Christmas cacophony carefully considered
By Robert E. Meyer (01/02/06)
Okay, this is the piece that should have been submitted last month, but it in no less relevant now. The Christmas season is now over. But the controversy surrounding it will linger, and at best be placed in abeyance for a season.
A recent poll in a local newspaper revealed that a majority of readers agreed that there is indeed an assault on Christmas—no surprise there. What I found troubling is the large minority of respondents who disagreed with that proposition. One wonders what would need to happen in order for them to be disturbed by the trend over the last several decades. I suspect their blindness is largely due to either indifference, or perhaps an outright hostility against Christianity.
From my youth, I recall people using various greetings around Christmas time. In Christmas cards, in recorded music aired on the radio, on printed and television advertisements, we saw greetings such as "Season's Greetings," “Happy Holidays,” or “Merry Christmas,” and others used nearly interchangeably, or on the basis of personal preference. What has changed is this: people are being instructed, even forbidden not to use certain greetings, such as “Merry Christmas,” which they might be otherwise inclined to do. While private enterprises have a right to insist on specific etiquettes by their employees, we must question the motive that mandates such changes to longstanding policies.
In trying to be inclusive and unoffending, they become demonstrably offending and exclusive in their new approach. We might also ask what public perceptions led to this policy change? With the majority of the U.S. still professing to be Christians, it is a wonder they never considered whether that majority would themselves be offended by the changes.
As a Christian, I am certainly not offended by people of other faiths offering me a greeting tailored to their particular beliefs. I look at the good intentions of the individual, rather than dissenting to the substance of the greeting. Several years ago, I called upon an ethnic restaurant in making a service visit during Christmas Eve Day. The proprietor was of Indian descent. I don’t know what his religious affiliation was, but he made me a meal to take out in honor of the special day that he knew that I reverenced. Now that was an act of true tolerance on his part. Rather than looking to make a stink about being marginalized by the majority, this man sought to be a blessing to those he came in contact with, whether or not they shared his specific beliefs.
I am familiar with the edicts of my faith that say that love endures all things, and that we should get along with all men as peacefully as possible. That for me defines what true tolerance is: graciously enduring those with whom you differ. It can never be some phony idea that a negative neutrality can be achieved by subordinating and suppressing Christianity. In fact nobody call really be neutral; that is like serving two masters.
We have often been misled to believe the demeaning of Christmas is somehow an attempt to appease or avoid offending religious minorities in a country rapidly sinking into subservience to pluralism and multiculturalism. While that may indeed be a factor, it is not largely religious minorities who are upset about public Christmas greetings or celebrations. Those of religious minorities tend to understand that if Christianity is attacked, there will be nobody left to speak for them if their own faith ends up in the cross-hairs.
Free exercise of religion isn't realized by an exclusion of all. This is an attempt at negative neutrality that publicly squelches the free exercise of religion, but does nothing constructive to ultimately avoid conflict. It amazes me how the First Amendment, which protected the public's free religious exercise from intrusions by the government, now is twisted so that the Establishment Clause is used to sanitize the public square from any mention of God.
By throwing out the recognition of Christmas, and everything that goes with it, you systematically throw out the baby with the bath water, or more precisely, throw out the baby and retain the bath water by declaring a "holiday" status without recognition of what is being reverenced and celebrated.
I think that in large, these bad vibrations come from those of a militant secularist persuasion, who tend to view free exercise of religion as a right to be free of religion altogether. Plurality is given as a smokescreen for a more sinister objective. I saw this vividly in a recent radio debate between a representative from a secularist organization in Michigan, and two familiar spokesmen representing Fundamentalist Protestantism and Orthodox Roman Catholicism respectively.
The secularist pointed out that Christmas nativities can’t be on government property, because the Constitution forbids favoring one religion over another—that such displays must have a secular purpose. I couldn’t help laughing about this perspective, because secularists often complain that the words “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance, placed there in 1956, reflect a modern imposition of theocracy upon America. The rationale used by the secularist, “The Lemon Test,” was of an even more modern perspective, the result of a 1971 Supreme Court decision, Lemon v. Kurtzman. Such jurisprudence has more recently been condemned by Justice Scalia as being far beyond the scope of the First Amendment, and is certainly foreign to the history of constitutional adjudication. It no more distills the true meaning of the religious clauses, then does the average personal interpretation of the seldom disabused metaphor, "wall of separation between church and state." The First Amendment has never required a negative or even position neutrality toward religion.
Hence, my contention is that the attack against Christmas, more than anything, is a by-product of the changing meaning of the First Amendment, traveling in a direction that favors secularism and the humanistic worldview over religion in general and Christianity specifically.
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Email: Robert E. Meyer
