So the Bush White House endeavors to send out a nice, simple, inclusive holiday card. No different than millions of Americans of all religions send out.
And what happens? The extreme religious right is offended. Hëll, let’s not even call them the extreme religious right, because that makes it sound like extremist Jews, Muslims, Shintoists, etc., are all on the same page. Let’s call it what it is: Extremist Christians.
Here’s the fascinating thing about Extremists: They’re all the same. The philosophy of Extremist Christians is fundamentally no different than, say, that of Extremist Muslims. They believe in the same things: Exclusionary thinking. Intolerance. Ignoring fundamental lessons of their own faith when it runs afoul of extremist thinking. Where is the philosophy of Christian charity and understanding? Where is the writings in the Koran specifically forbidding the killing of innocents? They don’t serve the Extremist viewpoint of exclusion and intolerance and thus are cast aside.
They only differ in degrees of their actions. Some chop off the heads of helpless victims. Others blow up abortion clinics.
And the most consistent link is that trying to accommodate them never, ever works. That’s what Bush is discovering now, having staked his political star to the whims of the Extremists. It’s insufficient for Extremists that eighty percent of this country celebrates Christmas. Instead the ONLY acceptable greeting at this time of year is “Merry Christmas” rather than something inclusive such as “Happy holidays.” It’s insufficient for Extremists that there is already an implicit lack of separation of church and state around the holidays (the government shuts down for Christmas. You see the government shutting down for Yom Kippur? For Ramadan?) They want an EXplicit lack of separation by having the official greeting card from the White House be in celebration of Christmas only.
It’s never enough for Extremists. Never enough. Because the only thing that will really satisfy them–whether they’re walking bombs or just bombasts–is if everyone thinks just like them, believes just like them, and wants the same things as them. Which is never, ever going to happen, which is why they will never, ever be satisfied. Bush has been trying to appease them and hopefully even he is now realizing that it’s hopeless.
One is left shaking one’s head at a people who are claiming their holiday, their very beliefs, are being threatened. No. When Romans were throwing them to the lions, THEN their beliefs were being threatened. Here, in this country, their core philosophies have complete dominance over just about every aspect of life in this country.
And it’s not enough.
When dealing with Extremists and terrorists…it never is.
PAD
• 
Boy, nothing like some religious fervor to really stir up a debate with the nearest fence post! To everyone out there, best wishes for the coming holidays, no matter which one(s) you might celebrate. Now move along. I have some non-believers to burn at the stake.
Heavens to Merkatroid…there’s like 60 posts since Friday night, so I’m just going to say Happy Winter-een-mas to everyone and go watch the Simpsons.
>I believe marriage is between a man and a woman. I think evolution is a fraud. So what? You do not find me — or 99.9% of those you would lump into the “extremist Christian” category — forcing anyone to convert?
I’d be strongly tempted to say that someone’s unorthodox manner of thinking should not necessarily see them branded as ‘extremist’ as much as those who go to extreme lengths in either promoting, or forcing those views on others.
>I would be surprised to find out that 100% of the people who are upset at the perceived “war on Christmas” are all right-wingers. Hmm…anyone know of any polls?
I don’t. But, though I’ve been a left/centrist most of my life (I see good, and not necessarily mutually exclusive ideas on both sides of the political spectrum, albeit tending more to those on the left than on the right), I’m finding myself more and more in agreement with those who are getting annoyed at what is perceived as political correctness throttling the life out of what was once a simple, pleasant time of year. When politicians want to officially change a city’s annual centerpiece’s name from “Christmas tree” to “holiday tree” (mercifully, that one was shot down), and when shop staff are instructed not to wish people “Merry Christmas” for fear of offending someone, something’s gone off the rails.
When I go to Japan, no one worries about offending me by telling me to remove my shoes before I go into their home. And they shouldn’t. I know what to expect and I make sure my socks don’t have holes in them. End of problem. Ditto, if I were to move to a fundamentalist Middle Eastern country, I wouldn’t raise a fuss because they won’t let me open a liquor shop. It’s the way things are there and I accept it. So why, exactly, should I be expected to change the way I’ve (and just about ecerybody I know) done things for decades, just because people who didn’t like the way things were in their country have decided to take offense at the way things are here as well?
> To the Christians: Christmas, to the Jews: Hanukkah, to the Pagans: Yule. There’s also the African Kwanzaa festival.
I’ve got a few Jewish friends and I invariably wish them Happy Hannukkah. But I also wish them Merry Christmas, send them Christmas card, and even exchange Christmas presents with a couple of them. No one gets their noses out of joint about it. What’s the problem with the others (of whichever faith) out there that they get upset because someone wishes them well in the best way they know how?
>The benefit of “Happy Holidays” is that it’s all-encompassing,
Since I tend to take my holidays (month’s worth) usually either in the Spring or Fall, not really.
>when we’ve no historical reason to conclude that that was his birthday
In fact, I believe historians have proven that the year we’ve used as his birth is off by at least four years. And we’re going to say the day is exact?
Lis Riba has pointed out on her blog that this whole attack on “Happy Holidays” bears a strong resemblence to the (extremely funny, even for this non-jew who probably only got a fraction of the references/jokes) plot of the movie The Hebrew Hammer (possibly the first and only jewsplotation movie in the spirit of 70s blaxsplotation movies). Dialogue she quoted included this from Santa Claus:
SANTA CLAUS (CONT’D)
I was responsible for pushing the Happy
Holidays Ordinance, in which all Merry
Christmas signage was replaced by the
Trans-relgious and inoffensive phrase
‘Happy Holidays.’
Which is why upon examination of my
annual naughty and nice list it shocked
me to discover that my own son, Damian…
…the heir to the Red Suit, could be so
filled with hate.
Damian, when I learned of your ludicrous
scheme to wipe out Hanukkah, my first
reaction was one of disgust. Now, I’m
only filled with sadness and
disappointment. Disappointed that I
failed to teach you the true meaning of
Christmas. What do you have to say for
yourself?
kudos to Jerry C for pointing out that the real force behind the whole inclusive Happy Holidays thing is capitalism.
it’s not a bunch of left-wing loonies saying we have to be super careful that we never in any way chance offending anyone. it’s a bunch of businesses trying to maximize their profits.
Happy Holidays sells more than Merry Christmas sells. that’s the bottom line. so much of the political correctness stuff people complain about is driven purely by profit motive.
also, kudos to Bill for having impeccable taste
I’ve told people I want Morricone music at mine (the finale for Once Upon A Time In America would be a particularly nice send off)
-will
To sum up: Happy Festivus, for the rest of us.
“That dreidel now hangs on my Christmas tree as a treasured symbol of that evening we shared.”
That’s one of the more interesting images I’ve encountered this season.
Unfortunately, I then imagine kids taking off the dreidel, playing with it and saying:
“Oh dear, I got a shin, now we have to give back the tree”
Just for that, Will, you’re invited.
