Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly . INTERVIEW: Professor Stephen Prothero . September 6, 2002

Read more of R & E's interview with Boston University professor Stephen Prothero about sacred space:

What makes a site sacred?

The community that decides it's sacred. There's no real one-two-three rule for why and how a site becomes sacred. A community decides that it's an important place.

A site can be sacred for a lot of reasons. There can be some event that happened in history that a community wants to remember. There can be a mythic story attached to a particular place -- Mount Fuji in the Shinto tradition, where particular gods have manifest themselves. It can be associated with history -- Medina in the Muslim tradition, where Muhammad first gathered his followers, or Bodhgaya in India, where the Buddha achieved enlightenment. It can be associated with a miracle, as in Lourdes, for example, where the Virgin Mary appears.

But the most common reason for a site's becoming sacred is the association with death -- the death of a particularly important founder, for example, the death of Jesus on Calvary in the Christian tradition -- or association with the relics of death, which you see in medieval monasteries and churches all over Europe where you have relics of saints.

Is there any sense in which the World Trade Center site could be called a sacred or holy place?

It already is becoming a sacred or holy place. One thing we look for with sacred sites is pilgrimage, and clearly there's massive pilgrimage already to the World Trade Center site. People are coming from all over the world, all over the United States, to see it. It's clearly a site that's associated with death. We've had thousands of people die there. And their remains are, in a sense, still there. So many people who died in that tragedy died through incineration, and their remains were scattered all over Lower Manhattan. In that sense, the site is doubly sacred ... as a place of death but also as a cemetery of sorts where the dead are interred.

Why would the site be sacred? What are the reasons?

We want to remember what went on there. Sacred places provide focal points for our memory. We go there, and we remember or think about the place. This is what happens with sacred places all over the world. When Muslims converge on Mecca, they're remembering the events that happened in the life of the prophet and in the life of their tradition. People want to remember this.

One way to remember is to carve out a particular piece of land and call it sacred and set it apart from the neighborhood around it. Then we act differently there. We might talk in hushed tones. We might tell certain stories, recall certain events. That's clearly happening already at the World Trade Center site.

What do different religious traditions have to say about sacred ground?

I think it's fair to say that some traditions use sacred space more than others. Native American traditions, for example, make certain mountains sacred. Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions all see Jerusalem as sacred. All religious traditions in some sense make space sacred because they all have the need to remember certain historical or mythic events that happened at given places.

What are some examples?

In Buddhism, Bodhgaya is an important sacred site. It's in north India, and it's the site of the Buddha's enlightenment. Buddhists travel from all over the world to go to that site to sit and remember how the Buddha sat and woke up at that particular place. They make that place sacred through pilgrimage there and through remembering that particular story.

Jerusalem is a place with so many events associated with Jesus' life. It's also the site of the old Jerusalem temple, now the Wailing Wall. And it's the site as well of many events from the life of the prophet Muhammad in Islam.

Hinduism makes sacred its geography. The Ganges, for example, is literally a goddess, and if you want to tap into the power of the goddess, you touch and bathe in the Ganges and take up that sacred power that exists in that particular place.

Are there certain practices associated with sacred ground?

The most common practice is pilgrimage. In order to make the site sacred, you need to go there in some sense. In the Muslim tradition, it is imperative -- one of the five pillars of Islam -- to travel at some point in your life to Mecca if you can afford it. First and foremost is pilgrimage. You need to go there.

Then, once you're there, how do you treat the space? There is no hard and fast answer. People don't always take off their hats or don't always take off their shoes or put on a particular kind of clothes. But they do act differently from the way they act elsewhere. They put on white clothes to go to Mecca. Or they take their shoes off to go into the mosque. Or, when they walk into the church, they talk softly rather than talking in a normal voice. So there's some kind of rule or behavior that sets it apart. You are aware that the spot is different from the place outside the wall or over the fence or at the edge of the property that is profane rather than sacred.

What's the distinction between profane and sacred?

