Religion

Teotihuacán

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Feathered and fire serpents adorn the steps of the Quetzalcóatl Pyramid. Some weathering has occurred in the past 17 centuries, but once the eye sockets held black obsidian volcanic glass, the flames were painted bright red and feathers adorned with green jade. The museum (show your gate ticket for admission) near the Sun Pyramid shows murals, artifacts and has a large model of the site, which helps add details to the huge structures outside. None of the three pyramids can be climbed now, but I still walked a couple miles round trip, including the Moon Pyramid near where I started. I arrived early at 9 am, just as the hot air balloons were descending after their dawn tours. It’s an awesome place, but it can get hot and crowded by midday. I recommend staying nearby the night before.

At its peak, Teotihuacán was the largest city in the Americas, 6th largest in the world. Roughly, the city began sometime around 200 BC and fell around 550 CE. Much of their wealth came from obsidian tools, weapons and art, mined from local volcanoes and expertly knapped. The pyramids and related buildings show an elaborate religious class, but few signs of military or monarchs. The pyramids are designed to make observations for the Mesoamerican calendar, so the priests likely derived their power by determining the seasons. Best guess is that their civilization’s collapse was internal, with signs of drought and starvation, before simultaneous fires burned out the elites. The priests essentially had one job—to monitor the climate—, and they failed. Human success, growth, unsustainable use of natural resources, crop failure, and collapse, is a common pattern in ancient civilizations, and we are likely on a similar path due to carbon pollution.

Thomas Jefferson Memorial

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The memorial is open & under maintenance with climate driven flooding at the Tidal Basin. Tom’s face has some cobwebs, and his reputation is also ebbing, as the stain of his slave exploitation will never wash. So, let’s clear up why he has a monument. Among other things, Jefferson was Governor of Virginia, Ambassador to France, codifier of religious freedom, the primary author of the Declaration of Independence, proposer of the Bill of Rights, Washington’s Secretary of State, John Adams’ Vice President, 3rd President, purchaser of the Louisiana Territory, appointer of Lewis & Clark, President of the American Philosophical Society, founder of the University of Virginia, and classical architect whose memorial resembles his own work, Monticello.

Jefferson was also a racist who owned hundreds of slaves in his lifetime, fathered children with one beginning when Sally Hemmings was a teenager, and sold over 100 slaves at auction through his will. He opposed slavery in theory and condemned it in his original draft of the Declaration (edited out to placate Georgia and South Carolina). But despite his ideals, Jefferson feared a Haitian-style rebellion and believed there was too much animosity between people of different races to reconcile and live together in peace. As President, Jefferson began removing Native Americans from the southeast in return for “new” land around Oklahoma (which was already populated with Native Americans).

Recognizing what he did that was wrong, we need to imagine what he could have done better, beyond freeing all his slaves, and not just Sally and her children. Nationally he should done more to end slavery, As a slave-owning President who added the Louisiana Territory to our country, Jefferson was uniquely suited to end slavery and offer reparations to slaves by setting aside a significant portion of that territory for ex-slaves to homestead. Similarly, instead of removing Native Americans from their sacred homelands, Jefferson should have honored and signed more treaties protecting their land and culture, especially in the “new” territory.

I view Jefferson as having missed his opportunity to solve those great moral challenges. But I have little patience for people who criticize Jefferson for his moral failings, without considering whether they themselves are doing enough about the greatest moral challenge of our time. Jefferson hated the idea that people would live “under the barbarism of their ancestors”. Jefferson was a student of science who loved nature, so he would be appalled by our lack of action in stopping the climate crisis.

“I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.”

Thomas Jefferson

St. Paul’s Church National Historic Site

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The New York Royal Governor Crosby’s allies tried to disenfranchise the Quakers by requiring them to swear an oath on the Bible, which violates their beliefs. In response, the colonial assembly voted in favor of religious freedom and protecting voting rights. The press coverage so annoyed the Governor, that he had the publisher arrested and tried at Federal Hall. But the publisher (Zenger) was acquitted in the case, resulting in expansion of freedom of the press.

The original church here was established by the British to impose the Church of England on the heretical Puritans and Quakers and others who lived here, including people like Anne Hutchinson, who fled both Boston and Rhode Island to avoid harassment over her belief that women could interpret scripture too. (The Hutchinson River Parkway is named after her). As the revolution approached, the people here split into factions of loyalists and patriots, and the graveyard contains families who fought on both sides, as well as Hessian mercenaries, slaves and free African Americans. There was some fighting nearby at Pell’s Point which helped Washington retreat to White Plains, and the church was used as a military hospital.

In addition to the fine old organ, family box-pews and flags pictured above, there’s also a bell cast in London in 1758 and a stained glass window. Much of the restoration work was done around WWII with fundraising led by FDR’s mother. But the surrounding neighborhood at the northeast border of the Bronx is now heavily industrial, not residential. (I walked from the Eastchester-Dyer Av station). The Episcopal church, which is related with yet independent from the Anglican Church, was deconsecrated around 1978 and is cooperatively managed with the parks service as a (secular) national historic site. Take some time to walk around the evocative colonial and early American graveyard.

Roger Williams National Memorial

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Those ignorant people who claim that America was founded as a Christian nation need to visit this site in Rhode Island. Disgusted with the forced religious conformity in England (including burning heretics), Williams moves to Boston in 1631, where the Puritans had moved to escape persecution.

“… that no civil magistrate, no King, nor Caesar, have any power over the souls or consciences of their subjects, in the matters of God and the crown of Jesus …”

Roger Williams

Williams’ idea, that the government should not control citizens’ spiritual lives, made him flee the Massachusetts Bay Colony and live with the Native Americans, learning their languages and becoming an advocate for their rights and separate beliefs. Eventually, they deeded him land and he founded “Provident’s Plantation”, now Providence, and Rhode Island became a haven of religious tolerance, for Jews, Baptists, Quakers and even atheists. It is no accident that the country’s oldest synagogue is in Rhode Island. King Charles II granted a charter to Rhode Island, fulfilling Williams’ wish, that no one would be “molested, punished or called into question” for different beliefs in 1663 over 100 years before America became a country. Other colonies copied his charter’s separation of church and state and Jefferson enshrined the concept in our Constitution’s 1st Amendment.

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

The First Amendment to the US Constitution

We live in a precarious time, where a single conservative Catholic sect, Opus Dei, has used its influence to place a majority of Justices on our Supreme Court, and that Supreme Court majority has limited an established right based on their particular religious objections to abortion, ruled in favor of Christian prayer at school events, and ruled in favor of using taxpayer funds for Christian schools. This country has avoided the religious and sectarian violence and oppression common elsewhere, by granting the right to freedom of conscience, and it is a frightening step backwards almost 500 years for the court to grant favored treatment to one religion. We have never been a Christian nation, and voters are wrong to vote for one.