Outward manifestations of piety and righteousness do not protect the citizenry. Each belt buckle that German soldiers wore had embossed upon it Gott Mit Uns (God Is with Us). Over the door of the courthouse in the Palace of Justice complex in Nuremberg were engraved the Ten Commandments. The group that established those commandments was precisely the group that was deprived of citizenship, human rights, and even life, under the laws promulgated in the name of that very city — the anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws of 1935.
Fredrick R. Abrams, M.D., wrote the above in his foreword to Vivien Spitz’s Doctors from Hell: The Horrific Account of Nazi Experiments on Humans. There are many people who believe that the problems in society can be traced to an absence of orthodox religious beliefs; therefore, a return to those beliefs will lead to an end of society’s most serious problems.
The question is, how should a restoration of more widely held orthodox religiosity be accomplished? It takes a lot of work to evangelize and there is no guarantee that evangelistic efforts will be greeted warmly. One short cut is to get the government involved and have it promote, endorse, or even enforce the desired religious beliefs. People can’t ignore the government like they can an evangelist at their door and the government’s power is far greater than that which any church can hope to possess.
This, I think, may be one reason why so many people seeking to promote religion don’t do so on their own and instead enlist the aid of the state. Unfortunately, state endorsements of religious beliefs are also no guarantee of success — but the difference is that at least there is the appearance of progress. Evangelists who go door to door to proselytize are constantly faced with regular failures and rarely see obvious success; government monuments to religion, however, allow these same people to be faced every day with an apparent victory and imagine that as a consequence of these monuments, people are being led back to orthodoxy and truth.
As the example of Nazi Germany demonstrates, however, such attitudes are naive and misguided. Not only do these monuments not actually do the work assigned to them, they may actually be counterproductive because they trade a symbolic step for substantive progress. Symbols are important and powerful, there is no question about it, but they are also no substitute for real changes in people’s minds and actions.
Religious believers who rely on installing symbols on public property are investing a tremendous amount of time, money, and energy which could be directed to other uses. If the symbols were really so important, they could invest less time, money, and energy for greater effect by installing the symbols in the front yards of every supporter and every supporting church — but they don’t do that. They could also invest all that into trying to reach people in a way that might actually encourage them to change; once again, though, they don’t.
The presence of religious symbols on public property gives the outward appearance of public piety without ever causing any changes in the public itself. Supporters allow themselves to believe that something has been accomplished; as a consequence, more fundamental problems are ignored and opportunities for genuine change are missed. Thus, it can be argued that defenders of these public symbols are undermining their own goals.
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