There are two wars on Christmas: one public and baloney, one conceptual and terrifying. The first usually involves a group of “Bah! Humbug!” atheists trying to ruin everybody’s fun. Take this story from Santa Monica, California. For decades Palisades Park has displayed traditional religious tableaux at Christmas – the Virgin and Child, the three wise men, shepherds etc. But this year a lottery system was introduced to allow other religious groups to compete for spaces. Incredibly, a bunch of atheists won and were permitted to put up images of Satan, Jesus and Father Christmas, with the tagline: “37 million Americans know a myth when they see one… What myths do you see?” All good family fun.
Anti-social displays of bad taste are becoming common in the United States of America. The Catholic League’s Bill Donohue reports the following outrages: “In a South Carolina cancer center, a 67-year-old volunteer Santa was evicted because of the “different cultures and beliefs of the patients we care for” … In an elementary school in Stockton, California, poinsettias were banned but somehow snowmen were permitted; they justified their censorship by saying there was a Sikh temple in the city … A skeleton St. Nick was found hanging from a cross on the grounds of the Loudoun County Courthouse in Leesburg, Virginia.”
Getting over-excited about this sort of thing is, of course, exactly what the perpetrators want. The kind of tragic busybody who takes the time to write a letter protesting a display of poinsettias as an affront to multicultural tolerance probably spends Christmas horribly alone and is just desperate for attention. The best thing to do is to ignore them (as so many public officials have done). Or else, you could wait until they fall asleep after a marathon Battlestar Galatica session and then cover their entire front lawn in a pattern of poinsettias that reads, “Merry Christmas.”
More worrying is the insidious conversion of the religious festival of Christmas into a purely cultural phenomenon. Christians on both sides of the Atlantic have noticed with dismay that the commercial aspects of the season have been elevated (I saw crackers on sale in September) while its spiritual dimension has been squeezed out of the public sphere. I’ve said it before and I’ll write it again: the Founding Fathers never intended for faith to be excluded from public or political life. America might lack England’s established church or continental Europe’s pervasive Catholicism, but it was founded by Christians along Christian principles with the express intention of building a more Christian commonwealth. It is, at risk of sounding pedantic, a Christian nation in all but its absence of national church.
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