Do we need a secular national church? A new book argues for a different kind of DC cathedral.
In his initial plan for the city of Washington, Pierre L’Enfant envisioned a secular church, equidistant from the White House and the Capitol, that would enshrine the nation’s civic ideals. That church was never built. Instead, we ended up with the, a private Episcopal institution that often hosts state funerals but isn’t connected to the federal government.
, Brigham Young University professor Richard Benjamin Crosby makes an odd and intriguing argument: that the absence of L’Enfant’s national church has done real harm to America’s social fabric.In the late 18th century, L’Enfant believed that the government should create a national civic identity to help bind the US’s fractious populace. “The nation wanted to build at its founding a grand church—a civic temple to the Republic,” says Crosby.
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