We don’t have a definitive answer on how high and how thick we should build the wall of separation between religion and the state.

We have a guideline in the First Amendment to the Constitution stating that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
But how those two principles are to be applied to specific circumstances is something courts and communities have debated throughout the years.

This week, one of those debates flared up in Holmen, Wis., when Eric Barnes, a University of Wisconsin-La Crosse assistant professor, complained that because a cross is on village-owned land and is lit with electricity paid for by the village, it violates the First Amendment.

Others disagreed, some because the cross on Star Hill has been a part of the landscape and culture of the village for a half-century.

Barnes declined to comment for this column.

Hank Zumach, a Stoddard, Wis., resident who has been vocal on church-state issues in the past, says the cross needs to come down. But he also raised a deeper point during an interview Wednesday.

“When we’re talking about things like the cross above Holmen and the Ten Commandments, what are we really talking about?” Zumach asked.

Zumach, an agnostic who occasionally attends the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of La Crosse, was one of the plaintiffs in the court case claiming the Ten Commandments in Cameron Park violated the First Amendment.

He reads modern conflicts and history to show that more people have been killed in religiously motivated wars than for any other reason.

And he doesn’t shy away from conflict himself.

“I think that the leaders of the various congregations in the Holmen area, if they really wanted to preach the basic message of Jesus Christ this Sunday, they would make an announcement from their pulpits that the cross should come down,” Zumach said. “If they really want to treat the other person as they would want to be treated, they would not want to have something there that is only causing animosity.”

But what, as Zumach asked, are we really talking about here?

The Rev. Steve Meyer, pastor at Bridge of Life Lutheran Church in Holmen, discussed the cross on Star Hill with his congregation Wednesday night.

Most people, Meyer wrote in an e-mail Thursday, said they see the cross as a historic landmark, not a tool to try to establish a religion. And he noted the issue would be different if the village wanted to erect a religious symbol today.

For him, though, the cross should not just be a brick removed from or added to the wall between church and state. It is an image of love and sacrifice, deeply rooted in the story of Jesus, he said. It has meaning.

“The cross is a very important image of the faith, and I don’t want it reduced simply to be a decoration,” Meyer said, noting for others, the meaning can vary from a mark of identity to a symbol of hope to an exclusionary symbol to little more than a pretty decoration, like a piece of jewelry.

The Holmen Village Board is now in the process of resolving the issue by selling part of Star Hill to the Holmen Lions Club. This is similar to the way the Ten Commandments issue was resolved in La Crosse. Some will be happy. Zumach called such a solution — selling a small chunk of land in the middle of public property so a religious symbol can remain — a “deception.”

Whenever I see those Cameron commandments, I think of the reaction of a friend visiting from New York. Walking through the park, he spotted the fence around the stone. He knew nothing of the legal battle, but seeing the monument and the fence, he saw the whole story without hearing or reading a word. A smile grew on his face, and then he dropped to his knees and fell forward with laughter. From a distance, the solution looked absurd.

I like that image of laughter. It doesn’t diminish the importance of hashing out these church-state issues. But I wonder if God, or Creator, or whoever, might not also laugh sometimes at how passionate we become over what we see as right.

And I wonder if any divinity might not also weep at the way we let such issues cause hate in us, or how they cause us to spend energy fighting over stones when the humans those stones tell us to love suffer everywhere.

Meyer said he doesn’t have a strong feeling one way or the other about the Holmen debate.

“I would hate to see something that is meaningful to so many people taken away,” he wrote in an e-mail. “On the other hand, the unadorned beauty of the bluff is in itself a wonderful witness to God and doesn’t need light bulbs to make it better. Given the climate crisis facing us, I’m not sure lighting it is the best stewardship of resources, but that isn’t the issue here.”

Joe Orso can be reached at jorso@lacrossetribune.com.

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