The Capitol and Democracy Both Qualify as “Sacred”

“The immediate danger of the Capitol attack has ended. However, the work of repairing the tear in the fabric of our nation has only just begun, a task we neglect at our peril.”

Is the Capitol sacred? David Graham argued that it was in an article earlier this month in The Atlantic, continuing a debate that began following the January 6th attack. On one side of this issue, some conservatives and religious commentators take offense at the use of this sacramental language—“desecration” of the “sacred space” in our “temple of democracy”—arguing that those terms should not be used outside the realm of religion. The far-right commentator Nick Fuentes tweeted that “The US Capitol is hardly a ‘sacred temple of democracy.’” Charles Camosy, a theologian and former Democrat who endorsed the American Solidarity Party in 2020, tweeted that the Capitol “is not sacred, is not a temple, and has not been desecrated,” arguing that Christians who see it as sacred are risking idolatry.

On the other side are those lamenting the attack on a “sacred” site. In President Joe Biden’s address on January 6th, he called the insurrection “an assault on the most sacred of American undertakings, the doing of the people’s business.” Cardinal Wilton Gregory of Washington, D.C., referred to the Capitol as “sacred ground.”

Abraham Lincoln, who would become the first Republican president, endorsed sacred political language when he called for a “political religion” in his famous 1838 Lyceum Address. If this seems surprising, consider that sacredness has meaning outside religious contexts: The Oxford English Dictionary defines one sense of sacredness as “secured by religious sentiment, reverence, sense of justice, or the like, against violation.” Shakespeare calls a vow sacred in his 1604 play Measure for Measure, and other writers over the centuries have evoked the sacred in secular—and yes, even political—contexts.