Dr. Nathan S. French
How often do we get the chance to pause and think about our relationship to the spaces and places that we inhabit? We spend our time at school or in the workplace – at a desk, in a classroom, or in an office. Some of us arrive to work and to school in a car, bus, or other form of enclosed transportation. We rest at home in various rooms of an apartment, condominium, or house. Sometimes, we might eat together in a restaurant or cafeteria. We inhabit and interact with spaces all the time.
In its 2014 Religious Landscape study, the Pew Research Center discovered that roughly 69% of U.S. adults attend religious services at least once or twice a month or a few times a year and over 36% attend religious services at least once per week. This suggests that for most Americans their relationship to religion – if understood broadly as an encounter with something understood as sacred or spiritual – involves embodying practices and beliefs within a particular space specifically designated for religious or spiritual activities. Such a space may go by differing names – a church, mosque, synagogue, or a temple, among others – but, in all such cases, a building or institution is involved.
What happens, though, when a religious community identifies a land or territory as an essential sacred space? For example, Americans of the Diné and the Oceti Sakowin nations – or the Navajo and Sioux nations, respectively – locate their sacred spaces within the geographies of their homelands that extend far beyond the reservations outlined by the U.S. government on a map. Equally, what occurs when religious communities attempt to transform a secular space – a former department store, a warehouse, or other building – into a possible sacred space as occurred in Lower Manhattan in 2010? When tensions about the usage of land, buildings, or other property emerge among secular and religious communities in the U.S., this often provides us an opportunity to reflect on the intersection of sacred spaces and constitutionally protected religious freedoms in the United States.
Religion and Sacred Space
For scholars engaged in the academic study of religion, sacred spaces might occur anywhere. Nancy Ammerman, a sociologist of religion, argues that in addition to beliefs and practices, individuals and communities engaged in religious behaviors frequently do so with material objects (“religious stuff”) within sacred spaces. Among the newest sacred spaces is cyberspace. The oldest? Nature, Ammerman argues. Sacred spaces emerge in varying ways across human history and often exceed, if not challenge, property laws, city codes, and other legislative attempts to govern them.
For Belden C. Lane, a professor of theological studies, sacred spaces are “’storied’ places” that weave together human experiences and ideas into a narrative that “joins every detail of the landscape within a community of memory.” When people who identify as practitioners of a given religious or spiritual tradition enter into such a sacred space, they do so while participating in a narrative that links their community and themselves to broader, shared memories and traditions.
Constitution and Religion
The first amendment of the U.S. Constitution reads:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
On the matter of sacred spaces, both clauses of this amendment related to religion apply. The first of these clauses – “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion” – is often discussed as the establishment clause. The second of these clauses – “or prohibiting the free exercise thereof” – is considered the free exercise clause. On matters of sacred space, these clauses suggest that religious institutions – even religious buildings – should be free from any official government declarations as to their usage (i.e., the government cannot establish a religious building as an “official religious building” of the U.S. government) and as to their internal rules (i.e., within reason, the government should not regulate the exercises of rituals and activities conducted within the building). Additional laws, such as the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA, 1993) and the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA, 2000) secured additional protections and granted particular privileges to religious institutions over the usage of their properties.
Oceti Sakowin & Native American Claims to Sacred Grounds
The Oceti Sakowin nation – a name meaning ‘Seven Council Fires,’ a confederation of the Lakota, Nakota, and Dakota speaking peoples – claims He Sapa, or the Black Hills, a mountain range extending across South Dakota and Wyoming, as a comprehensive and whole sacred site that has been in continual use since before the establishment of the United States and the colonization of North America.
Stephen Prothero, an American scholar of religion, challenges us to think about the question of Native American claims in this way:
“Imagine you are a Christian and the U.S. Forest Service is coming into your church every day for weeks on end each winter and spraying the sanctuary with treated waste-water. You could still go to church. You could still pray there. But would you? And, would your God still be there to hear your prayers? …. Would your religion still work?(Stephen Prothero, Religion Matters, Oxford University Press, 2020, p. 487)
Across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, following a series of treaties made and broken with the U.S., dispossession and the private commercial development of sacred lands, the Oceti Sakowin have fought to protect their territorial claims, sacred practices, and constitutional rights. Though laws like the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978 (AIRFA) affirmed the religious liberty rights of Native Americans – including access to their sacred sites – even a brief glimpse at the lawsuits brought by various nations against local, state, and federal authorities demonstrates uneven landscapes of constitutional protections, religious freedom, and rights. As Patrick E. Reidy of the Notre Dame Law School observes, however, U.S. Courts “rarely construe the free exercise of religion as a property right.” Instead, the court often takes it upon itself to parse, define, and identify what it identifies as essential exercises to authentic Native American religious practice. Over time, this has led some observers, such as Vine Deloria, Jr., to criticize the U.S. Supreme Court for its uneven and unjust applications of constitutional religious protections.
