The uncivil eye: Law, landscape, and American secularity

This is a study of recent legal conflict over the display of Christian symbols in public space. It seeks to explain why some Americans fight, often at great social cost, to displace such symbols, and why others fight so hard to keep them in the public realm. Hinging on the contested nature of "religious symbols" themselves, these cases reveal widespread insecurities on both the religious right and the secular left amid bewildering changes in the country's religious landscape: increasing diversity, resurgent evangelicalism, and the confrontation with so-called "radical Islam." Yet by staging a moral crisis over the relationship between viewing subjects and religious signs---a crisis couched in terms of idolatry and individual conscience---they also reveal an underlying debt to deep strains of Protestant thought. Working from the premise that landscape is both a way of seeing and mode of social performance deeply influenced by religious ideology, I argue that struggles to determine the proper place of such symbols are, at heart, struggles to define the visual and emotional sensibilities proper to members of American civil society. As such, they are struggles to define the relationship between place and religious pluralism. I draw on a series of interviews with lawyers, activists, and ordinary citizens on both sides of constitutional lawsuits in various parts of the country, as well textual analysis of numerous court cases, to show how both secularists and their adversaries marshal concepts of civil and uncivil emotion to project opposing visions of religious freedom on the ordinary built environment. In so doing, I paint a picture of secularity as a condition of intimate, embodied struggle over the religious and political meanings inscribed in public space.