There's no hard and fast distinction. It is made by the people who practice a particular ritual that they see as sacred or who respect a particular site as sacred. The profane is the nonsacred and the sacred is the nonprofane. But the most important thing is that the sacred place is the spot where you behave differently, you talk differently, you walk differently; in Hinduism, you circumambulate the image of the divinity to carve out that spot as sacred. You do something different from what you do when you're in a supermarket or a library or your own home.

And is this happening already at the World Trade Center site?

I think so. I wouldn't say all those things are happening now at the World Trade Center site. We clearly have pilgrimage going on there. The most visible piece of iconography at the World Trade Center site is a cross, and this is important. It says, "This is sacred ground." If you look at the World Trade Center site, you see workers there, you see a big hole in the ground, you see some American flags on the buildings surrounding it, but the most dominant image, the icon that's there, is that large steel cross. To me that says this spot is being made sacred already.

What is unusual about the cross there?

What intrigues me is the fact that it's been accepted, because this is a multireligious country. It's not a country merely of Christians, it's a country of Buddhists and Jews and Muslims and Hindus. And we don't have an image of Ganesha, the Hindu divinity of thresholds, at the World Trade Center. We don't have an image of the Buddha sitting next to the image of the cross. Neither do we have the text of the Ten Commandments. We have a Christian symbol there. And the symbol isn't just Christian, it's Protestant, because in the Protestant tradition you have the empty cross; in the Catholic tradition typically you have a crucifix, which has the body of Jesus suffering on the cross. So it's not just a Christian image, it's a Protestant image. And this is appropriate in a sense, because the United States is largely Protestant. We have more Protestants here than any other faith tradition.

But somehow that cross has been, in my view, abstracted to stand for religion in general rather than Christianity in particular. The reason I say that is because there has not been a swelling up of opposition to that cross. I could imagine people saying, "Take that cross down. It's inappropriate. Jews died here. Muslims died here." But that's not what people are saying. People seem relieved in a way that there is some kind of sacred symbol there, and the cross is generic enough, perhaps, to stand for that sense of the sacred at the site.

And people see the cross as a sign given from God, in some way a divine manifestation?

Well, I'm not sure how people are seeing the cross, but I know that they are accepting the cross. And I think the reason they are accepting it is because of this deeply felt perception across New York and across the country and the world that this is becoming a sacred place. What the cross does is mark that. It says, "Yes, you're right, this is important. A lot of people died here. What happened here was important. We can't forget it, and we won't forget it."

Do you think that a future memorial will contain that cross, and if so, do you imagine it would contain other religious symbols as well?

The memorial is going to be tricky, and I do not envy the work of the people who are on the commission to decide what to do there. It is, obviously, a highly charged political task that they all have there.

I would be very surprised if the cross were not integrated into the memorial. There is a strong demand for a memorial that is significant, that is not overwhelmed by the commercial buildings in the site. There's an upsurge, it seems to me, a calling across the country for a significant memorial that somehow speaks to us, not just as Americans but as a spiritual people. I think that cross will be there.

Now, when the cross is there, it raises the problem of "What about us?" You know, what about Hindus who died at the World Trade Center? What about the Muslims who died at the World Trade Center, and not the terrorist Muslims but the innocent Muslims? What about the Buddhists or the Jews who died there? That's going to be very tricky. I think at the point of [creating] the memorial, people are not going to have the sense that the cross stands for generic spirituality, and if the cross is there, there is going to have to be some kind of recognition of other religious traditions there.

One thing that's going on now in the United States is a negotiation, particularly after 9/11, about the religious character of the United States. We used to talk about ourselves as a Judeo-Christian nation, and we would speak of God or the Supreme Being, and that would be, in a sense, our national divinity. That embraced Protestants, Catholics, and Jews. But as the country has become more pluralistic religiously, particularly since new immigration liberalization in 1965, that Judeo-Christian notion of America has become more and more contested. After 9/11, there was an effort to turn the Judeo-Christian country into the Judeo-Christian-Islamic country, the Abrahamic country. That may be where we're going, but that doesn't include Buddhists and Hindus; neither does it [yet] include Muslims, so maybe we're not a Judeo-Christian-Islamic country. Maybe we're a multireligious country.

