Thou shalt make unto yourself no graven image. . .

There’s no such thing as a portrait of Jesus Christ. There are only pictures of how someone imagines him to have appeared. Although you can use iconography to convey the suggestion of Christhood, nobody has a clue what Jesus of Nazareth looked like or what he dressed like or how he wore his hair. At least since the Renaissance, it’s been increasingly common to portray Jesus with northern European features and long, brown, lanky hair and trimmed beard. Some 16th century painters, like Albrecht Durer used their own, and in his case blond, faces as models as they used contemporary clothing and architecture to make the Bible stories more immediate. Everyone has his own idea and a right to his own idea, despite what the fundies say.

So when the School board of Clarksburg, West Virginia raised over $150,000 to defend against a lawsuit that centers on the large painting that has been on the wall of the local high school for 37 years, they’re truly defending “our Jesus” as they say on their T-shirts, not someone else’s Jesus. They are defending the supremacy or their sectarian interpretation, using the power vested in them by government to force others to look at their idiosyncratic version of a larger religious iconography, or idolatry if you prefer to regard the Ten Commandments as law. What we are dealing with here are not sophisticated theologians, historians, legal scholars or philosophers but narrow cultural supremacists who think majority conveys license when they bother to think anything at all. We’re dealing with the American religion in all it’s simple mindedness.

Americans United for Separation of Church and State and the West Virginia American Civil Liberties Union filed suit in federal court in June, saying the painting, "Head of Christ," sends the message that the school endorses Christianity as its official religion. I don’t know what other interpretation to put on it. The very title “Christ” tells the story. No one thought to title it “head of an early first century Jewish healer who was executed, according to legend, for breaking Roman sedition laws. This is a painting of a God presented to you as an object of worship by Bridgeport High School in open defiance of the US Constitution.

"The ACLU is saying they have the right to come in and find a few people who disagree with the majority and use them to overtake the majority," said Dennis Swindle, a local minister. I swear I did not make the name up. The Reverend Swindle of course is both right and wrong. The “Few people” are the few people who refuse to hand over rule to the clerics because majority or not, the law is the law. Tempering the rights of a majority to protect the rights of a minority is the nature of a free society, our society and using public funds and public office to promote their concept of Jesus over my concept of Jesus is unlawful.

"I feel proud to be a West Virginian and an American today because of what these people did here," said aptly named Mayf Nutter about the fundraising. I didn’t make that name up either, but proud though he may be the Nutters and Swindlers of West Virginia seem to think more of their pride in blind conviction than of their pride in the United States and its constitution.