worship, strife, attention, and endless use of the image of the goddess Libertas does not seem to have achieved the desired objective.
Indeed, as U.S. President Calvin Coolidge remarked on the 143rd anniversary of the Battle of Bunker Hill:
“They were contending for the liberties of the country, they were not yet bent on establishing a new nation nor on recognizing that relationship between men which the modern world calls democracy. They were maintaining well their traditions, these sons of Londonderry, lovers of freedom and anxious for the fray, and these sons of the Puritans, whom Macaulay tells us humbly abased themselves in the dust before the Lord, but hesitated not to set their foot upon the neck of their king.”
Coolidge calls the men and boys who died in the Battle of Bunker Hill “lovers of freedom and anxious for the fray.” The fray is the fight — and constructing our present age around a fight around liberty seems to only promote mimetic rivalry and add to pagan worship.
Freedom as a “highest good” does not seem properly oriented without reference to the Triune God. As St. Augustine argues in City of God:
“The notion, entertained by Porphyry and a number of others, that those angels enjoy the smell of dead bodies, is false. It is divine honors that really delight them. They have a plentiful supply of smells everywhere; and if they want more, they can produce them for themselves. So the spirits who arrogate to themselves divinity, do not find their pleasure in the smoke of any burning body, but in the soul of a suppliant, deluded and subjected to their domination. They bar the way to the true God, so that a man may not become a sacrifice to Him, so long as he sacrifices to any other being.”
St. Augustine, who died in 430 A.D. after arguing against the Roman state’s devotion to the pagan pantheon, would instantly recognize the goddess Libertas that tops our own much more modern state buildings over a thousand years later, and he may very well be speaking to us today, highlighting that devotion to any spirit above devotion to the Triune God is destined to fail.
This screed is not to say that freedom is not a good. In The Ethics of Freedom, Jacques Ellul writes:
“Freedom is created by God for man and in man. […] God is the liberator and on this ground man is authorized to hope and to live out hope. Because he has experienced this act of liberation, this man knows that hope is not vain. Only the free man can hope, since the breaking of his bondage guarantees all the rest. […] We are to affirm in our freedom the truth of the glory of God which will be fully manifested.”
Ellul sees freedom as something beyond the “fray”, the heat of the moment — something that is oriented toward hope, the hope that the glory of God will be fully manifested. If we can truly be free — not in a pagan goddess who permitted the practice of slavery but in the Christ who pierces hearts and reveals the hidden things — we can see beyond our present foibles to the manifestation of the glory of God in the life of the world to come. And that may look something far more like freedom than all the statues, poems, protests, marches, shouting, rallies, and posters could ever show.
I was informed many months after publication that I had inadvertently written “bicentennial” in the original draft and not “centennial” so corrected this December 2022.