That battle about the religious character of the country is going to be played out in the design of this site. What the designers come up with is going to give us some new sense of what we are religiously. Are we going to be three great western religions that are largely represented there? Is it going to be multifaith, multireligious, or is it going to be generic -- just God language that isn't really particular to Christianity, in which case the cross would not be appropriate?

What about the role of civil religion and places like Gettysburg representing the sacred, as it were, in American civil religion?

Well, at Gettysburg, of course, we have the two types of death associated with the sacred coming together. We have Gettysburg as cemetery and Gettysburg as battle site, and so that is doubly sacred. That is one of the great sites in American civil religion, along with the Lincoln Memorial or the Vietnam Memorial or the Declaration of Independence or the Pledge of Allegiance, which are all part of that panoply of religious beliefs, practices, sites, and symbols that we refer to [as] civil religion.

In some ways, the connection with Gettysburg (that is apparently going to be made quite explicitly through the reading of the Gettysburg Address at the anniversary or the one-year remembrance of the World Trade Center and 9/11 events) seems to me particularly apt, because this, in a way, is Gettysburg for our generation. This is the place of mass death that we are going to remember, where Americans responded to an attack and in a way defined the character of the country. That connection strikes me as quite appropriate. At the World Trade Center, we have that lingering presence of the cremated remains of innocent people who died there. It seems to me that it is shaping up as a new site in the list of sacred sites in American civil religion.

American civil religion exists alongside the great traditions such as Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism. It's the "religion" of all of us as Americans, the spirit that we feel when we're at the Fourth of July parade in our hometown or when we recite the Pledge of Allegiance or read Lincoln's words on the Lincoln Memorial. It's that spirit of being an American that is something higher than the mere feeling of nationhood. It's the sense of being connected with some kind of divine purpose or divine destiny that is American civil religion.

And how would a place like Gettysburg be different from the Vietnam Memorial for the purposes of American civil religion?

The Vietnam Memorial is an interesting place. Besides the fact that it's a brilliant design by Maya Lin, it lists the names of the dead individually. This strikes me as very 20th-century America. This is not something that was done typically in the 19th century or the 18th century, when people died in war together, as it were, rather than as individuals.

But in the 20th century, it's become much more important to remember people as individuals. We see that at the Vietnam Memorial. We also see that in the NEW YORK TIMES series of short biographies of all the people who died at the World Trade Center site. I'm sure when it comes to designing that site, there will be some way to integrate the names of everyone who died there, but I suspect there will be something even broader than that. I wouldn't be surprised if there is a way that those NEW YORK TIMES pieces will also be incorporated into the site, or something similar.

The Vietnam Memorial is different from Gettysburg in the sense that it is not a burial site; it is a commemorative site. It's also not a place where people lost their lives. So in that sense it doesn't resonate, or it shouldn't resonate as powerfully as a place where someone actually died or is actually interred. But even without that, the site still carries so much power. Once the World Trade Center memorial is done, if it's done in an equally powerful way, it ought to resonate at least as powerfully in the minds of Americans as the Vietnam Memorial site already does.

The Vietnam Memorial, though, is a memorial not just to the dead of Vietnam but also to the conflict that happened here. Its healing, its purpose isn't simply to remember the dead but also to heal the conflict. The conflict happened here. It happened in Washington, D.C. -- debates in the White House, debates in the U.S. Congress about how to go forward with the war, and protests that happened right in that very area. In that sense it is sited at the place of what it's memorializing. It commemorates the soldiers who died in Vietnam, but it's also an effort to heal the divisions that happened in this country between people who were for the war and people who were against the war.

Some people say 9/11 is the great human spiritual experience of our time. What does that mean for the World Trade Center site in the future? Is it going to become some kind of preeminent sacred site for us?

It will definitely join other important sites on the map of American civil religion. It will join Gettysburg. It will join the various important sites in Washington, D.C., essentially a memorial city where we remember the dead -- Lincoln, Jefferson, the Vietnam War dead. It will certainly be in that league.

