0601 Christmas Wars
The Christmas wars are over – or are they? It does not take a gift of prophecy to predict that the attempts at re-wrapping, misrepresenting and attacking the Jesus of Christ-mas will continue and increase. Incredibly, predictably, the issue will be wrongly framed, as it already has been, in terms of various minority “rights,” church-state separation and commercialization.
For anyone who isn’t aware of it, Christmas was victimized this year as never before. In the name of appeasement toward a few small but vocal minorities, some major merchants, decided to hypocritically continue reaping the financial blessings of the holiday while catering to its secularist, liberal religionists and civil libertarian enemies. Suddenly mercantile landscapes were littered with “Season’s Greetings” cards, “winter” sales and green things labeled “holiday” trees that eerily resembled what had, for four hundred years and until ten months earlier, been celebrated as Christmas trees. Even Congress and the White House became involved.
Undoubtedly a good part of the population considers December’s controversy a misguided to-do over nothing being propagated by simple-minded right-wing Bible-thumpers. There may be some “thumping” going on, but the basis for it is far from simplistic or misguided
Since the social “liberations” of the 1960s, there have been ever-increasing efforts to unravel America’s spiritual and moral moorings. The wolves have attacked in sheeply guises by creating public images of oppressive religionists who dare to oppose misguided efforts at such things as marriage and family redefinition, court-sanctioned infanticide, atheistic science, or “progressive” public education. Activist courts have been their enforcers and liberal media their mouthpieces. One weapon of choice has been “Chicken Little Brigade” character attacks based on absolutely zero substance. Another has been daring perversions of First and Fourth Amendment rights, neither one of which have anything to do with protecting civil institutions from religion or carte blanche privacy rights.
Although progress of the error has been steady, it has been stymied by one monolithic barrier – overwhelming public devotion to religious roots and principles, Christianity being the foremost obstacle, but by no means the only target.
It should not be surprising therefore that Christmas should eventually become the center of controversy. It is a cultural icon, a deeply rooted element of American spiritual heritage and charitable values. For that reason, as others have noticed, its reach extends beyond being a quaint tradition only deserving of unconstitutionally closeted observance. As a matter of fact, Christmas is a prime example, not of governments or crusaders forcing religion on society, but of exactly the opposite; societies, century after century, celebrating and sustaining the most fundamental part of human existence, the life of the soul. It has never been a matter of forcing worship from without, but of cherishing what already exists within. Some people manage to suppress the witness of their inner life to the reality of the unseen. But that does not invalidate the truth. Nor does the personal discomfort brought on by their own choices warrant submission of the rest of the nation to their fallacy.
The core antagonists in the Christmas wars are not over-bearing fundamentalists or evil merchandisers, but whiny secularists and liberals who would rid the world of any spiritual expression in public. Christmas and Christians are only the distorted poster children. Once Christmas is neutered and Christians neutralized, the less visible works of the soul will be much easier subdued. It is a historical truism that one freedom sacrificed begets more sacrifice. As the Spirit of Christmas labors in us throughout the rest of the year, how much of His work will be fed to the wolves for the sake of wrong-headed peace-keeping or distorted minority “rights”?