Christ the Skier

I love a good bout of righteous indignation as much as the person—and normally nothing makes me more righteous than some bible-thumper trying to impose his deity on me—so I was surprised to find myself on the opposite team as the professionally indignant Freedom From Religion Foundation this week.

It turns out that the Knights of Columbus erected a big Jesus memorial statue on a mountain in federal land over 50 years ago in honor of some war veterans.

Already I can see several great reasons as to why I should be on board with the statue-fighting crowd. First, the big Jesus statue is a dead giveaway for a knee-jerk antitheist like myself. Second, the Knights of Columbus are involved, and on top of being Jesus-related they are named in honor of an asshole partially responsible for kicking off the annihilation of two continents worth of inhabitants. Finally, and most importantly, it involves the church vs. state fight, and I am practically obliged to rattle my saber at any who dares violate the sanctity of our wall of separation.

But I think there is another, equally valid, aspect of the 1st Amendment at play here.

Why do we put up memorials? Because the dead cannot speak, but we feel the memory of their story needs to be preserved. The memorial remembers for us all, when we ourselves no longer learn the particulars of the history, or can recall anyone close who died. How many people would know the story of the 10th Mountain Division and how they marched through the mountains of Italy, statues of Christ looking down upon them from the peaks, were it not for the memorial in question? If that memorial entices just a few of the skiers who pass it each day to Google “big jesus statue whitefish mountain” and they learn about those who served, some of whom died, is it not an effective spokesman for those memories? Has it not spoken for those veterans?

Survivors want to feel that their loved ones’ sacrifice will be remembered. They know that people forget, and the memorial will be a visual memory jog for some people. This is a definite exercise of visual speech. And considering how intimately related most people’s religion is to their understanding of death, it is hard to divorce religion from monuments dealing with death. Add to the fact that, in this particular case, the Christ statue serves as an artistic homage to those of the Italian mountains of the soldiers’ tour of duty as well as religious symbol, and I think you have a pretty strong free speech argument to counter the church vs. state argument.

Maybe Big Mountain Jesus, perching like Flathead Valley’s own Christ the Redeemer, should be taken down because the legal precedent it would set is too broadly religious. But this case helped me to remember why we make memorials—to speak for those who no longer can—and that one 1st Amendment freedom should not be used to bludgeon another.

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