Christmas God Chow

Christmas God Chow
by Garin Hovannisian

This Christmas, keep your fireplace lit, because odds are that some lofty lawyer has dressed up as Santa and will come down your chimney in his stead.

The glum prospect is not without its indicators. In every recent December, some capitol building or elementary school has become war territory for holiday ideologues and demagogues (and their lawyers). The Christian fogey decides that the United States is a colony of God while the atheist dimwit religiously declares a crusade against religion.

The very same colorful characters have come to life this year, too. When he noticed the prominent absence of Jesus in the annual Denver holiday parade, Laverne Gillespie protested, “We just wanted to show them the love of God and what Christmas is all about.” On the opposite end, when his town high school barred its band from playing Christmas songs, parent Mark Brownstein whined, “Holiday celebrations where Christian music is being sung make people feel different. And because it is such a majority, it makes the minority feel uncomfortable.”

Both these statements make me divinely nervous, because I know that whichever side wins—whether it is the religious or the secular fascists—liberty will lose.

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It doesn’t take as much analysis as it does perception to realize that the Christian elements are advocating public displays of religion on the flimsiest, most dangerous, of grounds—that Christianity, as America’s foundational and majority religion, deserves a spotlight, maybe even a throne.

A virtual tour of the website of Alliance Defense Fund, which is the legal command center of the Christian reactionaries, reveals that its motivations—and goals—are not rooted in the Constitution or in liberty, but in Christianity first. “The fact is, 96 percent of us celebrate Christmas. For a small minority to force their way and their will on the public majority is unconscionable,” said Greg Scott, an ADF lawyer. But Scott neglects to mention, and revealingly so, that the majority forcing its ways on the minority is equally unconscionable.

Like, for instance, when a Christian public school teacher preaches his faith to his students. That was precisely the case in the instance of a swim coach in Colorado who, according to ADF itself, “felt that it was important that his students learn more than just the butterfly and the backstroke. He believed that it was his duty to help prepare them for life as well, by sharing the Gospel with them.” ADF representative Robert Corry defended him. He notes, “The coach regularly shares his Christian faith with his young swimmers, and the government took offense and terminated his pool privileges. ... This case would not exist without ADF.”

So when the ADF and its 700 Christian lawyers stand up seemingly to protest a violation of religious freedom, recognize that they are in fact protesting an attack on their religion, not a higher (or derivative) political principle.

And they have every right and reason—it often seems more vital to defend one’s own than to defend grand and sloppy ideas that are usually devoid of meaning. But we the cheerleaders have equal right and reason to be skeptical. And skepticism is in order because in his 1991 book Character and Destiny: A Nation in Search of Its Soul, ADF founder D. James Kennedy writes:

"How much more forcefully can I say it? The time has come, and it is long overdue, when Christians and conservatives and all men and women who believe in the birthright of freedom must rise up and reclaim America for Jesus Christ … God forbid that we who were born into the blessings of a Christian America should let our patrimony slip like sand through our fingers and leave to our children the bleached bones of a godless secular society."

And there in that instant, everything becomes clear: the die-hard Christians who conjure up sacraments of “liberty” and “religious freedom” to make their public case, would want nothing more than to establish Christianity as the American religion. The lawyers who invoke the first amendment with such passion (because in this instance, a proper interpretation of the “establishment clause” stands to benefit them) would prefer ideally that it never existed. These Christians are, at core, religious statists and plain enemies of liberty.

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But on what seems to be the other side held by self-described “civil libertarians,” liberty is just as scarce and fascism even more manifest. Because in their advertised pursuit of a secular society, civil libertarians are in fact pursuing an atheist society. Their actions and deeds are aimed not at the separation of religion and state, but at the ultimate intolerance of religion by state.

At the forefront of this brigade hails the American Civil Liberties Union, which has gained a spoiled reputation by taking legal action against public institutions that sanction Christmas music or make displays of religion. So powerful and daunting is the ACLU that school districts, city councils, and local governments capitulate to the organization’s every demand, for fear of lawsuit.

In June, the ACLU charged that a small cross on the Los Angeles County seal was an “impermissible endorsement of Christianity by the county government.” And that was enough! The cross, perhaps the most descriptive symbol of Los Angeles’s historic spirit—from the city’s name to the vast Catholic influences on its creation—was erased. Incidentally, the central figurine of the county seal remains Pomona, the Roman goddess of gardens and fruit trees.

As one becomes more familiar with the practices of the ACLU, one discovers on his own that the group is not a universal guardian of civil liberty but rather a very particular foe of the Christian religion.

Real libertarians and indeed most normal people will tell you that the separation of church and state is just as important—and in the same way—as the separation of hedonism and state. The reason that theology and government should not mix is not that theology is an exceptionally licentious philosophy—but because it is a philosophy! The government should not endorse any personal belief—whether it is religion or postmodernism, church or anti-church.

But the ACLU is indeed saying the direct opposite. Government should have a philosophy—and the philosophy should be atheism. Thus, when any religion finds itself into the public domain for any reason whatever, the government should take positive action to crush it.

Yet what does this mean to liberty? It means that on a property that is endowed and maintained by my tax dollars, I can’t sing Christmas songs, can’t make a banner that says “Merry Christmas,” can’t be open with my religion. The successes of the ACLU and Scrooge civil libertarians are taking away our liberties, not expanding them.

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So where are the sensibly pious and the sensibly atheist? Why haven’t the true defenders of liberty suited up for this epic war?

To be painfully curt, because we have not seen that in this altogether religious struggle, the highest stakes ironically are political, not religious. Whether the Christians win or the atheists win, their power and prosperity in these United States will not change one way or the other. Neither religion will be heavily wounded.

But regardless of the outcome, liberty will be a loser. Regardless of the final result, government will have taken a stand for Christianity or against it.

This may be a war fought between religious fanatics but it is a war that will influence the safety of critical liberties in the future. The United States is in dire need of a unified third front that will expose the intentions of the Christian and anti-Christian radicals and guarantee that, ten Christmases from now, they might have those intentions still, as intentions only.

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