Whether it surpasses those places seems to me entirely up to the design. Is this going to be a design that really works in the way the Vietnam Memorial design works, or is it going to be designed by a committee? Will it be a compromise design that doesn't work? The sacredness is going to be in the details -- how well is it done? If it's done well, it will certainly be one of the most important sites for pilgrimage in American civil religion. If it speaks to people the way the site already speaks to people, then it's hard for me to imagine it won't endure for a long time as an important pilgrimage site.

We've all heard that 9/11 changed everything. I'm not sure that's the case. It certainly changed everything for the time being. As a historian, I think we probably need a little more time before we decide exactly how important and transcendent the event was.

How does a site made profane by death go through a process of purification and become sacred?

The relationship between death and religion, death and the sacred, is perplexing, because in many religions the presence of death profanes a place. So, for example, in the Hindu tradition you have the cremation steps along the Ganges that are made profane by corpses, and they need to be attended by the lowest level of people in society, the so-called outcastes. You have the notion in Judaism of certain priests who cannot enter the cemetery because it will make them polluted.

There is an awareness in religions that death is dangerous, that death is profaning and polluting. And yet religions also have a way to transform death, as it were, into something positive -- in the Christian tradition, for example. The resurrection trumps the crucifixion. But we also have rites of purification in religious traditions, where someone who has been profaned by coming in contact with a dead body can do some kind of washing rituals and be returned to society. That dance with death in religion is always that death is dangerous, death is to be avoided; but death is also sacred, death is the moment of connection with God or with divinity. We see that process in many religious traditions.

Is Gettysburg an example of this process of moving from a place profaned by death and then purified, toward the sacred?

You see this movement from death as polluting to death as purifying in the Gettysburg site, where you have the defilement of the dead strewn across that battlefield and then the gradual purifying process.

When Lincoln gives his Gettysburg Address he says, "Nothing I can say will make this place sacred, because this place is made sacred by the actions of the heroes who died here." And then, of course, Lincoln's words themselves, as they resonate in our memory, actually do make the place sacred. They didn't make it sacred then, but they [made] it sacred over the centuries, because we remember those words more, in a way, than we remember the events at the battlefield. You see that movement from profanation and defilement to purification -- Lincoln's words as a kind of purification, and now the site stands for us as a sacred place, thanks not just to the brave men who died at that battlefield but also thanks to the words of Abraham Lincoln.

Will something purify the World Trade Center site?

Apparently we won't have a contemporary version of the Gettysburg Address because we are not going to hear any original words spoken at the site [this Sept. 11]. I think that's too bad. We have some people who could say 250 words, maybe not as well as Lincoln, but half as well, and that might have worked. But we will not hear any original words that make the place sacred. We will have the Gettysburg Address read, and some kind of ritual will go on there. That will not begin the process, because the process has already begun, but it will continue the process, and then down the road a memorial will carry that process on.

Why do we build memorials?

We build memorials to remember, and we remember better, arguably, if there's some building or some piece of art that jogs our memory. You can go to a site without a memorial and remember. If we rebuilt the World Trade Center site or just built it up with skyscrapers, it would still be possible to go there and remember. But if there is some kind of memorial building or park there, that building or park, as a gathering place of other pilgrims who have come to remember, becomes more powerful because it becomes communal. At the Vietnam Memorial site, you go and stand there with other people who are remembering similar things. So we build memorials because we need to remember, and it's easier for us to remember in the presence of a building commemorat[ing] that event or a piece of art commemorating the event.

Is this some attempt to convey immortality upon those who are gone?

A memorial site is a way to convey immortality, but more importantly, it's a way for us to figure out what we think. This happens before a memorial is built when people say, "What is this all about?" What is the Oklahoma City bombing all about? What is Pearl Harbor all about? What is 9/11 all about? That happens ahead of time, and people make decisions about it. Then, over time, as people visit these memorial sites, they come up with their own interpretations, and the interpretations can change. So it's about immortality, yes, but it's also about defining ourselves. This memorial at the World Trade Center is a way to define America as well as to remember the people who died.

Is there anything important to note about the Oklahoma City memorial or the events that happened in Oklahoma City as they relate to the World Trade Center?

