That cross at the 9/11 Memorial

One would hardly begrudge him that. But now the girders, never disassembled, are set to be featured as a part of the National 9/11 Memorial Museum that is due to open in Lower Manhattan in May. The Museum is private, but the grounds it is leasing are public. And that, like many veterans’ monuments that feature a cross although built on public lands, is a problem.

The American flag is a symbol common to all Americans. The cross is not. Few Americans would object to a flag in a courtroom or a school. Few non-Christians would object to a cross in any privately owned space, no matter how publicly visible. But a cross in a museum commemorating a national tragedy on public ground is another matter.

Sign of spirituality?

The argument can be made that the shaft and its beam weren’t designed as a cross, that its resemblance to one is a happenstance, and that one can look at it in nonreligious terms as a bit of salvage from a commercial building. Clearly, however, that isn’t the perspective of the presenters.

Joseph Daniels, the Museum’s president and CEO, puts it this way: “To have a piece of the history that provided some spirituality, some faith, some respite in the midst of all this, if we didn’t have that we really wouldn’t be telling the story as it happened.” Judge Deborah Batts of the Southern District Court of New York concurred in a ruling upholding the Museum’s position: The piece of metal at issue, she wrote, “demonstrates how those at Ground Zero coped with the devastation they witnessed.”

But Frank Silecchia’s reaction, even if shared by others, doesn’t necessarily illustrate anything. Silecchia himself, after saying that the cruciform girders had comforted him, reflected that they ultimately symbolized “the faith that was crushed on 9/11.” This is quite the opposite of comfort. It’s also the opposite of Daniels’s assertion that they provided faith in general.

By the same token, it falsifies Judge Batts’s argument that the girders demonstrate “how those at Ground Zero coped.” Some responders may have found their faith strengthened by the shaft and beam, some may have found it weakened, and some may have had a faith other than that represented by the cross, or no faith at all.

Al-Qaeda’s line

There is no single story here and no way to privilege one response over another. To attempt to do so is merely to propagandize. That’s all right on private property. It isn’t OK on public ground leased to a private party.

But what is the Museum propagandizing for? If it’s for Christianity, some Christians regard the cross as idolatrous to begin with. If it’s for religion or “spirituality” in general, then the cross is an inappropriate symbol, since it’s neither universal nor inclusive.

In fact, the cross doesn’t distinguish Americans from those who attacked us on 9/11, but associates us with them. For Al-Qaeda, the jihad against America is an affirmation of Muslim faith against the infidel and of Muslim nations against the “crusaders” who exploit their resources and undermine their culture. It’s America’s enemies, in short, who see their war in terms of faith. If we oppose the cross to the crescent, or even not so subtly encourage Museum visitors to see 9/11 in those terms, we ratify the perspective that led to it in the first place: that it represents a clash of faiths.

Of course, there’s a simpler explanation of what the 9/11 Memorial Museum is trying to do: sell tickets. The World Trade Center itself, after all, was about commerce. But if those structures mean anything more than that to us today, Americans need the most thoughtful possible consideration of why we were attacked, how we have responded to it in the dozen years since, and what honoring the victims of 9/11 and the responders who risked their lives to save them really means.

An organization called American Atheists is challenging Judge Batts’s ruling in the Second District Court of Appeals. These plaintiffs make the worthy point that no form of religion should be propagated on public ground, whether by direct statement or inference. But American Christians, Muslims, and Jews should be no less offended by this attempt — misguided at best and cynical at worst — to exploit Ground Zero for any self-interested purpose, religious or commercial.