The Multi-Culti Christian Christmas Tag Team

I recently read Charles Freeman's The Closing of the Western Mind, a book about the development of the early Christian church, and was struck by the many levels of interplay between church and state once the Christians became the official state religion under Constantine. The move was meant to stabilize the Roman Empire by giving the growing Christian minority a stake in its success, but the emperors would find themselves drawn into the theological disputes that caused so much unrest among the Christians. Constantine, for example, became embroiled in the Arian controversy, in which Jesus was distinct from God and subordinate to him as the Father.

Constantine had to act if he was to achieve any stable support from the Christians, and so he took the initiative in calling a council of bishops at which he could enforce an agreed definition of Christian doctrine to be backed by the state. So was initiated the process by which church doctrine was decided in councils of bishops called under the auspices of the emperor; all church councils up to the eighth century conformed to this model. (p. 167)

Note here the interdependence of church and state. The state needs a unified Christian church or its Christian minority will continue causing instability. The church, as a state-sponsored religion, is the concern of the state and is, in some ways made subordinate to it. In fact, within a century, the precedent had already been established whereby the emperor would intervene to define and enforce orthodoxy. This interdependence existed on more than one level. For example, clergy of the state religion enjoyed tax-exempt status. But what the clergy espoused would determine whether they would be tax-exempt.

The recent debate over holiday greetings brought this back to mind. A recent Charles Krauthammer column has been widely cited in conservative circles as hitting the nail on the head as far as the controversy of "Happy Holidays!" vs. "Merry Christmas!" is concerned.

School districts in New Jersey and Florida ban Christmas carols. The mayor of Somerville, Mass., apologizes for "mistakenly" referring to the town's "holiday party" as a "Christmas party." The Broward and Fashion malls in South Florida put up a Hanukah menorah but no nativity scene. The manager of one of the malls explains: Hanukah commemorates a battle and not a religious event, though he hastens to add, "I really don't know a lot about it." He does not. Hanukah commemorates a miracle, and there is no event more "religious" than a miracle.

The attempts to de-Christianize Christmas are as absurd as they are relentless. The United States today is the most tolerant and diverse society in history. It celebrates all faiths with an open heart and open-mindedness that, compared to even the most advanced countries in Europe, are unique.

Yet more than 80 percent of Americans are Christian, and probably 95 percent of Americans celebrate Christmas. Christmas Day is an official federal holiday, the only day of the entire year when, for example, the Smithsonian museums are closed. Are we to pretend that Christmas is nothing but an orgy of commerce in celebration of . . . what? The winter solstice?

Krauthammer's overall point is a very good one: that Americans, who are mostly Christians, show a great deal of generosity towards members of other faiths and have done so since the birth of the nation:

America transcended the idea of mere toleration in 1790 in Washington's letter to the Newport synagogue, one of the lesser known glories of the Founding: "It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights."

But our founders separated church and state for good reason: to prevent the state from having a position on inarguable matters of faith, and thus a reason to persecute individual citizens. This separation, codified in what is known as the Establishment Clause of the Constitution, has been rightly raised as an objection to such things as teaching Christianity in our public schools. The Establishment Clause was also seen as a way to prevent the sort of mutual entanglement between government and religion described above for the Romans and written in blood today throughout the Moslem world.

But there is another belief system at work today that is, in many respects like a religion: multiculturalism. Since our government is involved in education, and some ideology must underly any curriculum, the government by necessity becomes entangled in whatever ideology that is. Given the dominance of the left in our academic culture, multiculturalism is, in effect, the state religion espoused by our public schools. According to Elan Journo, multiculturalism has, as its goal,

... not to teach about other cultures, but to promote--by means of distortions and half-truths--the notion that non-Western cultures are as good as, if not better than, Western culture. Far from “broadening” the curriculum, what multiculturalism seeks is to diminish the value of Western culture in the minds of students. But, given all the facts, the objective superiority of Western culture is apparent, so multiculturalists artificially elevate other cultures and depreciate the West.