I’ll be the quiet guy in the coffin.
Okay, this ground has been pretty well covered, so I’ll just drop a couple of points and reiterations.
What is commonly known as the Christmas Tree has deeply pagan origins, along with mistletoe, wreaths, the “holiday colors” red and green, the yule log (duh) and other symbols of the season.
Nobody is trying to tell anybody that they cannot say “Merry Christmas” on their own time. The rare person who takes offense to a heartfelt expression of holiday wellwishing needs emotional help, and you can feel free to ignore them. HOWEVER, when you’re on the clock at Target, Wally World, or pretty much anyplace else you’re dealing with the public, you are acting as an official representative of that company, and if the company wishes to use an inclusive holiday greeting, either deal with it or get a different job.
I don’t think any of my fellow Christians here have actually claimed to be persecuted yet, and that’s good. There’s very little that makes me more sick. Walk down practically any public street in the Bible Belt, openly displaying a pentacle and see how people treat you. THEN get back to me on how “persecuted” you are…
RE: Narnia. I’ll probably go see the movie, if for no other reason than the visuals look incredible. I’m reading the series for the first time currently, and only in book 3 it’s starting to get a little bit preachy. I’ll see how far I get before it gets unreadably so.
Happy Holidays to all!
-Rex Hondo-
Whoops, forgot one in the heat of the moment.
If, like the guy who felt the need to call my home after reading my letter to the editor the other day, you ever end up using “Merry Christmas” or any other holiday greeting not as an actual greeting, but as some sort of epithet or just to “make a point,” you have in that moment done more to “attack” the spirit of the holidays than any retail establishment can.
-Rex Hondo-
***Posted by Jerry C at December 11, 2005 10:12 AM
It’s also dumb to go after stores over this. They are in the real world (rather then the conservatives make believe Earth C) . . . . ***
Leave Captain Carrot out of this!
🙂
Chris
Science, by definition, looks for natural laws.
Unless you’re in Kansas, which just changed the definition because they apparently know better than actual working scientists. Got it.
I’ll be the quiet guy in the coffin.
Given all your talk about zombies, I have my doubts. 🙂
TWL
Time for my 2 cents
Who gives a šhìŧ?
Let me tell you a little about myself. I am Bi-polar 31 years old and for a large part of my life I was homeless. My standard joke to anyone that asks is I struggle between Athesicm and Agnostic. Want to feel “Christian”? Go volunteer at a homeless shelter. Not just at this time of the year all year round.
I wish for just one paragraph I could write as well as PAD. Get my point across better. Either way we concern ourselves with stupid things that do nothing to help those around us.
The reason I mentioned the Bi-polar thing is sometimes I MUST go talk to people. There is a Baptist church right down the street. So for a few Sundays I went down there mainly to socialise. I kept good control, I didnt talk anyone to death. Yet each time the Pastor would ask if I would accept god in my life. I had to be honest. I said no and I was Excluded, it was subtle but there.
Here is another fun story want a free meal in Mobile Alabama? Better be ready to sit in a pew starving for a few hours being preached too before you get any food. I am willing to work for my supper and have many times. Why do I have to be converted as well?
Religion, Shop talk, sports, Politics hëll any group of people 3 or more becomes Exclusive. I try and look for ways in my life to be Inclusive.
We are all on a planet spinning thru the galaxy together. I have no clue what happens after death no one has come back to tell me. I do know for a fact that I can make my life what I want it to be. Somehow in my “travels” I didnt end up dead.
Currently I am on medication my wife makes sure I take it and we are raising a cute daughter. My life is wonderful, I am happy.
I guess my point is worrying about “happy holidays” or “merry christmas” seems like an intellectual game to distract from real life worries and concerns. It feels like spam news. Lets move on to better stuff. Find a homeless shelter help people there, devote time to someone in your family that is lonely.
“Yeah but maybe it’s all for the best. Easter hasn’t been co opted the way Christmas has been.”
Oh, I don’t know. I’m thinking of the episode of “Sportsnight” entitled “Sally,” where the Jewish Jeremy is trying to learn everything he can about Easter in order to impress the Christian family of the girl he’s dating. Puzzled about something, he runs his understanding of the entire history of the holiday past his boss, Isaac, who then asks, “So what’s your question?” And Jeremy says, “The bunny fits into this HOW?”
Long story short, I don’t recall colored eggs, chocolate rabbits or marshmallow Peeps playing a major role in the death and resurrection of Jesus. But then again, it’s not my religion, so I could have missed something.
PAD
HOWEVER, when you’re on the clock at Target, Wally World, or pretty much anyplace else you’re dealing with the public, you are acting as an official representative of that company, and if the company wishes to use an inclusive holiday greeting, either deal with it or get a different job.
Ahhh, but what if the situation were reversed? Would it be ok with you if your place of employment FORCED you to say “Merry Christmas” or demanded that you remove your pentacle?
John, you make some very good points. I hope the holidays treat you well. Take care.
Bill, an interesting question. I think any company would have a hard time FORCING somebody to say “Merry Christmas” or remove religious iconography of any kind, assuming it fit within a resonable dress code. That would definitely fall within the realm of religious harrassment or discrimination.
“Happy Holidays,” however, by it’s very all-inclusive nature, is patently non-discriminatory. True, there are SOME people who will probably be upset that they have to lump themselves in with those OTHER people by using an all-inclusive, but then, naked bigotry of any kind is usually a fireable offense in just about any workplace I can think of.
Hopefully I managed to effectively describe what I see as the distinction. It’s been a long night…
-Rex Hondo-
“Long story short, I don’t recall colored eggs, chocolate rabbits or marshmallow Peeps playing a major role in the death and resurrection of Jesus. But then again, it’s not my religion, so I could have missed something.”
Who or what do you think moved the rock? The rabbits hatched from the eggs (being chocolate, they could only come from eggs), and placed the peeps under the rock. Then, they used the microwave beams attached to their forheads to inflate the peeps (c’mon, you ALL know what I’m talking about) to roll the rock aside. Finally, they ate the remnants of the peeps to cover up the evidence (30-40 AD CSI may have been primitive by today’s standards, but even they couldn’t have missed that).
Which of course, today translates into coloring eggs, hunting for them in your uncle’s backyard, getting into a peep fight (think snowball fight, until someone puts an eye out), all culminating in the “hey, what would happen if we put a peep in the microwave?” event.
What, that’s not Easter?
Alan Coil wrote
NIVEK:
That’s Knuckledrag, Iowa. Leave Oklahoma out of this.
Thanks.. we have enough hard time with the idiots here already… Oklahoma does not at all need to be dragged into anything. We’re capable of dragging ourselves into stupidity, thankyouverymuch.