The “Ground Zero Mosque” and Questioning Sacred Space
At other times in U.S. history, democratic debates emerged over the appropriate use of once-secular spaces for ostensibly religious purposes. In December 2009, Sharif El-Gamal, an Egyptian-American Muslim property developer announced his plans to develop a five-story building at 45-47 Park Place in Lower Manhattan into a 13-story interfaith community center and mosque.
Although the Park51 project, as it was known, received support from local government officials and many residents in Lower Manhattan, a nationwide debate emerged over the usage of the state. The building to house the Park51 project had been damaged by materials from the aircraft that struck the World Trade Center towers during al-Qaʿida’s terrorist attacks on the United States in September 2001. Many family members of victims of the 9/11 attacks expressed their deep opposition to the construction of any such structure so close to the site of the World Trade Center. In an opinion piece in the New York Post published in September 2010, former New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani argued that he believed that every American had constitutional rights to religious freedom, but this mosque, unfortunately, demonstrated a complete lack of sensitivity. Those who defended the Park51 project, such as Feisal Abdul Rauf, who would have served as its principle director, argued that the mission of the project was to “strengthen relations between the Western and Muslim worlds and to help counter radical ideology.”
Ultimately, the project was never completed. El-Gamal, the developer, instead proposed the construction of a condominium tower.
Debates over the “Ground Zero Mosque,” as it was often named in news media and popular accounts, often paralleled similar debates across the United States over the construction of mosques and other Islamic community centers. Scholars such as Kathleen M. Moore, at the University of California, Santa Barbara, note that these experiences are one of several experiences of Muslim Americans in their encounters with American laws. In Islamic Center of Murfreesboro v. Rutherford County (2014), for example, efforts by local community members to force the closure of a local mosque were resolved, ultimately, by a ruling of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee.
Sacred Spaces and the U.S. Constitution
The experiences of the Oceti Sakowin and Muslim communities in New York and Tennessee reveal to us that a claim to exercise one’s constitutionally protected rights to religious freedom within a given sacred space is far from a settled matter. Instead, debates and contestations over sacred space drawing upon the U.S. constitution and placing claims upon U.S. institutions reveal that differing understandings of sacred space might often challenge legal, cultural, or social practices.
Questions for Class Discussion
In your own words, define a “sacred space.” What sorts of sacred spaces come to mind? Do you or your classmates encounter or use sacred spaces on a regular basis? What functions do they serve? Do they differ or are they similar? What might account for these similarities or differences?
Imagine your community or your neighborhood is found to rest upon a very valuable mineral. After a court case, you are told that everyone in your neighborhood must move. What would you hope to receive in return, if anything? Now, imagine that for some of your neighbors, the neighborhood contains within it a sacred space that has been in use for over a century. What do you think their concerns might be? Why?
Watch interviews, documentaries, and discussions of the Oceti Sakowin and Muslim claims to sacred spaces and religious freedom. Do you notice any similarities in their arguments? Differences? In the U.S. context, both would be considered religious minorities. Do you think that U.S. religious minorities face unique challenges when it comes to their free exercise rights? Why or why not?
Go online and identify a controversy over a sacred space. Who were the parties to the debate? What are the arguments that each side made? To what authorities did they refer? What was the outcome?
Additional Sources
Documentaries
“In the Light of Reverence,” 2001 (link, link)
“Lakota Nation vs. United States,” 2022 (link)
“The Man Behind the Mosque,” PBS Frontline, 2011 (link)
“Unwelcome: The Muslims Next Door,” 2011, (link, and educator resources link)
Scholarship
Nancy Tatom Ammerman. Studying Lived Religion: Contexts and Practices (New York University Press, 2021)
Rosemary R. Corbett, Making Moderate Islam: Sufism, Service, and the ‘Ground Zero Mosque’ Controversy (Stanford University Press, 2016)
Andew Guilliford, Sacred Objects and Sacred Places (University of Colorado Press, 2000)
Suzan Harjo,“American Indian Religious Freedom Act after Twenty-Five Years: An Introduction,” Wicazo Sa Review 19, no. 2 (Autumn 2004): 129-136
Brendan Hkowhitu, Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Linda Tuhwai-Smith, Chris Andersen, and Steve Larkin, eds. Routledge Handbook of Critical Indigenous Studies (Routledge, 2022)
Kathleen M. Moore, al-Mughtaribūn: American Law and the Transformation of Muslim Life in the United States (SUNY Press, 1995)
Patrick E. Reidy, “Sacred Easements,” Virginia Law Review 110, no. 4 (2024): 833-908
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