Posted by
"Happy" Jake Greene on Monday, December 31, 2007 10:36:59 PM
As I write this, I am sitting in my parents’ basement in Nebraska as I visit during the Christmas holiday. While I’m here, I can reflect on how the Christmas season is treated both here and in the Nation’s Capital. The differences between the East Coast, and this, the middle of Middle America, are striking. A few weeks before Christmas day, I led a small group of fellow Choir members on a Christmas Caroling tour around a local shopping center. As we have done each of the last three years, we sang mainly religious carols with a spattering of secular songs for variety. Fortunately, in Stafford, Virginia, a very red county in a reasonably red state, this sort of thing doesn’t even get you thrown out of Borders or Targèt (Pronounced tar-ZHAY). In fact, we usually receive praise and thanks from customers and shopkeepers alike. I mention this because in this same shopping center, as of Christmas Eve, there was nary a decoration visible from the outside. Granted, Borders was caught playing “O Holy Night” (words and all, in fact) over the muzak, but that is the best you get.
By contrast, perched on top of a bank in Omaha is a brightly lit Nativity scene, and Christmas decorations, particularly Christian Christmas decorations abound in the heartland. It’s nice to visit a town where the people aren’t afraid to display that Christmas is a Christian holiday first and foremost, and – pagans’ views to the contrary aside – the holiday wouldn’t be celebrated at all if it weren’t for Christianity. The best we might get is New Years. Certainly Santa Claus (originally the Catholic Saint Nicholas, bishop of Myra, Asia Minor in the 4th Century) wouldn’t exist, and the holiday would probably get as much play as, say, the 4th of July. Maybe. The barbarians would have wiped out every hint of Roman culture (including their pagan religion) if it weren’t for Catholic monks to keep the Roman and Greek texts alive by copying manuscripts. But that’s another story for another time, back to Christmas, 2007.
Another nice thing I saw was a wax Nativity scene put up by a small town in western Iowa. The town owns and displays the statues and I’m unaware of any ACLU lawsuits to try to take them down.
What I find fascinating is that the whole reason the ACLU and other anti-Christian groups complain about religious displays is that other religions (non-Christians) will necessarily take offense. Never mind the obvious bigotry behind such a generalization (“Non-Christian religious people are over sensitive and easily offended”) it simply isn’t true. There was a story in Reuters a few weeks ago where the leaders of many Muslim, Jewish, and Sikh communities in England got together to say “stop the nonsense” about Christmas. The nonsense (actually, they used the word “insanity,” I believe) is not the display of religious symbols by the government, but the handwringing and lawsuits that the Anti-Christian Left brings about every year.
My father (who doesn’t lean quite as far right as I do) believes that at least some of the people responsible for the madness don’t realize what they are doing. More to the point, he mentioned that they don’t get that there may be a backlash against non-Christians if this doesn’t let up, and the judges and politicians don’t realize that. I disagreed. Not about the backlash, because it’s human nature, you get pushed enough, you eventually push back. I disagreed with the idea of the ignorance and lack of intent. I personally believe that the people who bring the lawsuits, the judges who rule in their favor, and the politicians who support and appoint those judges know exactly what they are doing. And I believe they are hoping and praying (to whatever false god they worship) that it happens so they can say “See, look, Christians are intolerant.” And you think the Left hates Christianity now…
HJG