The National Cathedral

On the highest point in the District of Columbia stands the sixth-largest cathedral in the world. Its official name is the Cathedral Church of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, but everyone calls it Washington National Cathedral. It is an Episcopal church — part of the Anglican Communion — yet it functions as the religious arm of the federal government. Presidential funerals are held there. National prayer services are held there. The cornerstone was laid by Theodore Roosevelt in 1907. The building took 83 years to complete. It contains 112 gargoyles, 215 stained glass windows, a moon rock embedded in one of those windows, and a stone carving of Darth Vader. This study walks through what the National Cathedral actually is, why it is there, and what its existence tells us about the relationship between American civil religion and historic Christianity.

What It Is on Paper

The National Cathedral was chartered by Congress in 1893. Congress chartered a church building — in a country whose Constitution prohibits the establishment of religion. The charter named it the Protestant Episcopal Cathedral Foundation of the District of Columbia and gave it federal recognition. The Episcopal Church is the American branch of the Church of England, which became the Anglican Communion after Henry VIII broke with Rome in 1534. It is liturgically and theologically Catholic in nearly every respect except papal authority — it has bishops, sacraments, vestments, the liturgical calendar, prayers for the dead, the veneration of saints, and the same Gothic-cathedral architecture that defined Roman Catholicism in the medieval period.

This is the denomination Congress selected to build the de facto national church on the highest hill in Washington DC. The architects were George Frederick Bodley and Henry Vaughan, both English, both deeply steeped in the Anglo-Catholic Gothic Revival movement. The building was designed in 14th-century English Gothic style, the same style as Canterbury Cathedral, the same style that arose in medieval Europe alongside the most opulent excesses of the medieval church. It is solid masonry construction, no structural steel — built like a medieval cathedral, on purpose, in the twentieth century.

Roosevelt’s Cornerstone

On September 29, 1907, the cornerstone was laid in a public ceremony presided over by President Theodore Roosevelt. The stone laid that day contained inside it a smaller stone taken from a field near Bethlehem. The symbolism was deliberate: this American cathedral was being grafted onto the holy land of Scripture by means of a relic. Relic veneration is a Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox practice. It is not a Hebrew or apostolic one. The Pilgrim Fathers who founded the Plymouth colony would have considered it idolatry. By 1907, an American president and the Anglican establishment together considered it national piety.

Construction took 83 years and was finished in 1990. Every detail of the building was carefully designed and executed. There are no shortcuts. The 112 gargoyles function as actual rainwater drainage. The 215 stained glass windows depict scenes ranging from biblical narrative to American history to — quite literally — the Apollo 11 moon mission. The carvings, the pinnacles, the buttresses, the rose windows: this is not a building thrown together. It is a fully realized medieval cathedral built in the modern era, with all the theology and symbolism of its medieval models intact.

The Things That Should Not Be in a Church

The Space Window

On the south aisle of the nave is a stained glass window called the Space Window, dedicated in 1974. Embedded inside the window, near the center, is a 7.18-gram fragment of moon rock collected by the crew of Apollo 11 in 1969. The rock was a gift to the cathedral from NASA. The window was designed by Rodney Winfield. It depicts the orbits of planets and a small white sphere representing the moon, with the lunar fragment set into the glass.

Stop and consider what this is. A piece of an extraterrestrial object — a fragment of the moon — has been embedded in a stained glass window in the central worship space of the de facto national cathedral. The moon was, in every ancient pagan religion across the Near East, a deity — Sin in Mesopotamia, Yarikh in Canaan, Khonsu in Egypt, Selene and Diana in Greece and Rome. The Torah condemns moon-worship explicitly (Deut. 4:19, 17:3). And here, in a building that hosts presidential funerals, a literal piece of the moon has been installed as a sacred object in a window the worshippers gaze through during services.

Deuteronomy 17:3, 5And hath gone and served other gods, and worshipped them, either the sun, or moon, or any of the host of heaven … then shalt thou bring forth that man or that woman … and shalt stone them with stones, till they die.

The Darth Vader Grotesque

On the northwest tower of the cathedral, high up where binoculars are required to see it, is a carved stone grotesque depicting Darth Vader, the Sith Lord from the Star Wars franchise. The carving was added in the 1980s as a result of a children’s contest run by National Geographic World magazine, in which kids were invited to design new grotesques for the cathedral. Darth Vader was the third-place winner, submitted by a 13-year-old named Christopher Rader. The design was carved by Patrick Plunkett and installed on the cathedral’s dark north side.

The official cathedral website explains the placement on the north side as appropriate for “dark, villainous” figures. Note what is being said. The cathedral acknowledges that one of its permanent stone carvings depicts a fictional dark wizard from a film franchise that explicitly invokes occult Eastern mysticism (the Force, the dualism of light and dark, the use of meditation, etc.). The grotesque has been there since 1986. It has not been removed. It is a deliberate, approved addition to the architecture of the building Congress chartered as the national house of worship.

