Having a Sacred Cow

Here's a brain-dead thought experiment from The Corner. Would the Saudis appreciate a Christian outreach center in Mecca after Christian terrorists trashed the Kaaba site, the focal point of the Haj that good Muslims have to do one a lifetime?

Of course not, but that has nothing to do with the Cordoba House.

Last I checked, good Americans had no requirement to visit the World Trade Center to keep their patriotism card in good standing. Nor was is a religious site that Christians were expected to visit once a lifetime.

Nor has it become such a site in the nine years post-9/11. Ground Zero has become one of those "must-see" things if you visit New York these days, but it isn't sacred. Not in a religious sense at least.

It housed a number of key financial futures markets and a number of high-powered business offices, but it wasn't a holy site to say the least. Unless money and international finance is your god.

It has become a memorial for the people who died there, but it is sacred only to the American civil religion that blends generic Ten Commandments-style theism with patriotism. A bit of free-market economics gets folded into that faith as well, so that the Word Trade Center's demolition-by-plane was seen as a jab at American neoliberal economics.

It might be a place set apart for that civic religion with a generic, impersonal deity, but it isn't set apart for the real living God.

Christianity, especially the evangelical side of the tribe, doesn't have any real sacred sites. There are significant places in church history, and a few places in the Holy Land that might have been where Jesus was born and rose again, but none that would be considered Kabba-level sacred.

Jesus ran the money-changers out of the Temple. Modern patriots are trying to make the modern money-changers HQ into a new temple and want no ideological competition in the neighborhood, especially from seeming fellow-travelers of the folks who trashed the Twin Towers.

It's an important place of remembrance, yes. But it isn't worth trashing the Constitution to keep competing visions from that part of Manhattan.