Christ-Mass is very interesting, I believe… since the majority of the traditions seem to be, as stated above, usurped from other religions. The Yule Log, the Christmas Tree, the ritual trimming of the cat hair… though for some reason, i can’t find anyone else who does this.
Just remember folks, the true meaning of the season is to give retailers a boost in sales to make their year goals. Anyone who tells you otherwise isn’t a true American.
– Travis
“Long story short, I don’t recall colored eggs, chocolate rabbits or marshmallow Peeps playing a major role in the death and resurrection of Jesus. But then again, it’s not my religion, so I could have missed something.”
Reminds me of the last ep of Farscape.
Scorpius: “I believe trust, like religion is an individual choice. Either you have faith, and bunnies are irrelevant, or you don’t. In which case, chocolate!”
Rex, I think you express it fine. It also points out the method behind the madness of the “war on Christmas” thing. If Target, Wal-Mart, et al insist on having their people say “Happy Holidays” so as not to offend paying customers, then having a bunch of them suddenly taking offense to it will force them to change.
Here’s my solution. Anybody can wish anyone any freaking courtesy they wish, as long as it’s genuine and not vulger. In return, the well wishee should reply in wahtever form THEY wish. It would go something like this:
“Merry Christmas!
“And a happy Solstice right back at you!”
And everyone can safely write off anyone who tries to make to big a deal out of it as a crank. No edicts from the corporate offices, no reasons to boycott or waste printing ink on a non-issue. Anyway, that’s how it would be in MY world. Also, everyone has a rocket launcher, just to keep things interesting.
Long story short, I don’t recall colored eggs, chocolate rabbits or marshmallow Peeps playing a major role in the death and resurrection of Jesus.
True. There’s no doubt been SOME co-opting but nowhere near the degree that Christmas has. And anyway, while coloring eggs has only the vaguest link to the holiday, it’s a nice family ritual. We have too few of those these days.
(I know that it is commonly claimed that the Easter Egg is another pagan ritual grabbed by the Church but there may be other explanations as well–eggs were considered meat and thereby banned for Lent. Hardboiling them would preserve them during that time. It’s easy to imagine how this could have morphed into the the whole Easter Egg hunt game.).
http://www.christianbooksonline.net/
This is one of the banner ads that comes up on your site. Merry CHRISTmas to everyone! BTW, PAD, I met Herr Hauman at PhilCon this weekend.
spring + eggs + rabbits = fertility festival
i’m gonna have to go with the argument that Easter is another pagan holiday that’s been co-opted by Christianity.
Long story short, I don’t recall colored eggs, chocolate rabbits or marshmallow Peeps playing a major role in the death and resurrection of Jesus. But then again, it’s not my religion, so I could have missed something.
PAD
What do you think the crowd was eating? 😉
A brief “holidays” history lesson.
On two separate occasions, I’ve written articles about the origins of Christmas, Chanukah and Kwanzaa for the newspaper I write for. Here is an excerpt, focusing on how various Christmas traditions originated (since this thread is focused primarily on that holiday).
(And, for the record, the word “holiday” is derived from “holy day.”)
The holiday of Christmas can be traced to the Roman holiday of Saturnalia, a week-long carnival which culminated with the winter solstice on Dec. 25. The actual date (and even year) of Jesus’ birth remains unknown, though most scholars believe he was born between 6 B.C.E. and 4 B.C.E.
Not all Christian denominations celebrate Christmas on December 25, however. Members of Eastern Orthodox churches celebrate it Jan. 6, the feast of the Epiphany, when the three wise men were believed to have visited the baby Jesus.
As to Santa Claus, the symbol of the commercial Christmas, according to one legend, he evolved from St. Nicholas, a 4th century Bishop of Myra in Asia Minor who performed anonymous acts of kindness.
In his 1975 book “St. Nicholas, Life and Legend,” author Martin Ebon relates the popular story that before Nicholas became a priest, he anonymously threw bags of gold through the window of a now penniless, widowed nobleman who feared he would have to sell his teenage daughters into either slavery or prostitution.
B.A. Robinson, writing on the Internet site http://www.religioustolerance.org, disputes that theory, however. Robinson states that according to religious historians, there is no evidence to indicate that a man called St. Nicholas ever existed. Instead, he may have been a recycled Pagan god. Robinson said Nicholas seems to have been created out of legends attributed to the Greek god Poseidon, the Roman god Neptune, and the Teutonic god Hold Nickar.
St. Nicholas also shares similarities with the “The Grandmother” or “Befana” from Italy, who was said to have filled children’s stockings with gifts.
Robinson also said that by the 19th century, Nicholas had been superseded in much of Europe by Christkindlein, the Christ child, who delivered gifts in secret to the children. He was accompanied by a dwarf-like helper called Pelznickel (a.k.a. Belsnickle). Eventually, all three were combined into the image we now know as Santa Claus. “Christkindlein” became Kriss Kringle.
As to the name “Santa Claus”, or “Sinta Claes”, some say it’s Dutch in origin; but Ebon cites Dr. Charles W. Jones’ article in the Oct. 1954 issue of the New York Historical Society Quarterly, as stating that there is no reference to Santa Claus during the Dutch rule of now New York. The first such reference, he says, comes in 1773, with an item in the Rivington’s Gazetteer.
Jones’ argument, Ebon says, is that St. Nicholas was an anti British symbol adopted by the colonists known as the Sons of St. Nicholas, and not meant to be taken seriously.
Many people trace the modern image of Santa Claus, including his appearance, his reindeer and his sleigh, to the works of Thomas Nast, a German born illustrator for “Harper’s Weekly,” who illustrated Christmas issues of the magazine between the 1860s and the 1890s; and Haddon Sundblom, an illustrator for The Coca-Cola company who drew a series of Santa images in their Christmas advertisements between 1931 and 1964. However, Ebon also names Washington Irving and Clement Clark Moore with helping to create the modern image of Santa Claus.
In 1809, Irving wrote a satirical history of New York “from The Beginning of the World To the End of The Dutch Dynasty”, which contained 25 references to St. Nicholas. In 1822, Moore, a Hebrew scholar is credited with writing “A Visit From St. Nicholas,” the poem that begins with “‘Twas the night before Christmas.” Robinson said, however, that some have attributed the poem to a contemporary of Moore’s named Henry Livingston, Jr.
Another Christmas tradition involves the decoration of a tree, under which presents sit. According to Tristram P. Coffin, in his 1973 volume, “The Book of Christmas Folklore”, one legend states that the custom of decorating trees began in 8th century Germany, when St. Bonifice dedicated a fir tree to Jesus, to rebut the sacred oak of Odin. The most popular legend, however, states that the first tree was cut down by Martin Luther and decorated with candles to imitate the “starry skies of Bethlehem.”
