Reflections

Looking back on this research project, which has turned out to be much more of a historical and theoretical investigation than the fieldwork that I initially anticipated, I am struck nonetheless by the changing narratives surrounding these religious objects in public space. Over the course of my interactions with some of the Faribault community members at the Buckham Complex, a number of things were immediately apparent. When I first walked into the center and asked if anyone would be willing to speak to me about their thoughts on the monument, leading with the fact that I was part of a religion class at Carleton College on religious monuments in public space, I was met with silence. Nobody wanted to talk to me, although I was eventually directed to a community member who would speak to me only anonymously and did not wish to share personal reflections, but only their understanding of the broader community sentiment about the monolith.

By the time of my interview with this person, I had decided to rebrand my project. I wanted to present it less in terms of a religion class project with understandingly threatening overtones, considering the relatively recent removal of the Ten Commandments monument from in front of Duluth’s courthouse, and to emphasize the historical elements of my research. Even getting the history of the object was difficult, however, simply due to a lack of documentation, and I was redirected to a Faribault City Administrator in my search for such information.

He was new to his post, however, and didn’t have any knowledge of the monument. This seemed to be a general problem with researching these monuments, as confirmed by Sue Hoffman’s investigations into their history. It appears that most documentation is either lost or was never created in the first place.

Finally, some help appeared with my interview with the Buckham Center Director, Paul J. Peanasky, who directed me to the city council’s microfiche records for my historical information. As for contemporary reactions, he was also a good source of information, since as director of the center, he got most of the phone calls either complaining about the monuments or their removal. He commented:

In the late fall, we usually put up a Nativity scene right behind the Ten Commandments monument. We get a number of complaints about that, and it’s a bit of a hot topic, so I don’t really want to talk about it, but the Ten Commandments is more of a historical monument and we don’t have any complaints about it, basically.

He was also the person contacted by the Freedom From Religion Foundation, the only major source of complaints about the monolith. He stated:

The Freedom From Religion Foundation is the name of the organization that is complaining, and they brag about having 10,000 members nationwide, but if you think about it, Northfield has about 20,000 people. And they’re not from here; they’re from Madison, Wisconsin.

The general sentiment communicated by Peanasky, as well as the other community members, is that the monolith is generally either treasured or happily tolerated. For example, he recalled:

Back when there was all that controversy about the Ten Commandments in Duluth, a news group came out here to interview people about it and they couldn’t find a single person who objected, who didn’t want the Ten Commandments to be there.

This type of statement, in combination with comments about the interfaith nature of the monuments, and how they are either ostensibly inclusive even to Muslim community members, or that the overwhelming demographic majority of Christians invalidates such questions of complete inclusivity, raises further questions about religious unity, tolerance, and tension in this growing and changing community. Perhaps non-Christians do not want to complain about the implicit government endorsement of Christianity because they feel morally represented by the values of the Decalogue. On the other hand, perhaps they do not, but they do not complain because they don’t care, don’t feel overtly threatened, or don’t want to make trouble. Christians, on the other hand, appear to be generally satisfied with the monuments as representative of their own values, and seem to believe that their values are non-sectarian and are broadly applicable to other traditions. The main (very small, apparently) community source of resistance to these statues comes from Christians, however, because of how they believe it violates their understanding of the disestablishment clause and thus the greater American value of religion as separate from the public, government sphere. The most vocal support for the removal of the statues is not local at all, however; it comes from a small foundation in Madison, Wisconsin. The fact that the backlash against these monuments largely comes from outside of the community likely further reinforces community solidarity for some people around keeping this object, and ones like it, such as the Jesus statue, in public space, if simply as a statement about the historical legacy of Faribault’s community.

On the historical side of things, the community reaction to both the Jesus statue and the Ten Commandments monument was largely positive, as far as I can tell from the city council minutes that describe their proposed placement and later reactions to them. For example, the only negative reaction to the Ten Commandments monument came from George R. Kingham and other members of the Buckham Memorial Library Board who opposed its placement because “the Library Board had refused many memorials,” not because of its religious content.

With the changing demographics of the city of Faribault, as well as emerging resistance to public displays of Christian religious objects in government space, so too the narratives surrounding these objects, which have always contained artistic, historical, and religious aspects, have shifted.