As always, a thoughtful and thought-provoking post. But I would advance an alternative defense of the Witnesses' objection: Rather than a competing consecrated ground, the state is inherently secularizing. Anything it enforces is necessarily subordinated to its secular ends. Even sincere invocations of religious commitment by the state or state actors are objectionable for at least three reasons: (1) the sanctity of the religious idea will be tainted if it is enforced by the state; (2) the citizens (whether in the religious community espoused or not) will have their religious liberty curtailed; and (3) any true patriotic enchantment, as Kahn describes, will be impossible--replaced by a politically useful caricature of religious sentiment.
That may be, depending on what we mean by "secularizing." If "secular" is a challenge to the pre-Enlightenment jurisdictional claims of Christian theology, then I think the tension you've described makes sense. See also Trunk v. City of San Diego, 568 F.Supp. 2d 1199, 1218 (S.D. Cal. 2008), rev’d, 629 F.3d 1099 (9th Cir. 2011) (“[T]he cross has a broadly-understood ancillary meaning as a symbol of military service, sacrifice, and death.”).
I'm not confident I know what you mean by the pre-enlightenment jurisdictional claims.
What I mean by secularizing is subordinating the sacred to some other end, in this case a political one. The Trunk case was a ridiculous outcome because it upheld the state maintenance of the cross on the basis that it was not a Christian symbol. But that's an unusually obvious outlier.
As always, a thoughtful and thought-provoking post. But I would advance an alternative defense of the Witnesses' objection: Rather than a competing consecrated ground, the state is inherently secularizing. Anything it enforces is necessarily subordinated to its secular ends. Even sincere invocations of religious commitment by the state or state actors are objectionable for at least three reasons: (1) the sanctity of the religious idea will be tainted if it is enforced by the state; (2) the citizens (whether in the religious community espoused or not) will have their religious liberty curtailed; and (3) any true patriotic enchantment, as Kahn describes, will be impossible--replaced by a politically useful caricature of religious sentiment.
That may be, depending on what we mean by "secularizing." If "secular" is a challenge to the pre-Enlightenment jurisdictional claims of Christian theology, then I think the tension you've described makes sense. See also Trunk v. City of San Diego, 568 F.Supp. 2d 1199, 1218 (S.D. Cal. 2008), rev’d, 629 F.3d 1099 (9th Cir. 2011) (“[T]he cross has a broadly-understood ancillary meaning as a symbol of military service, sacrifice, and death.”).
The case I wrote my law review note about!
I'm not confident I know what you mean by the pre-enlightenment jurisdictional claims.
What I mean by secularizing is subordinating the sacred to some other end, in this case a political one. The Trunk case was a ridiculous outcome because it upheld the state maintenance of the cross on the basis that it was not a Christian symbol. But that's an unusually obvious outlier.