In Europe, the first Christmas Tree was raised in Strassburg in 1604. Princess Helen of Mecklenburg then brought the custom to France in 1837. It subsequently came to England in 1844; and to the U.S. with German immigrants. However, it didn’t gain national recognition until President Pierce decorated the White House with a Christmas tree in 1856.
Hope that wasn’t too long.
By the way, in case the ultra-right wing “Christians” haven’t noticed, the three holidays of Christmas, Chanukah and Kwanzaa are all celebrated in December (though I suppose Chanukah might occasionally fall in November). Sounds like a good argument for saying “happy holidays”. You know, since there’s more than one during this time of year. And that’s not even including Thanksgiving (when the “holiday season” traditionally begins), and New Year’s.
For the record, however, I have no problem saying Merry Christmas.
So, Feliz Navidad to all who celebrate.
Rick
This is why one day the government will destroy ALL religion.
They’ll just one day going to have too much of the B.S. and get rid off them for being “anti-american” or “anti-government”.
for the record, most biblical scholars seem to agree that that passage from Jeremiah 10:2-4 is talking about making wooden idols, not decorated trees.
i’m gonna have to go with the argument that Easter is another pagan holiday that’s been co-opted by Christianity.
Since Easter is tied to Passover does that mean that passover is also a pagan holiday? Unlike Christmas, which could have fallen on any day, Easter is very specifically tied to the Jewsish Holiday (JEsus and followers all being Jewish.) So if it falls on a Pagan day it would seem to be a happy coincidence.
All this conversation on the topic and virtually nothing about one of the biggest battlegrounds: the schools. Anyone care to defend one side or the other? How about the unenviable task of defending those schools that allow nods to Hanukkah and Kwanzaa, but not Christmas, even when the vast majority of the students are indeed the latter? Or the whitewashing of any religious references from some of our schools?
And while it’s easy for someone like PAD to throw his hands up and say “All religious extremists are the same,” it’s exactly this sort of relativism that has made liberalism largely irrelevant in fighting the war on terror. A school of thought that cannot distinguish between a global movement of violence that regularly targets civilians (even ones of their own faith) and one whose “offenses” center largely on what they say will never be able to keep its focus on the task at hand, forever letting itself be thrown off the scent by antiquated red herrings like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell.
They are the same in one key respect: they tend to have way more children than non-extermists. Especially the Muslims. Like it or not, that’s your battleground for the future, because there’s literally no future in liberal European-model, 1.3 kids per couple, abortion more-or-less on-demand societies.
-Dave OConnell
Bill, Easter isn’t quite as tied to Passover as one might think. Many years, in fact, Easter comes BEFORE Passover (as with this past year–Easter fell on March 27 while Passover didn’t begin until April 24), as the actual date of Easter is based on a near-arcane formula which largely boils down to its being the first Sunday following the first full moon following the Spring Equinox (whoo!). This means the date for Easter can fall as early as March 23 (but only if the Spring Equinox falls on the 20th and the full moon occurs the 21st, but I believe that is not allowed to be a Saturday; in fact, Easter 2008 will fall on March 23–the last time it fell on that date was back in 1913), but generally no later than April 25 (the last time for that date was in 1943). Passover, on the other hand, is a “fixed” date, at least, by the Jewish calendar–as that calendar is a lunar-based one, it’s shorter than the standard calendar in use in most Western countries, and so any fixed date on the Jewish calendar is not so by the Gregorian calendar; by the Jewish calendar, Passover begins on the 15th day of Nissan every year, regardless of when Easter falls. (For the record, it should be noted that the dates for Easter as listed above only apply to Roman Catholic and Protestant churches and adherents. The Eastern Orthodox Easter holiday may fall as late as the end of May, but is almost always after the Western Churches’ holiday–and, incidentally, so is the Eastern Orthodox Christmas relative to the standard December 25.) More on the history of the determination of when Easter falls, check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computus.
I’m rather amazed, though, that I haven’t heard any complaints about “Chrismukkah” (that term seems to have become quite popular this year, courtesy of “The O.C.”). I guess Bill O’Reilly, John Gibson and the “good” Christian hypocrites don’t watch anything that doesn’t appear on Fox News Channel.
“it’s exactly this sort of relativism that has made liberalism largely irrelevant in fighting the war on terror.”
I take it the contrary assumption would then be that conservatism is relevant in fighting th war on terror? So relevant that we’re engaged in a battle that is not against terrorists, but Iraqi insurgents. So relevant that, 4 years after 9/11, the only action the conservative government received high marks from the 9/11 commission were to add staff to the Canadian border…protecting us from those pesky Canadian terrorists. So relevant that the conservative government, after seeing the need for quick, decisive action in the wake of 9/11, stayed on vacation and failed to act quickly or decisevely during this countries greatest natural disaster, ever.
So, yeah, I can see how pointing out that a liberal acknowledgement that extremist thinking is the same wherever it occurs, and is generally a bad thing (even if a particular movement does not embrace wanton acts of destruction) makes a political bent irrelevant in fighting a war on another ideal. (I’d do the “eyerolling” thing, but I don’t know what the smiley symbol is for that…)
Meanwhile, over at Democratic Underground, they have a screenshot of O’Reilly using the term “recommended holiday gifts” instead of “recommended Christmas gifts”
http://www.democraticunderground.com/top10/05/225.html
Long story short, I don’t recall colored eggs, chocolate rabbits or marshmallow Peeps playing a major role in the death and resurrection of Jesus. But then again, it’s not my religion, so I could have missed something.
Some stand-up comic had a great bit about that some years ago. “And Jesus said, ‘Go, and gather thine eggs.’ And so went the rabbit…”
How about the unenviable task of defending those schools that allow nods to Hanukkah and Kwanzaa, but not Christmas, even when the vast majority of the students are indeed the latter?
Can you name even one such school? I’ve taught at three and attended half a dozen in my time, and not once have I heard of anything of the sort happening in my schools or in neighboring ones. Maybe I’m just fortunate, but I suspect it’s more likely that the propaganda has gotten ahead of the reality here.
Or the whitewashing of any religious references from some of our schools?
That one’s a touchy issue, and I can readily see both sides of it. On the one hand, it seems very odd to keep December a religion-free month on a school campus, because virtually everyone is celebrating SOMETHING that month.
On the other hand, I suspect by the phrasing of your question that you don’t have much sense of what it’s like to be in the minority everywhere you go, and the sort of casual pressure to conform (usually unintentional) that goes along with it. As an atheist, I do, and there are times I’ve found it uncomfortable, to say the least. (Going to High Catholic weddings is … an experience.)
The vicious circle you get into here is where it ends. If you’re going to acknowledge Christmas, shouldn’t Chanukah and Kwanzaa also get recognized? How about Diwali? The Winter Solstice? Zeusmas (a holiday a friend and I invented in college)? Festivus? (Okay, maybe not that last…) And, only half tongue-in-cheek, what *about* the atheists?
