It strikes me that this tempest over the Wren Chapel
cross is yet another example of the kind of
emotional, hot-button issue that conservatives
love, that makes great editorial fodder, and that
makes for a catchy bumpersticker, but as usual wilts
under reasonable scrutiny.  Why does the fact that
the cross has been there for a "some time" mean that
it must stay there?  Tradition?  If tradition is a
valid argument, let's restore the ducking stool at
Witch Duck and ban celebrations of Christmas.  If
religious tradition is immutable, why are we
discussing the removal of a cross and not a statue
of the Virgin Mary?  Come to think of it, why don't
we return the chaple to it's rightful owner - the
Church of England?  I believe Madison had it right
in his "Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious
Assessments" that religion's dabbling in the state
and vice versa serves neither one well.  My support
of church/state separartion is grounded in that
treatise.  I do have an additional guide: those red
words in my NIV New Testament which strongly suggest
that the divine and the profane state should remain
seperate realms.  Jesus rebelled against an
established religious authority which was entwined
with the state; one wonders why so many modern
evangelicals and fundamentalists seek exaclty the
opposite.  Is the Gospel so weak that it needs the
crutch of government endorsement?  I think not.  The
Diety who created all reality is not going to wither
away and die if a nineteenth century cross is
removed from a many-times-over "restored" Wren
Chapel.
________________________________

Dr. David S. Hardin
Assistant Professor of Geography
Department of Biological and Environmental Sciences
Longwood University
Farmville, Virginia 23909
Phone: (434) 395-2581
e-mail: [log in to unmask]

********************
"For as Geography without History
seemeth a carkasse without motion,
so History without Geography
wandreth as a Vagrant without a
certaine habitation."
John Smith, 1627

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