Muslims, the Bladensburg Cross, and the Preservation of Order

“Why would a Muslim support the public display of a forty-foot cross monument? Because displays with religious meaning on public land are a reminder that the United States preserves something of the substance of an older civilizational order grounded in faith in a transcendent God. America’s founding document declares that the nation comes into being by leave of God, proceeding from the self-evident truth that all human beings are ‘endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights.’ The founders saw religion as a description of reality, the basis of our obligations to one another, and a source of public good, and so they afforded it a special status and protection in the Constitution. The Establishment Clause was not intended, as many believe, to drive religion from the public square; its authors did not see religion as a merely private matter but as something to be lived in public.”