If you say “there must be X number of people who celebrate that holiday for us to recognize it,” then you’re telling any member of a faith that falls short of that message that their beliefs don’t count.
So I don’t know that I’m defending the schools that “whitewash” religious references away, as you put it, but I certainly understand and empathize with the conundrum they’re in. That’s part of diversity.
TWL
allow me to modify my statement. i think it’s fair to suppose that specific Easter traditions (rather than the very notion of the holiday itself) were co-opted from pagans.
this is just my pet theory, but at one point i found myself wondering what the heck eggs and rabbits have to do with the resurrection of Christ.
then it hit me that the common thread between the two was fertility, and as it’s a spring holiday that strengthens the connection in my mind.
i speculate that when Christianity moved into certain areas they might already have had their own celebration of easter. this, coincidentally happened around the same time as a pagan spring festival.
in the process of converting people, they incorporated indiginous traditions and symbols.
i think it’s just another example of how adaptable Christianity is. this is one of the religion’s primary strengths.
-will
There could well be a smarter political angle to this than I’d thought. Like a knee that can’t help but jerk, some Democrats immediately jump at the bait. http://www.washingtongop.net/images/DemocratChristianHaters.jpg has a screen shot of some items for sale on the Washington State Democratic Party website, including a Fish symbol with a tilted cross eye, filled in with flames and the word “hypocrite”.
Someone sane must have seen it and wrote them a letter using the words “Hey” “Ðûmbáššëš” and “What the hëll were you thinking” because they took it down but not before conservative bloggers got the word out.
WHY the hëll are we talking about EASTER?
ALL that is on the news is “keep the Christ in christmas!” Happy Hoildays covers all religious and none religious people alike, however we’re not renaming the hoilday, so X-mas will still be X-mas.
I think the REAL PROBLEM is they were outdone but that “I”M A GOD WARRIOR” … lol
Peter, this was your best blog entry in a long time.
I posted a link to this blog entry at http://www.nitcentral.com, and my friend and fellow moderator Mike Cheyne posted this insightful bit in response, at http://64.33.77.146/discus/messages/6572/20318.html?MondayOctober1420020837pm#POST309821:
Another classic example of no news being turned into news.
What did President Bush put on his Christmas card last year?
Nothing that used the word “Christmas.”
How about in 2003?
The same.
2002?
The same.
2001?
The same.
What did President Clinton put on all his Christmas cards from 1993 to 2000?
Nothing that mentioned Christmas.
So if you want to get all hot and bothered by it, you’re about a decade or so late.
——————————–
And in a subsequent post, Mike mentioned:
(The other weird thing about it all is that people seem to forget that Bush included a Bible verse on his card. And yet, the extremists say he’s not a “real” Christian.)
Iowa Jim: I think evolution is a fraud.
Luigi Novi: Can you cite scientific reasons for this, Jim? And if you don’t want to address this on this particular board because it’s off-topic, feel free to do so at the Evolution vs. Creationism boards in the Political Musings section of Nitcentral, at: http://64.33.77.146/discus/messages/2310/25987.html?1134075078.
Iowa Jim: You are confusing some traditions that still linger (such as government closing down for Christmas but not Yom Kipur) with actual philosophy. A very strong case can be made that Christian philosophy has not had complete dominance for at least the last 50 years. I am not claiming it has disappeared, but it is not dominant.
Luigi Novi: Of course it’s dominant. Our currency doesn’t say “In Jehovah We Trust.” President’s are not sworn in on a copy of the Torah. In courtrooms, witnesses are not asked to tell the truth “So help me Allah.” Congress does not open sessions with a prayer initiated by a tax-paid Wiccan priestess. Government doesn’t shut down on the Hindu Festival of Lights.
Iowa Jim: The most crucial example is evolution. This is more than a scientific theory. It is the foundation of a worldview that is radically different than Christian philosophy. This theory has held dominance in more than just biology classes. It influences social policies, educational philosophy, judicial practices, and even moral questions such as gay marriage and abortion.
Luigi Novi: Evolution is not a foundation of any worldview. It is a scientific principle in which organisms adapt to their environment through natural selection. Even if someone were to use as a basis for a worldview, it does not have any bearing on its veridical worth. Empirical and scientific facts are morally neutral. Those who use them are not.
And in what way does it influence these things you say it does, Jim?
Iowa Jim: Yes, there are some do would say they believe God created the earth, but when you look at the other areas, you would find their philosophy is built on a foundation of evolutionary thought.
Luigi Novi: Evolution has nothing to do with how the Earth was created. That is an area covered by cosmology, astronomy and/or geology. Not evolution.
Iowa Jim: Most on this thought would consider evolution to be a proven fact, and anyone who disagrees is as ignorant as those who still claim the earth is flat.
Luigi Novi: Evolution is a scientific fact. That in itself is a statement of fact. A fact is something that has been confirmed to such a degree that it is reasonable to offer provisional agreement. Evolution has been thus confirmed through the Scientific Method and the Peer Review Process. Your position, on the other hand, has not.
And yes, Jim, you are ignorant if you draw conclusions on a subject without having studied it in a sincere and good faith matter, and do so solely on an a priori basis. That you have done this with creationism is clear. The beauty of this is that you don’t have to be ignorant of it if you don’t want to. You can crack open a book on the subject—a real one, mind you, not one written on a priori basis by creationists who do not understand how the Scientific Method works—and read it, and learn about it.
Iowa Jim: So is it “intollerant” by definition if I say evolution is a fraud?
Luigi Novi: Possibly. It is certainly a statement made without any rational basis. In order to show fraud, you have to know that those who advocate it are not only incorrect, but knowingly so. Obviously, you have no way to show this, and you later stated that it wasn’t fraud. So why use a word apart from its actual definition? Isn’t making this accusation without any proof itself intoerlant? And isn’t that use of the word “fraudulent”?
Iowa Jim: Am I “intollerant” simply because I want to argue that gay marriage harms society — particularly when I argue not based on the Bible saying it is wrong but based on history and observation of human nature?
Luigi Novi: Again, if you do so on an a priori basis, and without supplying a rational, reasoned, internally consistent argument or evidence for it that is based on facts, then yes, you’re being intolerant. What history or observation are you referring to? What society has been harmed by gay marriage? And what about gay married couples who exist today? In what way have they harmed society?
Peter David: No. Just ignorant of science…and spelling.
Luigi Novi: C’mon, Peter, that’s a cheap shot. So he misspelled a word. So what? I try to proofread my posts, and I still make errors of spelling or grammar. Doesn’t everyone? If anything, I think vocabulary is more important than spelling.
Craig J. Ries: Although Tolkien was, from what I’ve read, far more forthright in saying his stories weren’t, specifically with regards to WWII.