Given the prominence that Christianity has had in shaping the West, is it really surprising that the multiculturalists misuse the Establishment Clause to silence carolers at public schools or reach out from academia to agitate against malls having Christmas displays? (Malls, being private property, are (and should be) exempt from the Establishment Clause.) As I have stated here before, these are attacks on religion as a proxy for Western civilization. Santa Claus and Christmas carols are not attempts to impose religious indoctrination, but are celebrations of a happy time that have become, fortunately, devoid of almost all their Christian content anyway. As Leonard Peikoff puts it:

Christmas as we celebrate it today is a 19th-century American invention. The freedom and prosperity of post-Civil War America created the happiest nation in history. The result was the desire to celebrate, to revel in the goods and pleasures of life on earth. Christmas (which was not a federal holiday until 1870) became the leading American outlet for this feeling.

Peikoff further points out the historical antecedents to the Christian holiday as well as the Christians' actual views about this-worldly pleasure.

Ancient Romans feasted and reveled during the festival of Saturnalia. Early Christians condemned these Roman celebrations -- they were waiting for the end of the world and had only scorn for earthly pleasures. By the fourth century, the pagans were worshipping the god of the sun on December 25, and the Christians came to a decision: if you can't stop 'em, join 'em. They claimed (contrary to known fact) that the date was Jesus' birthday, and usurped the solstice holiday for their Church.

Peikoff further explains that when the Americans invented Santa Claus, Christians denounced him because he implicitly rejected their ethos. "He did not denounce the rich and demand that they give everything to the poor.... Nor is Santa a champion of Christian mercy or unconditional love. On the contrary, he is for justice -- Santa gives only to good children, not to bad ones."

So, just as our country has both Greco-Roman and Judaeo-Christian intellectual roots, so does its most festive holiday. And this, of course, leads easily to confusion. The multiculturalists seize upon the weakly religious nature of the holiday so they can abuse the Establishment Clause and the legal system to cow Americans from celebrating the holiday. In the process, they have played into the hands of the religious right, who are now on the counterattack.

Just as the religious right has been claiming, contrary to the evidence, to have been decisive in Bush's recent electoral victory, they are now trying to commandeer the backlash against multiculturalism to make Christmas more religious in nature. This Paul Weyrich column is a good example. Weyrich starts off by recalling how as a parochial school sixth-grader in 1954, he and his classmates "made up hundreds of posters and we walked the streets asking merchants to display them saying 'Put Christ back into Christmas.'" and ends with this point.

Once those who hate God figure out that we are not going to roll over and play dead, they will find something else upon which to spend their time and resources. Don't you dare blame them for what is happening. Blame us. We have been much too tolerant. It is high time that we put Christ back into Christmas.

(I hate God no more than I do Santa Claus or any other imaginary character, but I digress....) Certainly, if a storekeeper wishes to display a sign saying, "Put Christ back into Christmas," he is free to do so. It is also certainly silly to say "Happy Holidays!" instead of "Merry Christmas!" for the cultural and historical reasons above. ("Happy Holidays" has also been used for the entire season of Thanksgiving to New Year's. In that use, I find it nonobjectionalble.) Notice that Weyrich's campaign to insist on saying "Merry Christmas" isn't just about protecting a cheerful, benevolent holiday from the nihilistic left. It's about making the holiday more religious: the very thing the multiculturalists pretended was the problem in the first place.

And furthermore, many on the religious right, seeing that multiculturalism is dominant in our schools, though the nation is Christian, see the backlash against the former as an opening to replace it with the latter. This will be easy to do with the lefties making the Establishment Clause into a charicature of itself.

So how do we keep Christmas, and protect its benevolent nature from the Christians, without causing the government to adopt a state religion outright? We can start by de-nationalizing the education industry. The Christians can teach their children that the Earth is flat for all I care, but everyone else's children will be free to learn what their parents see fit. And the multiculturalists, no longer having the captive audience created by the current government monopoly, will no longer be an entrenched majority. I suspect that, in fact, they will be unemployed until they learn something useful.

It is revealing that in the alliance between the secular and Christian conservatives, that crises such as this have not led to more and stronger calls for privatization of our schools. If you don't want your child taught religion by the state, take note.

-- CAV