Myths in Stone, by Jeffrey F. Meyer
Like many writers and historians who have come before him, Jeffrey Meyer argues that religious metaphors have loomed large in American history, and that there are implicit religious messages in the monuments, memorials and museums of the nation's capital. Washington is our sacred and secular center; the city's public art and architecture, its axial plan, diagonal streets and processional avenues represent a compendium of symbolic values; and the capital, "a repository of myths in stone," gives physical expression to our republican virtues and democratic ideals.
Meyer, a professor of religion at the University of North Carolina, leads readers on what he describes as a pilgrimage route: down Pennsylvania Avenue from the Capitol to the White House ("the axis of power"); from the White House to the Washington Monument and Jefferson Memorial ("the axis of Enlightenment"); and from Arlington Cemetery back to the Capitol by way of the Lincoln Memorial and the National Mall ("the axis of memory").
His itinerary derives from the grand lines of French designer Pierre Charles L'Enfant's ambitious plan of 1791, still more or less in place, for a great capital that would enlighten the world. One piece of L'Enfant's original plan that is missing, Meyer explains, is a national church, "the victim of total disinterest on the part of the poverty-stricken new republic." Its surrogate, he suggests, is the cathedral-like National Archives, shrine for our documentary treasures, sacred relics and hallowed national scriptures--the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights and the Constitution, "the greatest sacramental sign of the new republic."