There were fierce negotiations in Oklahoma, and that is also what is in store for the World Trade Center. There are going to be fierce negotiations, and it really depends on that push and pull between various interested parties -- the families that lost husbands and wives and fathers and mothers, but also the people who were injured there but did not die. Those are stakeholders too, as are Americans and people all over the world. So the lesson from Oklahoma is that there will be negotiations, and it's a tricky matter.

What about the debate over the World Trade Center footprint? Is it important that the tower footprints not be built over, or is that debate beside the point?

I understand why people don't want to build on the footprint. It seems to me what they're saying is that this is an important place, and it should not become merely commercial, because 9/11 changed that. They're saying this is a sacred place. To that I say amen; I think they're right. But it strikes me as somewhat inappropriate to make a fetish about the footprint. After all, people who died at the site didn't just die inside the footprint of those buildings. People died on the streets around them and outside those footprints. Similarly, the remains of people who were incinerated in those buildings did not merely come to rest inside those square footprints. So in that sense, it is in a way to say, "Look, the sacred space here is merely in the footprint of where the architect drew the line around the building." And I don't think that's right. It's a broader spot that is really the sacred place being contested there. I sympathize with the argument, but I think that to make a big deal over those particular surveying lines may not be appropriate in this case.

What type of memorial do you envision at the World Trade Center site? What needs to be in a memorial there?

It needs to be an American site because it needs to speak to American civil religion. This is our loss, and it needs to recognize that. But it can't merely be an American site, because many people who died there were not Americans; this was a global and international tragedy. So it somehow needs to be international as well as ... American.

Now, if the T-beam cross is integrated into the design, which I think it will be, then this is going to be a Christian site. And if it's a Christian site, it needs to be not only a Christian site, because not only Christians died on that day. It somehow needs to be an international site, an American site, a Christian site, and somehow a Jewish and Buddhist and Hindu and Muslim site.

When we talk about the World Trade Center site as sacred in some way, are we implying that God is there? For many people, the site may represent the absence of God. Is it possible that it can represent both at the same time?

The sacred doesn't necessarily represent the presence of God. One reason scholars of religion have liked to use that phrase "sacred space" is because it seems applicable to traditions such as Buddhism that have no god. The Bodhgaya site of the Buddha's enlightenment is a sacred place, but it is not a place where God is necessarily present. At least Buddhists wouldn't say that God is present there. So the sacred doesn't necessarily invoke that. But I do think there is a sense of awe at this place, where you have the presence of God in the form of the people who gave their lives for others, and you have the absence of God in the sense of the classic problem, why would a good god allow evil like this to happen in the world? It does make sense to say you have the presence and absence of God at the site at the same time, and that's part of what makes the event mysterious for many people.

What will be the test of whether the World Trade Center comes to be seen as a site that is sacred to Americans?

The real test for the sacredness of the site will be pilgrimage. Are people going to come, and are they going to weep, and are they going to remember? And if they come and weep and remember, then it's going to be a place that works, and it's going to be, alongside Gettysburg and the memorials in Washington, D.C., a key place in American life. That's the test.

And will it pass that test?

Whether it passes that test depends on the design. Even a bad design will draw people there for a few years. And even a bad design will cause people to look and remember for a decade. But whether it lasts for a quarter of a century or a century is going to depend on exactly what's produced there.

There was talk early on about some effort to link the memorials in Pennsylvania, at the Pentagon, and at the World Trade Center, and it strikes me as interesting that it doesn't seem to be happening. In some ways, this was one event that happened not only in New York but also in Pennsylvania and Washington. There should be some effort in the memorials to link those events together. This could obviously be done by Internet or television links across those three sites. There might also be a way to remember the people who died in Pennsylvania at the New York City memorial, and the people who died in the Pentagon at the New York City memorial -- including them on the list of the deceased. I don't know if that's going to happen, but it strikes me as making quite a bit of sense, given the fact that in some ways this really was one event rather than three. The problem is that memorials need to be local, and you can't really have a memorial for those three places, because the power of a memorial is being at the place. But there may be some way to link New York City and Pennsylvania, and to link them as well with the deaths that happened at the Pentagon.

