Tarasius, today’s saint, was most famous for his successful role in helping to refute, confute, and defeat (at least for a while) Iconoclasm in the Eastern Church, during the 8th century.

Iconoclasm–it has come to mean “The act of attacking or assertively rejecting cherished beliefs or institutions or established values and practices.” Historically, it became the name of one of the most thoroughly rejected of heresies during the first century of the Christian church–because it was the movement to do away with pictorial and three-dimensional representations of God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, Mary as the Theotokos (bearer or God), and any venerated/prayed-to saints in churches or other places of Christian worship. Islam and Judaism have long traditions of anti-iconography, and earth-based religions have even gone so far as to assert that the gods cannot even be properly worshipped in structures made by human hands.

The Iconoclasts made their heresy (= a belief or practice that eventually loses out to orthodoxy rather than winning and thereby becoming orthodoxy) strongly felt through actively destroying church statuary as an act of (in their minds, at least) faithfulness. They took seriously that Commandment against having any graven images. The King James Version states this stricture as: “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.” (Exodus 20:4)

The Iconoclasts were most roundly criticized as being “Jewish-ish” in their approach. And, in a later time, they would have been accused, no doubt, as possessing “Muslim tendencies.” Not surprising that churches did not want to see their art holdings (which were–and indeed are–substantial: just consider St. Peter’s Basilica, the Sistine Chapel, the Pieta… and then think of every single stained glass window that’s ever shown Jesus, the Good Shepherd, and you start to get the picture) destroyed. Much less did they want to see their rich patrons disaffected nor their church leadership called morally corrupt. There are indeed few theological principles against Iconoclasm that hold up to close examination, but that’s never been the point.

Now the irony is inescapable that so many of the fundamentalist Christians who want to see the Ten Commandments posted in every school room and court house worship in buildings with those stained glass depictions of Jesus, et al. But the point of posting those Commandments for them is not the desire that these principles are taught “for real” to students or are enforced in our courts (after all, is the Sabbath honored and kept holy by drinking beer at a football game? what would learning to happily live within our means (i.e., not coveting) do to capitalism? and don’t even get me started about empty or vain uses of God’s name to put forward ungodly political agendas! Instead, their desire in posting those Commandments is to browbeat Americans into submitting to a particular brand of civic and political life that accords to what they want–kind of like a quasi-secular orthodoxy with the power of the State behind them!

Over time, a small-i “iconoclasm” has come to be celebrated as the willingness to take on social, political, and, yes, religious tenets and to question, deconstruct, and even discard them–often for reasons that, again ironically, often accord more with what Jesus taught and did than what Christians have subsequently done. The small-i iconoclasts are those who are angry with the established order and are willing to smash things in order to (attempt to) effect change. Many such people voted for Obama. Many such people voted for Trump. Many supported Sanders. This nascent iconoclasm is an area largely unexplored, except tangentially, in today’s political landscape, yet–like any truly powerful heresy–iconoclasm can never fully be expressed and will always seek forms of expression.

It’s worth taking time to ask what values the orthodox and the iconoclasts share and can potentially build upon. Failure to do so has shown itself to spawn gridlock and even unreasoning hatred…and the election of a president who, by one means or another, garnered a majority of electoral votes and a minority of the popular votes.

Oh, and Tarasius? Well, Butler writes, to the relief of the orthodox (and paving his way to canonization): “The good patriarch, pursuant to the decrees of the [orthodox] synod, restored holy images throughout the extent of his jurisdiction.”