Luigi Novi: How could it be, when he began writing material that led to it during WWI? Even when it he began writing it as a sequel to The Hobbit, it was only 1937.
Craig J. Ries: Why is it acceptable for copies of Chronicles of Narnia to be read by children, but not something like Harry Potter?
Luigi Novi: Where has anyone taken this position?
Iowa Jim: Evolution is based on assumptions that cannot be proved.
Luigi Novi: No. Evolution is not based on assumptions at all. It is based on same things that any other scientific principle is based on: testable and confirmed observations and facts.
Iowa Jim: The biggest assumption is that God does not play an active role in the universe.
Luigi Novi: Evolution makes no such assumption about God. It is entirely neutral on the subject. Evolution only deals with how organisms adapt to their environment. If you are perceived as being intolerant or ignorant, Jim, it is statements you make like this. Can you cite a single scientific text that claims this? If not, and you continue to claim, it then, yes, you are ignorant.
Iowa Jim: Guess it is impossible for someone to have actually studied these issues and come to a different conclusion.
Luigi Novi: Except that you and I both know that you have not “studied” the issue. If you have, then why have you made claims about evolution that no biologist does? If you’ve “studied” it, then why do you claim it is based on presumptions? Why do you claim that it takes a position on God, when in fact it does not? Why do you imply that it deals with the creation of the Earth, when it does not? Why do you repeat common creationist fallacies and Straw Man arguments, like the notion that evolution concerns how life first began?
Yeah, you’ve studied it. From your statements, it’s obviously that you’ve “studied” it solely from creationist sources, which you are parroting, which is akin to “studying marijuana by watching Reefer Madness, or studying Judaism by reading Mein Kampf. And that doesn’t count. If there are actually was a text in there somewhere that was not written a priori, then it would seem that you certainly read it that way. Can you cite these works that you’ve read, Jim?
Iowa Jim: I am rather tired of Christians being seen as the neo-nazis out to eradicate those who disagree.
Luigi Novi: Some Christians are. It is those we criticize. Not those who are not. So what difference does that make to you if you claim not to be one of them?
Iowa Jim: It is a central creed of naturalistic evolution that things MUST have a natural origin and explanation.
Luigi Novi: As Bill Mulligan pointed out, scientific principles like evolution do not have “creeds.” Science does, however, have a methodology, and that methodology requires that phenomena be observed, documented, tested, etc. The alternative to natural explanation would be supernatural explanations, which are not testable by this methodology. That doesn’t make it a “creed.” To argue that any science has “creeds” is silly. When we present DNA evidence in court to prove a crime was committed a given suspect, you are employing that methodology. That doesn’t mean that a “central creed” is being cited in court. Only a methodology.
Iowa Jim: My assertion is that naturalistic evolution does not measure up. I have studied the evidence that life itself came from inanimate matter, and it is not convincing.
Luigi Novi: Evolution has nothing to do with the creation of life. That’s abiogenesis, not evolution.
Iowa Jim: You have just made my point. By definition, if you insist the universe has a *natural* origin and explanation, you have made a philosophical statement. You have said it is at least possible (if not probable) for the universe to exist without there being a “god” of any kind.
Luigi Novi: Wrong. All science does it observe the universe, and report. It doesn’t say that there is no god, only that it doesn’t see any evidence of one. If and when that changes, then it will incorporate that into its base of knowledge. That isn’t a philosophy. It’s just a statement of fact. Again, if I describe how DNA works, and you ask me where God is in it, and I say that there is no evidence of a god in DNA, that’s a philosophy. It’s a statement of observation. The reason your description doesn’t work is because it presumes the existence of a god at the outset. You don’t do that in science, because science presumes nothing. You have to establish a god first. At present, there is no scientific evidence for the existence of gods or any other supernatural entities, and any such discussion of them as a matter of “presumption” is non-scientific.
Iowa Jim: To put it differently, your statement assumes the universe is a closed system.
Luigi Novi: No it does not. It states that we don’t know the nature of anything beyond it. Not that it’s closed.
Tim Lynch: Some stand-up comic had a great bit about that some years ago. “And Jesus said, ‘Go, and gather thine eggs.’ And so went the rabbit…”
Luigi Novi: Jon Stewart and Dom Irrera’s bits on this were priceless.
I posted a link to this blog entry at http://www.nitcentral.com, and my friend and fellow moderator Mike Cheyne posted this insightful bit in response
Wow. That’s amazing. Thanks Luigi. This should be sent out to anyone who had anything to say about this non-issue. You know, I was wondering why nobody was bothering to compare this Chirstmas letter to the previous ones…
// spring + eggs + rabbits = fertility festival
i’m gonna have to go with the argument that Easter is another pagan holiday that’s been co-opted by Christianity. //
Unfortunatly those annoying Christians didn’t co-op the best part of those old fertility festivals, yes, of course I’m referring to naked women dancing in the moonlight.
// The vicious circle you get into here is where it ends. If you’re going to acknowledge Christmas, shouldn’t Chanukah and Kwanzaa also get recognized? How about Diwali? The Winter Solstice? Zeusmas (a holiday a friend and I invented in college)? Festivus? (Okay, maybe not that last…) //
Don’t laugh but every year more and more people are having Festivus celebrations, yes, they’re probably doing it as a gag but it doesn’t take much for a joke to become a tradition, and once it becomes a tradition the origins no longer matter as much as the need to follow the tradition.
Sadie Hawkins day started out as a gag in a popular comic strip and lots of high schools still have a Sadie Hawkens day dance even though the comic stip, (and it’s creator) are long gone, the origins of the gag being largly unknown to those who participate in the tradition.
Someone else may have mentioned this (I haven’t had time to read through all the posts), but in regards to Easter and eggs, and so forth, I offer the following:
The Teutonic Goddess of Fertility was Eastre, whose symbol was the egg. Eastre was also the name of a spring festival. Just as the early Christian church incorporated aspects of “pagan” winter festivals into Christmas, and the birth of Jesus, so to did they incorporate spring festivals of rebirth into the resurrection.
But apparently, she wasn’t the only influence. Joseph Cambell writes, in “Masks of God: Occidental Mythology” (pg. 138) (about both Passover and Easter), “It is highly significant that the later festival of the Passover, which… was first celebrated in 621 b.c. in commemoration of the Exodus, occurs on the date of the annual ressurection of Adonis, which in the Christian cult became Easter.”
Campbell goes on to say that in both the “pagan” and Christian cults the resurrection is that of a god, while in the Jewish tradition, it was of the chosen people as a whole. As an illustration, he says that during the Hagadah of Passover, the father of a household reads aloud a meditition: “in every generation, one ought to regard himself as though he had personally come out of Egypt.”
Later in the same book, Campbell addresses how and why Easter came to be celebrated on the first Sunday following the first full moon on or after the vernal equinox, but I’m too tired to go into details.
