When a president cuts Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments by more than 90 percent — opening over 3 million acres containing thousands of tribal sacred sites to mineral and energy development — what do religious traditions and the Constitution say about land held sacred and land held in trust?
The land-management debate is real: rural communities have legitimate grievances about decisions made far away, and reasonable people disagree about how much land a monument requires. But two things sit outside that debate. The first is legal — the Antiquities Act grants presidents the power to create monuments and says nothing about shrinking them, Congress reserved modification authority to itself in 1976, and no court has ever upheld a president's power to do what these proclamations do. The second is religious — the ground at issue holds thousands of sacred sites belonging to five tribal nations whose traditions cannot relocate their worship, and whose request created the monument in the first place. Every tradition surveyed here treats land as held in trust rather than owned outright, and treats sacred ground as carrying obligations that survive a change in administration. A monument that can be created and erased by each successive president is not a protection; it is a preference. The question is whether the country intends the difference.
Religious perspectives
This is one of the questions where Indigenous religious traditions are not a supplementary voice but the primary one — the land in question is sacred ground to five tribal nations, and the traditions that hold it sacred have the most direct claim to be heard.
Indigenous traditions: The Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition — the Hopi Tribe, Navajo Nation, Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, Pueblo of Zuni, and Ute Indian Tribe — describes the area as holding thousands of sacred cultural sites and places of ongoing spiritual significance. For these nations the land is not a setting in which religion is practiced; the land itself is a participant in the religious life — burial grounds, ceremonial sites, places of origin narrative, and gathering grounds for plants used in ceremony. The distinction matters constitutionally as well as theologically: a tradition whose sacred sites are fixed in place cannot relocate its worship when the ground is opened to extraction. The 1978 American Indian Religious Freedom Act was Congress's acknowledgment that U.S. law had, for most of its history, failed to recognize this.
Judaism: The Torah's land ethic is explicit that ultimate ownership is not human: "The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine; for you are strangers and sojourners with me" (Leviticus 25:23). The sabbatical and Jubilee provisions (Leviticus 25) treat the land as having its own claim to rest, independent of its productivity for humans. The prohibition on moving a neighbor's boundary stone (Deuteronomy 19:14) is about the durability of what an earlier generation established.
Christianity: The stewardship tradition holds that human dominion (Genesis 1:28) is trusteeship rather than ownership — "the earth is the Lord's, and the fullness thereof" (Psalm 24:1). Pope Francis's Laudato Si' (2015) drew this into explicit contemporary application, and specifically addressed Indigenous peoples: "For them, land is not a commodity but rather a gift from God and from their ancestors... it is a sacred space with which they need to interact if they are to maintain their identity and values."
Islam: The Quranic concept of khalifa — humanity as steward on the earth (2:30) — combined with the principle that "the earth is a mosque" (a widely cited hadith) treats the natural world as both entrusted and sacred. Islamic law's hima tradition established protected reserves in which extraction was forbidden.
The honest counterweight: Land management involves genuine tradeoffs. Rural Utah communities have long argued that large monument designations restrict grazing, recreation access, and local economic development, and that decisions made in Washington about land their families have worked for generations should include their voices. That argument deserves a hearing; it is not a bad-faith position. What it does not resolve is the specific question of the sacred sites — because a grazing dispute and the destruction of a burial ground are not the same kind of loss, and cannot be traded against each other in the same currency.
Constitutional & legal framework
The July 2026 proclamations raise a legal question that has been debated for a century and never definitively resolved: whether the Antiquities Act, which grants presidents the power to create national monuments, also grants the power to substantially shrink them.
What happened: On July 13, 2026, the president signed two proclamations reducing Bears Ears National Monument from approximately 1.36 million acres to approximately 121,100 acres, and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument from approximately 1.87 million acres to approximately 181,500 acres — reductions exceeding 90 percent in both cases. Together, more than 3 million acres formerly under monument protection would be opened to oil, gas, and mineral exploration as well as expanded motorized recreation. The proclamations take effect September 11, 2026.
The Antiquities Act (1906): The statute authorizes the president to "declare by public proclamation historic landmarks, historic and prehistoric structures, and other objects of historic or scientific interest" located on federal land to be national monuments, and to reserve parcels of land for their protection — with the requirement that the reserved area "shall be confined to the smallest area compatible with the proper care and management of the objects to be protected." The Act was signed by Theodore Roosevelt and has been used by presidents of both parties; Roosevelt himself used it to protect the Grand Canyon.
The create-versus-shrink question: The statutory text grants a power to establish monuments. It says nothing about revoking or reducing them. A 1938 opinion by Attorney General Homer Cummings concluded that the president lacks authority to abolish a monument created by a predecessor. The Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976 (FLPMA) expressly reserved to Congress the authority to modify or revoke withdrawals of public land — language many scholars read as confirming that the president does not hold it. The administration's position relies on the "smallest area compatible" clause: if a predecessor reserved more land than necessary, a successor may correct the error. Critics respond that this reading would make every monument permanently revisable by each new president, which is the opposite of what a protective statute is for.
The unresolved precedent: The same two monuments were reduced in 2017 and restored in 2021. Litigation over the 2017 reductions was pending when the restorations mooted it, so no appellate court has ruled on the merits. The 2026 proclamations will almost certainly be challenged, and this time the question may actually be decided.
Tribal consultation and trust obligations: Bears Ears was designated in 2016 following a proposal from the Inter-Tribal Coalition, and its management structure gave the five nations a formal collaborative role — the first such arrangement in the monument system. The federal government holds a trust responsibility toward tribal nations, established through treaties, statutes, and a long line of Supreme Court decisions. Whether reduction of a monument created at tribal request, protecting sites tribes identified as sacred, satisfies that trust obligation is a distinct legal question from the Antiquities Act issue.
The First Amendment dimension: The Free Exercise Clause protects religious practice, but Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association (1988) held that the government's management of its own land does not violate free exercise even when it makes Indigenous religious practice impossible — a decision widely criticized and partially addressed by Congress through subsequent statutes, but never overruled.
See: Antiquities Act (54 U.S.C. §320301) → | Federal Land Policy and Management Act (1976) → | Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery (1988) →
Sources cited:BibleQuranConstitutionSupreme Court