Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/18pdf/17-1717_4f14.pdf
Page Number: 75.0

Cite as:  588 U. S. ____ (2019) 

9 

GINSBURG,  J., dissenting 

Amici  Christian  and  Jewish  Organizations  8, and “com-
memorates [that person’s death] by evoking a conception 
of salvation and eternal life reserved for Christians,” Brief 
for Amicus Jewish War Veterans 7.  As a commemorative 
symbol, the Latin cross simply “makes no sense apart from 
the crucifixion, the resurrection, and Christianity’s prom-
ise of eternal life.”  Brief for Amici Christian and Jewish 
Organizations 8.8 
  The cross affirms that, thanks to the soldier’s embrace 
of Christianity, he will be rewarded with eternal life.  Id., 
at  8–9.   “To say that the cross honors the Christian war 
dead does not identify a secular meaning of the cross; it 
merely  identifies  a  common  application  of the religious 
meaning.”  Id., at 8.  Scarcely “a universal symbol of sacri-
fice,” the cross is “the symbol of one particular sacrifice.”  
Buono, 559 U. S., at 748, n. 8 (Stevens, J., dissenting).9 

—————— 

8 The  Court  sets  out  familiar  uses  of  the  Greek  cross,  including  the 
Red  Cross  and  the  Navy  Cross,  ante,  at  3,  22,  and  maintains  that, 
today, they carry no religious message.  But because the Latin cross has 
never  shed  its  Christian  character,  its  commemorative  meaning  is 
exclusive  to  Christians.    The  Court  recognizes  as  much  in  suggesting 
that the Peace Cross features the Latin cross for the same reason “why 
Holocaust memorials invariably include Stars of David”: those sectarian 
“symbols  . . .  signify  what  death  meant  for  those  who  are  memorial-
ized.”  Ante,  at 30. 

9 Christian  soldiers  have  drawn  parallels  between  their  experiences 
in  war  and Jesus’s suffering and sacrifice.  See, e.g., C. Dawson, Living 
Bayonets:  A  Record  of  the  Last  Push  19–20  (1919)  (upon  finding  a 
crucifix  strewn  among  rubble,  a  soldier  serving  in  World  War  I  wrote 
home  that  Jesus  Christ  “seem[ed]  so  like  ourselves  in His lonely and 
unhallowed suffering”).  This comparison has been portrayed by artists, 
see,  e.g.,  7 Encyclopedia of Religion 4348 (2d ed. 2005) (painter George 
Rouault’s  1926  Miserere  series  “compares  Christ’s  suffering  with 
twentieth-century  experiences  of  human  sufferings  in  war”),  and 
documented  by  historians,  see,  e.g.,  R.  Schweitzer,  The  Cross  and  the 
Trenches:  Religious  Faith  and  Doubt  Among  British  and  American 
Great  War  Soldiers  28–29  (2003) (given the horrors of trench warfare, 
“[t]he  parallels  that  soldiers  saw  between their suffering and Christ’s 
make  their  identification  with  Jesus  both understandable and reveal-