This is going to be a long post. Before I get into it, let me just say that I realize that, in internet terms, everything I’m about to say concerns ancient history—one of last year’s forgotten scandalettes. My only excuse is that I wasn’t blogging last year when all this was fresh. But that’s ok [he rationalizes, quickly] because this post is going to be all about hindsight anyway…
Late in 2006, my alma mater, The College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, VA, made headlines when the new-ish President of the College, Gene Nichol, decided on his own initiative to remove the cross from the altar of the chapel located in the 300-year-old Wren Building, the school’s oldest building and its most recognizable symbol. (I should say that part of Nichol’s later self-defense was that cross was simply removed from public view—it was still made available for worship services. Mind you, this was supposed to cushion the blow regarding a chapel that had been used for Christian worship since 1695!) Word of Nichol’s action leaked out first through the campus paper, the Flat Hat, and made its way through the local media into the conservative press. Christian students and alumni (and not a few others of various persuasions) were understandably aggrieved, both by Nichol’s action itself and by the seemingly underhanded way it was carried out. (For those of you who don’t know, William and Mary is a school that takes its history and traditions very seriously. W&M is the second-oldest university in the U.S., chartered before Harvard but later in opening its doors. Presidents Jefferson, Monroe, and Tyler are alumnae—we had a good 18th century, but there was a rough patch in the 19th when some fellows from places like Ohio and Indiana marched through and burned the place down…) A petition was started, at www.savethewrencross.org, and a lot of people, including me, signed it. If you are interested, see their website for links to all the facts and media coverage of the controversy. The heat on President Nichol finally increased enough until he felt he had to do something. And so, after a lot of hemming and hawing—and threatening to resign should his orders be simply countermanded by the Board of Visitors—Nichol relented and the cross was replaced. Kinda. More on that in a bit. Oh, and a committee was formed—as night follows the day, in academe, a committee follows a controversy—to study the future role of religion in public universities.
So I guess in this case the good guys won, right? Nichol was allowed his face-saving gestures—the committee and all—but the important thing is that the cross is back where it belongs. That’s what I thought at first, but I’ve come to have my doubts.
An aside on the Wren Building and the Wren Chapel itself. The building has been called “the soul of the college” and is one of the best-proportioned, best-situated, loveliest buildings I have ever known, and I know it quite well, having had several classes inside and often having meandered through and around it for the sheer pleasure of occupying its space. It’s that kind of a building. It’s not particularly large, or grand, or ornate, or imposing…it’s just perfect.
The idea that Sir Christopher Wren himself designed the place is probably wishful thinking, sadly, but it’s no wonder that people think the attribution plausible. As Alexander Pope said of Wren’s new St. Paul’s in London, “No single parts unequally surprise, / All comes united to th’ admiring eyes; / No monstrous height, or breadth, or length appear; / The whole at once is bold and regular.” Here’s another look.
Here’s a good shot of the Chapel, which is on the right as you face the rear. Here’s a close-up of the altar, with the cross–shocking, I know.
On the left, mirroring the Chapel you can see the Great Hall, originally used as the ceremonial meeting-place for the whole College. The balance has symbolic as well as visual harmony; the building is a model of, and home for, a certain kind of idealized community, joined on the one hand for business, dispute, and secular learning, and coming together on the other for worship and a shared spiritual life. An important detail is that the building is the current home of the religion department, and classes are still held inside; that is, though the Wren Building is part of the Colonial Williamsburg tour (tourists often mistakenly poke their tricornered hats into busy classrooms), it is no museum-piece, but an active, functioning part of the university—and that includes, or did, the chapel.
As the controversy progressed, all the familiar tropes and arguments regarding religion in the public square were duly deployed. Again, I refer you to the collection of links at the Save the Wren Cross site. President Nichol, who, as it turned out, had been a high-ranking member of the ACLU, claimed that the chapel cross had been removed only after several complaints (which he declined to cite specifically) and that allowing the chapel to remain overtly Christian “sends a message that the Chapel belongs more fully to some of us than to others. That there are, at the College, insiders and outsiders.” To which the Chapel’s defenders replied that the chapel had been in place since the founding of the College with little apparent damage to the school or the republic. Furthermore, the idea that the display of a cross in a Christian chapel was somehow “inappropriate” was ludicrous on the face of it—clearly the motivating factor behind the removal of the cross was some sort of animus masquerading as a concern for fairness. President Nichol tipped his hand in this regard in a later comment implying that the very existence of the Wren Chapel on the grounds of a public university was, for him, problematic. (This is certainly an issue, a complex one, and I don’t mean to minimize it. However, let’s just say that I do not share President Nichol’s apparent belief that the U.S. Constitution mandates a “naked public square.”) Meanwhile, the faculty of the department of religion, on whose doorstep (literally!) the conflict was raging, contributed little to the discussion beyond noting that the particular cross in question had only been on display since the 1930’s…which must be significant…somehow….