I’m also pretty sure Campbell addresses Eastre the goddess _somewhere_, but offhand, don’t know which particular book that might be in.
Rick
P.S. It’s been traditional throughout history for conquering cultures to destroy or assimilate the gods of those they’ve subjugated. Read, for example, “The Dictionary of Angels” for a list of “angels” and “demons” that had once been gods in their own right until both Jews and Christians told their followers that, nope, this “god” is either an angel who works for my God, or a demon, who opposes my God (the designation determined primarily by how “good” the particular entity was).
Anyway, if we’re ever conqurered, we can expect our God- the T.V.- to be destroyed by whomever does the conquering.
Also, let us not forget Kurisumasu, the entirely secular festival celebrated in Japan with trees, gifts, Santa Clause, and a fair amount of sake to go around. Nary a religious reference to be found, and God hasn’t sent the mother of all tsunami their way, nor has their society imploded on it’s own.
Merry Christmaramachannukwanzolstice!
-Rex Hondo-
That is a very well thought out post Luigi. Remind me not to get into an argument with you anytime soon.
Here is the card my dad sends me once a year
http://www.funnypart.com/funny_pictures/card.shtml
Cynical and to the point. If the link doesnt work copy paste.
A 12 page article from the NY times about the seperation of church and state
A Church-State Solution
•
A Church-State Solution
By NOAH FELDMAN
Published: July 3, 2005
I. THE EXPERIMENT
For roughly 1,400 years, from the time the Roman Empire became Christian to the American Revolution, the question of church and state in the West always began with a simple assumption: the official religion of the state was the religion of its ruler. Sometimes the king fought the church for control of religious institutions; other times, the church claimed power over the state by asserting religious authority over the sovereign himself. But the central idea, formally enshrined at Westphalia in 1648 by the treaty that ended the wars of religion in Europe, was that each region would have its own religion, namely that of the sovereign. The rulers, meanwhile, manipulated religion to serve their own ends. Writing just before the American Revolution, the British historian Edward Gibbon opined that the people believed, the philosophers doubted and the magistrates exploited. Gibbon’s nominal subject was ancient Rome, but his readers understood that he was talking about their world too.
All this changed with the radical idea, introduced during the American Revolution, that the people were sovereign. This arrangement profoundly disturbed the old model of church and state. To begin with, America was religiously diverse: how could the state establish the religion of the sovereign when the sovereign people in America belonged to many faiths — Congregationalist, Anglican, Presbyterian, Baptist, Quaker? Furthermore, the sovereign people would actively believe in religion instead of cynically manipulating it, and elite skeptics would no longer be whispering in the ears of power. Religion would be a genuinely popular, even thriving, political force.
This model called for a new understanding of church and state, and the framers of the American Constitution rose to the occasion. They designed a national government that, for the first time in Western history, had no established religion at all. The Articles of Confederation, which were drawn up during the Revolutionary War, had been silent on religion — itself something of an innovation. But the Constitution went further by prohibiting any religious test for holding office. And the first words of the First Amendment stated that ”Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” If the people were to be sovereign, and belonged to different religions, the state religion would be no religion at all. Otherwise, the reasoning went, too many religious denominations would be in competition to make theirs the official choice, and none could prevail without coercing dissenters to support a church other than their own — a violation of the liberty of conscience that Americans had come to believe was a God-given right. Establishment of religion at the national level was prohibited. Religious diversity had ensured it. The experiment had begun.
II. OUR PRESENT PREDICAMENT
During the two and a quarter centuries since America’s founding, the experiment has progressed fitfully. The nonestablishment of religion, with a simultaneous guarantee of its free exercise, was an elegant solution but not a complete one. Generation after generation, fresh infusions of religious diversity into American life have brought with them original ideas about church and state — new answers to the challenge of preserving the unity of the sovereign people in the face of their flourishing spiritual variety and often conflicting religious needs.
Consider the influx of Catholic immigrants that followed the Irish potato famine in the 1840’s. In the overwhelmingly Protestant world of the framers’ America, there was a common belief that taxation for religious purposes violated religious liberty. As a result, when public schools were invented a few decades later, they featured only ”nonsectarian” Bible reading and prayer. But Catholic immigrants soon protested that the schools’ nonsectarianism — in which the Protestant King James Bible was free to be interpreted by the individual student but not by the teacher (let alone a priest) — was in fact sectarian Protestantism in disguise. The unsuccessful struggle of Catholic immigrants to have their own schools publicly financed or, failing that, to take the King James Bible out of the public schools, generated half a century of vituperative and sometimes deadly struggle.
In our own era, two camps dominate the church-state debate in American life, corresponding to what are now the two most prominent approaches to the proper relation of religion and government. One school of thought contends that the right answers to questions of government policy must come from the wisdom of religious tradition. You might call those who insist on the direct relevance of religious values to political life ”values evangelicals.” Not every values evangelical is, technically speaking, an evangelical or a born-again Christian, although many are. Values evangelicals include Jews, Catholics, Muslims and even people who do not focus on a particular religious tradition but care primarily about identifying traditional moral values that can in theory be shared by everyone.
What all values evangelicals have in common is the goal of evangelizing for values: promoting a strong set of ideas about the best way to live your life and urging the government to adopt those values and encourage them wherever possible. To them, the best way to hold the United States together as a nation, not just a country, is for us to know what values we really hold and to stand up for them. As Ralph Reed recently told an audience at Harvard, ”While we are sometimes divided on issues, there remains a broad national consensus on core values and principles.”
(Page 2 of 8)
On the other side of the debate are those who see religion as a matter of personal belief and choice largely irrelevant to government and who are concerned that values derived from religion will divide us, not unite us. You might call those who hold this view ”legal secularists,” not because they are necessarily strongly secular in their personal worldviews — though many are — but because they argue that government should be secular and that the laws should make it so. To the legal secularists, full citizenship means fully sharing in the legal and political commitments of the nation. If the nation defines itself in terms of values drawn from religion, they worry, then it will inevitably tend to adopt the religious values of the majority, excluding religious minorities and nonreligious people from full citizenship.
Despite the differences, each approach, values evangelicalism and legal secularism, is trying to come to terms with the same fundamental tension in American life. The United States has always been home to striking religious diversity — diversity that has by fits and starts expanded over the last 230 years. At the same time, we strive to be a nation with a common identity and a common project. Religious division threatens that unity, as we can see today more clearly than at any time in a century in the disputes over stem-cell research, same-sex marriage and end-of-life issues. Yet almost all Americans want to make sure that we do not let our religious diversity pull us apart. Values evangelicals say that the solution lies in finding and embracing traditional values we can all share and without which we will never hold together. Legal secularists counter that we can maintain our national unity only if we treat religion as a personal, private matter, separate from concerns of citizenship. The goal of reconciling national unity and religious diversity is the same, but the methods for doing it are deeply opposed.