The Other Carvings

Darth Vader is the most famous, but he is not alone. The cathedral’s carvings include hundreds of grotesques, gargoyles, and bosses depicting all manner of figures — dragons, demons, devils, sphinxes, griffins, mermaids, satyrs, gorgons, hooded figures, masked faces, and assorted monsters from medieval European folklore. The cathedral defends these as “tradition” — medieval cathedrals had grotesques, so this one does too. The defense is honest as far as it goes. Medieval Catholic cathedrals were covered in pagan-derived imagery: gargoyles to scare away demons, green men with vines coming out of their mouths, sheela-na-gigs displaying explicit fertility imagery, signs of the zodiac, and depictions of pre-Christian deities in subordinate positions. The National Cathedral preserved the entire iconographic program.

Deuteronomy 4:16–18Lest ye corrupt yourselves, and make you a graven image, the similitude of any figure, the likeness of male or female, the likeness of any beast that is on the earth, the likeness of any winged fowl that flieth in the air, the likeness of any thing that creepeth on the ground …

Its Function as State Church

Since its consecration, the National Cathedral has hosted the funerals of Presidents Eisenhower, Reagan, Ford, George H. W. Bush, and others. It hosts the National Prayer Service the day after every presidential inauguration. It hosted the post-9/11 national prayer service in September 2001, attended by every living former president and the entire congressional leadership. It is the building used whenever the United States as a polity needs to perform a religious act. There is no other building in America that fills this role.

This is significant because the United States Constitution explicitly prohibits the establishment of religion. There is, formally, no national church. In practice, the Episcopal cathedral on the highest hill in Washington fills exactly that function. Congress chartered it. The federal government uses it. Presidents are eulogized in it. National crises are processed there. It is the established church the Constitution forbade, hidden in plain sight by being denominational rather than constitutional.

The Masonic Connections

Theodore Roosevelt, who laid the cornerstone in 1907, was a Freemason — raised in the craft at Matinecock Lodge No. 806 in Oyster Bay, New York. Many of the cathedral’s major donors and trustees over the decades have been Freemasons. The Episcopal Church itself has had a long, documented overlap with Freemasonry, particularly in its high-church Anglo-Catholic wing. Episcopal clergy could be Masons without conflict. The cathedral’s Master Mason in the 1980s was Peter Cleland, who said openly: “I tell my men: Take your time — you’re building something to last 2,000 years.” That is the timescale of medieval cathedral construction, of Solomon’s temple-builders, of the Masonic guilds whose name the modern fraternity inherited.

The cathedral’s decorative program includes Masonic symbols woven into the carvings: square-and-compass arrangements in some of the floor designs, all-seeing eye motifs in carved bosses, sun-and-moon pairings in stained glass. None of this is hidden. Cathedral guides will point much of it out as part of the standard tour. The honest reading is that the National Cathedral was built as a Christian-shaped vessel into which the symbolic vocabulary of Anglican Catholic-style Christianity, English Gothic medievalism, American civic religion, and Masonic esoterica could all be poured at once.

The Torah Pattern

Yahuah did command His people to build a single sanctuary. It was the wilderness Tabernacle, and later Solomon’s temple, both built according to a precise pattern given by Yahuah Himself. Every dimension, every material, every color, every implement was specified by His hand. The pattern was given in Exodus 25–40 for the Tabernacle and 1 Kings 6–7 for the Temple. There were no gargoyles. There were no images of pagan deities. There were no relics in the cornerstone. There was no moon rock embedded in any window. There were no carvings of dark wizards on the dark side. The structure was clean, holy, set apart, and served a single God by His own design.

Exodus 25:9According to all that I shew thee, after the pattern of the tabernacle, and the pattern of all the instruments thereof, even so shall ye make it.

The National Cathedral is the opposite of this principle in nearly every respect. It was built to a pattern Yahuah did not give. It is filled with images of beings He did not authorize. It contains a fragment of an object He commanded His people not to worship. It hosts ceremonies for political rulers He never appointed. It is funded by a state He did not establish. To a believer reading the Torah carefully, it is not a church. It is a temple of the empire wearing church clothes.

The believer’s response is not to picket the building or attempt to have it torn down. The response is to recognize what it is, refuse to treat it as holy, and not to seek God in it. When a presidential funeral is held there, do not call what happens worship. When a national prayer service is broadcast from its nave, do not say amen. The sanctuary Yahuah cares about is not in Washington. It is the body of His people, scattered across the earth, walking in His Torah, set apart from the religious architecture of the empires that rule them.

1 Corinthians 3:16Know ye not that ye are the temple of Elohim, and that the Spirit of Elohim dwelleth in you?

Come out of her, my people.