Florida has myriad of more than 100 specialty license plates ranging from the environmental such as “Protect Wild Dolphins” to the medical asking to “Donate Organs.” All specialty plates are created to raise funds for their corresponding organizations and causes.
A specialty plate, recommended by Rep. Edward Bullard, with a cross, a stained glass window and the words “I Believe” printed on it, was not include in a bill on license plates during a recent Florida Legislature session. The rationale was that such a plate would defy the separation of Church and State.
It is the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause that the plate’s protesters are referring to, where the government is prohibited from advocating or condoning religious ideas which have no secular intentions, and also from showing preference of one religion over another.
Yet another proposed plate, with the words “In God We Trust”, and an American flag as the predominant image, made it into the same legislature. And there are existing Florida specialty plates that have messages strongly associated with Christian values, such as “Choose Life”, “Family Values” and “Parents Make Difference”, and whose raised funds go to churches and other Christian organizations.
The common factor in all these cases is the cross. The “I Believe” plate that was refused for bill consideration has a cross as part of its imagery, while none of the other do.
There is a persistent fight in our society to remove the cross, the most fundamental Christian symbol, with the goal of doing away with Christianity altogether. The cross is being repeatedly sued out of public view, or its Christian values exchanged for cultural or historical elements.
The most recent public battle for the cross was fought, and partly won, at the Wren Chapel of the College of William and Mary in Virginia. The president of the college quietly removed the chapel cross arguing that the chapel was for students of all faiths and not just for Christians. The cross was finally restored in the chapel, but no longer at the alter, promoting its historical traditions with the college rather than its Christian essence.
Some groups just need a whisper of a lawsuit to comply. The County of Los Angeles was ready to cede to a demand by the ACLU to remove one tiny cross from a multitude of other images from its county seal. A large outcry from Christian and non-Christian groups, declaring that the cross was part of the historical heritage of Los Angeles and not an endorsement of Christianity, wasn’t strong enough. The cross was replaced by a more innocuous Christian image of a San Gabriel mission building.
Time and time again, it is the cross which offends, and not other Christian symbols. And where it is allowed to remain as in the Wren Chapel case, or in vain efforts such as those of the Los Angeles protesters to keep it on their seal, it’s presented as a historical symbol rather than a Christian one. There have been at least six different controversies which have reached national attention since 2005 where the cross has been removed, or diminished in size or significance.
The complaints are also flowing over from cross removals from public lands and insignia to removals from private property. The most recent nationalized case is that of a rancher in Carmel Valley, San Diego who has erected a 12 ft cross on his private property. The county has received an anonymous complaint that the cross needs a permit, and the rancher has endured three years of harassing mail to remove the cross.
The cross as individual attire is receiving its share of antagonism in Britain and Europe. A British Airways employee was temporarily fired for wearing a cross to work, and Italian and German soccer teams have had to rethink the cross emblems on their uniforms. Although there are no such extreme cases in North America , the future does not exclude us from similar assaults.
What is it about the cross that brings such ire, and especially in recent years?
There is nothing more fundamental in Christianity than the cross. Two simple lines intersecting one another provide one of the most powerful symbols in the visual history of mankind. Even non-Christians unversed in the religion admit to its power with its prominence in pop culture as an exaggerated fetish-like status symbol.
The flip side of this huge popular attraction is groups which try to erase it from view. It is the cross’ religious significance they are worried about, and its not its historical, popular, ethnic or other appropriations. When real Christians present it in its most meaningful manner, as the planks on which Jesus Christ was crucified for the salvation of humanity’s sins, all types of nay-sayers start joining the fray to denounce its importance.
However deficient in biblical knowledge they may be, what these groups are reacting against is the exclusiveness of the cross. It is exclusive to those who accept that the way to salvation, eternal and guaranteed, is through this cross. And not only that, to accept the cross is to admit to one’s sins.
The humanistic, enlightened man of the modern era does not believe in sin, and cannot recognize that he is deficient. Yet, in the presence of the primal cross, a gnawing, inarticulate doubt persists reminding him of his smallness and his indebtedness to something much bigger. Better for him, then, to eliminate the visual force to avoid this conflict.
In a surprising parallel story, the South Carolina Senate approved a bill to pass the identical specialty plate “I Believe” on the same day it was excluded in the Florida Legislature. The eternal battle between of the cross and its opponents will never subside, and in fact may be getting worse. Persistence is the strongest weapon we have.