The Freedom From Religion Foundation is asking Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy not to install a sectarian painting in a prominent space in the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy.
In a letter sent Aug. 11 to Duffy, FFRF Co-Presidents Dan Barker and Annie Laurie Gaylor vigorously object to the secretary’s decision to move the painting “Christ on the Water” from the basement chapel to the Elliott M. See Room in Wiley Hall, a space used for mandatory meetings with cadets and staff. The 1944 painting depicts a huge partial figure of Jesus floating over the water next to seamen adrift in a lifeboat.
“Cadets have the right to attend the Merchant Marine Academy without being exposed to prominent Christian imagery placed there at the direction of a high-ranking government official seeking to impose his personal Catholic beliefs on everyone else,” Barker and Gaylor write.
The painting was moved to the chapel in 2023 to resolve a complaint filed by 18 midshipmen, including five Jewish cadets, who objected to being forced to participate in meetings under the gaze of a sectarian image.
Duffy defended the return of the painting to the meeting room during a July 17 House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee hearing by asserting, “We have freedom of religion, not freedom from religion.” FFRF notes in its letter that this is a fundamental misunderstanding of the First Amendment, which guarantees both the right to freely practice religion and the right to be free from government-imposed religion: “It is an axiom of our nearly 50-year-old organization that, as FFRF’s principal founder Anne Nicol Gaylor put it, ‘There can be no freedom of religion without the freedom to dissent.’ Freedom of religion necessarily requires the government to be free from religion, as our godless and entirely secular U.S. Constitution demands.”
FFRF asserts that the Constitution binds government officials to remain neutral over matters of religion. Placing the pious painting at a prominent location sends a clear message that the Merchant Marine Academy is favoring one particular faith over others, and religion over nonreligion, which is both inappropriate and unconstitutional.
The state/church watchdog points out how exclusionary it is for the federal government to promote Christianity. While nearly a third of adults today have no religious affiliation, 43 percent of Gen Z youth identify as having no religion. With the addition of those adhering to other faiths, fully 36 percent of the U.S. adult population today is non-Christian.
FFRF is urging Duffy to either remove the painting altogether or return it to the chapel, where its religious nature is appropriately contextualized, and to reaffirm the Merchant Marine Academy’s commitment to respecting the First Amendment rights of all cadets.
The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a U.S.-based nonprofit dedicated to promoting the constitutional principle of separation between state and church and educating the public on matters of nontheism. With more than 42,000 members, FFRF advocates for freethinkers’ rights. For more information, visit ffrf.org.