How do religious beliefs and concepts of the afterlife influence the shape and form of memorials?

The afterlife is obviously closely tied with the notion of a memorial, because if someone has died and they're never coming back, that's one thing. If someone has died and gone to heaven, that's another thing. If someone has died and gone to hell, that's still another thing. And if someone has died and is being reincarnated even as we speak, that's yet another thing. So a memorial depends very much on the notion of the afterlife.

In general, some religions have a greater affinity for memorials because they're not worried about the problem of worshiping the dead. Judaism doesn't tend to have memorials, doesn't have pyramids, because of its radical monotheism. It doesn't want to elevate people to the status of divinities. Where was Moses buried? We don't know. Why don't we know? Well, because Judaism doesn't want us to know, because it doesn't want to turn Moses into a god. Judaism in general has been reticent to go for memorials because of the danger of worshiping the dead, of turning ancestor respect into ancestor veneration. In some religions, venerating the ancestors sustains the religion -- the traditions in West Africa, or the Shinto tradition in Chinese popular religion. In others, venerating ancestors destroys the religion. [There are] very different approaches to the same question. It [became] a particularly vexing matter for Jews after the rise of Christianity, which from the Jewish perspective is a case in point of elevating wrongly a dead human being to the status of divinity. You don't have that fear, obviously, in Christianity. You don't really have that fear in Buddhism. It's going to vary very much from religion to religion. Some traditions will see memorials as more appropriate and less appropriate. It's obviously appropriate for the Egyptians -- the pyramids. It's obviously appropriate for Muslims -- the Taj Mahal. Those are death memorials.

What are some of the marks of distinction between memorials that are strictly religious and private and individual, and the more civic, public kinds of memorials?

Civic memorials are much trickier than religious memorials, because religious memorials are allowed to carry forward the rhetoric of the tradition. It's OK to say "Jesus," it's OK to quote from the Gospel of Matthew if it's a Christian memorial site. If it's a civic memorial site in a multicultural country like the United States, for example, or like India, for that matter, it becomes a lot trickier, because the point of the site is to speak to the whole nation rather than to one segment of it, and that's where you have to cast about for metaphors and quotations that somehow will speak to everyone.

In the United States, we have seen negotiations about this with the presidential inauguration of George Bush when Jesus was invoked. Some people said, "No, no, no, you don't invoke Jesus at the inaugural," and other said it's fine to invoke Jesus. These negotiations have to go on in a civic project, as opposed to an explicitly religious one.

Is civil religion a new way of thinking, or does it go back to early in our history?

Analyzing places like Gettysburg or the Lincoln Memorial as sacred is fairly new. It really started in the 1960s when interpreters and sociologists of religion, particularly Robert Bellah, started saying, "We seem to have a religion here in America than isn't just Judaism and Christianity; it's our national religion." It's a fairly new way of analyzing what goes on here -- not that the practices are new, not that revering the Declaration of Independence is new or looking at George Washington as a saint is new. Paintings of George Washington ascending to heaven are as old as the country. What's new is analyzing it as a form of religion. That's something that we've really only done for the last 30 or 40 years.

You've written about a kinship between the living and the dead -- that memorials remind us of that kinship, almost as if they are our surrogates. What about at the World Trade Center site?

One interesting thing about America is how we respect what's young and new so much. American society is made up, for the most part, of the living. But if you look at most religious traditions, they have a sense that society is not just the living; it's also the dead. This is very clear in the Catholic Church, for example, where the Church is both the living and the dead, and that's why the saints are so important. Memorials provide a link between the living and the dead, and they say that the dead are part of society too. They become a place where the dead are enshrined, where the dead enter into society.

We walk along the sidewalk and participate with other living beings in our society, and then we walk into a memorial and stand there in the presence of the people who died in the Holocaust or the people who were bombed in Pearl Harbor or the people who lost their lives in Oklahoma City. At that moment, we integrate the dead back into society. This strikes me as a very important feature of memorials -- re-creating this social fabric between the living and the dead.

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