In the end, it was the appeal to the Chapel’s history that settled the argument for the Board of Visitors and the committee. The cross could remain, but in a display case with a plaque detailing the Chapel’s “historic relationship” to the Anglican Church. This conclusion was generally reported as a defeat for President Nichol—the cross could stay!—and was greeted warmly at Save the Wren Cross, though the group noted that “very important issues” remained unresolved. Indeed. I was as happy as anyone at the time, having seen such a compromise as about the best that could be expected, but with hindsight, I’ve come to feel that, as inevitable as compromise is in such matters, the enemies of the cross (if you’ll excuse the loaded phrase) got the better of this deal.
The official recommendation of the committee, which was ultimately enacted in March, includes the following: “The Wren sacristy shall be available to house sacred objects of any religious tradition for use in worship and devotion by members of the college community.” Now, I hasten to add that William and Mary is a nonsectarian public university, and has been since (if I remember correctly) the reopening of the College after the Civil War. The Wren Chapel forces itself on no one. An undergraduate can easily spend four happy, productive, fully engaged years at W&M without ever once crossing its threshold. The Chapel is always open to any visitor, and has always been available for student weddings—non-Christian and even non-religious ceremonies emphatically included. But it has always been an Anglican chapel, attached both to the College and to Williamsburg’s Bruton Parish Church; always, since the founding of the College (I repeat) over three hundred years ago.
Now, thanks to the compromise over the cross, it’s just a museum. It’s as much a “real” chapel as the Governor’s Palace, or the Capitol in Colonial Williamsburg, are real centers of political power—it’s even on the same walking tour! Sure, at one time these places were something more than relics—there’s a “historic relationship” there—but those days are, as they say, history.
To put it bluntly, when a space is sacred to “any religious tradition,” it is sacred to none. Remember—there were no Jewish or Buddhist or Muslim or Hindu or neo-pagan-wiccan-odinist groups demanding access to the Wren sacristy so they could “house” their “sacred objects” there. As far as I know, there are still none. There was only a militant secularist College president who, when stymied in his attempt to strip the altar, was successful in cluttering it up (theoretically at least) so much that the same effect was achieved. What was once a quiet little corner of Christendom, a visible link to the College’s storied past—a place for solitary prayer, or Christmas Carols sung by candlelight, or weddings both of those within the Church and of welcome guests from without—is now just another student activity room. With nicer paneling, perhaps. Oh sure, all those activities can and will still take place in the newly-multicultural Chapel, but they’ll be no more “at home” there than any other sort of goings-on, sacred, secular, or whatever. And this was the point of Nichol’s removal of the cross in the first place, to de-particularize the Chapel so as to avoid the impression that the College was favoring one religion over any other. Never mind the historical reality that the College was explicitly chartered in 1693 as a missionary school for the Indians as well as a place of higher learning for planters’ sons. Never mind the welcoming policy of the Chapel towards non-Christian students who wished to use the space for weddings. Never mind that the existence and function of the Chapel was utterly non-controversial among the students until President Nichol started swiping crosses.
The irony is that the multicultural impulse embodied by President Nichol, this desire to prevent there being “insiders and outsiders” at the college, merely redefines the terms of “insiderdom” and creates many more “outsiders” than before. As others have pointed out before me, ACLU-style secularism is no merely “neutral” stance towards religion; it is itself a religious position. And all those—Christian or otherwise—who do not hold to it are now outsiders at W&M. It’s unclear, by the way, whether the Wren Chapel compromise means that other campus organizations, such as Hillel and the Muslim Student’s Association, now have to provide space for Christians to house their sacred objects…in the interest of fairness naturally…nothing aggressive about such a move at all…
Over at the First Things site, there’s a post about the “assault on Christendom” which inspired my use of the word, above. It got me thinking about all sorts of troubling questions related to the sad fate of the Wren Chapel. Was it a blunder for the Chapel to be so easy-going about non-Christian services being held within? Doesn’t that send a message that, “Hey, we don’t take this place too seriously ourselves”? Can such a place be “welcoming” without defining itself out of existence? Or do we leave the public square to the Gene Nichols of the world and retreat to our sectarian enclaves? And shouldn’t secularists such as Nichol be scandalized by the cross? Wouldn’t it be worse, in a way, if he saw nothing threatening to his complacency in a place such as the Wren Chapel? But let’s give the man credit anyway—he knows how the game is played. In the end, I fear, we got the cross back, but President Nichol got the Chapel.
Posted by amede 
Posted by amede 
Posted by amede 