Thou Shalt Not Misinterpret: Landscape as Legal Performance

Since the early 1990s cities and towns across the United States have been embroiled in a series of increasingly contentious lawsuits over displays of the Ten Commandments on government land. Part of a broader wave of litigation over religious iconography in public places, these cases are seen to embody a national confrontation between conservative Christians and their liberal enemies over the separation of church and state. In many cases, one side argues that the displays merely acknowledge the nation's Judeo-Christian heritage, the other that they alienate non-Christians and thus exclude them from public life. On both sides, efforts to explain how landscapes “speak”—and more important, to describe the psychological effects of such speech—have focused on the affective modalities of observation. How, courts ask, should a reasonable observer respond emotionally to religious symbols in the public square? What, if anything, is the political significance of his or her feelings? This debate is best understood as a form of agonistic social performance that serves not only to define substantive legal rights but also to shape the moral and aesthetic sensibilities of its audiences. By dramatizing landscape's power to inspire and overawe, alienate and offend, its adversaries seek to affirm different standards of public discourse and civic piety. In so doing, they ground the poetics of public space in the politics of national memory.