War Memorials and Monuments: Patriotic, not Religious

Prior to the 1950's, war memorials almost never contained any kind of religious imagery. Why would they? This is after all a pluralistic country based on the First Amendment principle of separation of church and state. In fact, religious symbols on public lands have always been treated as anathema in our country, until the Cold War and the Red Scare, when "Godless" communism became a scare tactic used by the nascent religious right to join patriotism and religion in a way never intended by the Founding Fathers. 

At left is the Spanish-American War Monument, dedicated in 1925 and located in Kennedy Plaza in Providence Rhode Island. What we see here is a simple depiction of an American soldier, a man prepared to do his duty for the country. No mention is made on this monument of anything pertaining to God or religion.

I spend a lot of time looking at war memorials and monuments, carefully reading the inscriptions, looking for indications of that mix of religion and state that historical revisionists and sloppy historians ensure me are present all the time in America's past. I am always pleasantly surprised to find out that those with a vested interest in a mythic-Christian creation story for our country are wrong.

The United States of America was founded to be a secular country, and until fairly recently in our country's history, for the most part, it was.