It's interesting that you bring up the Statue of Liberty. In Japanese she is called "自由の女神", "Jiyuu no Megami" which can be translated as "Goddess of Freedom".

It's interesting that you bring up the Statue of Liberty. In Japanese she is called "自由の女神", "Jiyuu no Megami" which can be translated as "Goddess of Freedom". So future anthropologists with a limited snapshot of Japanese culture could find a picture of the Statue of Liberty captioned in Japanese, and conclude she was explicitly considered a goddess or divine spirit of sorts. I think it's worth pointing out, too, the Statue of Liberty is one of the icons of what scholars of religious studies call the "American Civil Religion". In terms of 1700s liberalism, she carries a torch, a "sacred fire" of liberty (I get vibes of prometheus, or the raven who brought down the sun) from France where the first massive liberal revolution took place, to America, home of the second revolutionary liberal state. I think American Civil Religion is about the tradition and growth of the US "distro" of liberalism. Another major landmark, the Temple of Abraham Lincoln gives us an ascended figure from a story of how liberalism is supposed to have beaten the deeply contradictory institution of slavery that inhabited it. Mt. Rushmore immortalizes 4 founding fathers, etc.