Yet neither legal secularism nor values evangelicalism has lived up to its own aspirations. Each promises inclusion, but neither has delivered. To make matters worse, the conflict between these two approaches is becoming a political and constitutional crisis all its own. Talk of secession of blue states from red in the aftermath of the 2004 election was not meant seriously; but this kind of dark musing, with its implicit reference to the Civil War, is also not coincidental. It bespeaks a division deeper than any other in our public life, a division that cannot be healed by the victory of either side.
III. CLOSING THE RIFT
The split between legal secularism and values evangelicalism was not born in a day. Legal secularism arose in the post-World War II era, reflecting a growing concern about the need to protect religious minorities, especially newly visible Jews who were arguably excluded by public displays of Christian religion like crèches or recitations of the Lord’s Prayer. But instead of attacking religion directly, as some antireligious secularists did earlier in the century with little success, organizations like Americans United for Separation of Church and State and the American Civil Liberties Union argued more narrowly that government ought to be secular in word, deed and intent. In 1971, in Lemon v. Kurtzman, the Supreme Court made this position law, requiring all government decisions to be motivated by a secular purpose, to have primarily secular effects and not to entangle the state with religious institutions. This new standard — known thereafter as the ”Lemon test” — did much more than simply reaffirm a deeply rooted American norm of no government money for religion; it prohibited school prayer and Bible reading, which had been practiced in the public schools since their founding, and in many instances it removed Christmas decorations from the public square. The framers had neither known nor used the category ”secular” as we understand it, but the court made secularism an official condition of all acceptable government conduct.
In many quarters of religious America, there was outrage at this court-mandated secularism, which to many believers soon came to seem of a piece with the Supreme Court’s 1973 guarantee of abortion rights in Roe v. Wade. By 1980, the televangelist Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority, the political organization he founded, succeeded in mobilizing this frustration to help elect Ronald Reagan president. In time, Reagan’s judicial nominees began to roll back the advances of legal secularism by allowing the government to pay for religious education and other activities via vouchers or other neutral and generally available government programs. In a particularly ingenious twist, evangelicals won these cases by depicting themselves as a minority subject to discrimination by secularists who wanted to deny them government support.
But the values evangelicals did not succeed entirely in reversing the Supreme Court’s embrace of legal secularism. Throughout the 90’s, in a series of 5-4 decisions in which Justice Sandra Day O’Connor provided the swing vote, the Supreme Court refused to permit the government to take any symbolic action that might be seen to ”endorse” religion, thus preserving and even expanding the ban on school prayer. The other eight justices on the Rehnquist Court held that government financing and state-sponsored religious symbolism should be treated the same way: either both were permissible or both weren’t. But since those justices were split 4-4 on whether to allow more of each or less of both, O’Connor’s compromise — allowing some government financing of religion but no government endorsement of religious symbols — has been the law of the land for the last two decades.
The resulting doctrine has been the cause of the major church-state controversies of recent years. In 2004, for instance, when a California man named Michael Newdow pressed the court to find that the words ”under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance impermissibly endorsed religion, the court ducked the issue. The more liberal justices seemed afraid to rule the pledge unconstitutional yet were unwilling to embrace the view (advanced awkwardly by O’Connor, given her usual opposition to endorsing religious symbols) that there is no endorsement when the religious symbol is longstanding and common.
During the same Supreme Court term, a young man named Joshua Davey asked the court to require the state of Washington to let him use his public scholarship money to pay for his studies as a theology major at an evangelical college. But the court, including Chief Justice William Rehnquist, refused to overturn the state’s policy against paying for religious courses of study, even though Davey was as much the victim of ”discrimination” as were earlier evangelical plaintiffs whom the court had granted access to government money to pay for their student publications. In essence, the court, divided itself and uneasy about O’Connor’s fence-sitting, is unwilling or unable to take a unified stand on what the Constitution really means when it comes to the relation between religion and government. It will be surprising if the Ten Commandments cases just decided by the court bring to an end the judicial wrangling over the church-state question.
The O’Connor compromise between values evangelicalism and legal secularism may be unsatisfactory, but the truth is that neither approach deserves to prevail. Both are self-contradictory: they fail precisely where they want to succeed, namely in reconciling religious diversity with unity. The values evangelicals want to find shared values, but that leads them to rely on the unexamined assumption that deep down, Americans agree on what matters. The trouble is that ”we” often do not agree. The Ten Commandments may appeal to Jews and Christians, but to Muslims, they are an imperfect revelation superseded by the Koran, and Buddhists and Hindus find no appeal in the Commandments’ self-attribution to the single God who took the Children of Israel out of Egypt.
Even a joint commitment to ”the culture of life” turns out to be very thin. Catholics and conservative Protestants may agree broadly on abortion and euthanasia; but what about capital punishment, which Pope John Paul II condemned as an immoral usurpation of God’s authority to determine life and death but which many evangelical Christians support as biblically mandated? To reach consensus, the values evangelicals have to water down the ”values” they say they accept to the point where they would mean nothing at all. They are left either acknowledging disagreement about values or else falling into a kind of relativism (I’m O.K., you’re O.K.) that is inconsistent with the very goal of standing for something rather than nothing.
Meanwhile, the legal secularists have a different problem. They claim that separating religion from government is necessary to ensure full inclusion of all citizens. The problem is that many citizens — values evangelicals among them — feel excluded by precisely this principle of keeping religion private. Keeping nondenominational prayer out of the public schools may protect religious minorities who might feel excluded; but it also sends a message of exclusion to those who believe such prayer would signal commitment to shared values. Increasingly, the symbolism of removing religion from the public sphere is experienced by values evangelicals as excluding them, no matter how much the legal secularists tell them that is not the intent.
Despite the gravity of the problem, I believe there is an answer. Put simply, it is this: offer greater latitude for religious speech and symbols in public debate, but also impose a stricter ban on state financing of religious institutions and activities. This approach, the mirror image of O’Connor’s compromise, is drawn from the framers’ vision and the historical experience of separating church and state in America. The framers might well have been mystified by courthouse statues depicting the Ten Commandments, but they would not have objected unless the monuments were built with public money. Having made a revolution over unfair taxation, they thought of government support in terms of dollars spent, not abstract symbols.
From this logic, it follows that a moment of silence to begin the school day should not be invalidated just because it is intended to let children pray if they wish. Though it will never be easy to determine when schoolchildren are being coerced by peer pressure, at least some older students at optional events like a Friday-night football game surely are not being forced to pray when others are doing so voluntarily. Intelligent-design theory, itself a product of the ill-advised demand that religion disguise itself in secular garb, should be opposed on the educational ground that it is poor science, not on the constitutional reasoning, which some secularists have advanced, that it is a cover for religious creationism. If its advocates can persuade a local school board to put it in the curriculum, the courts need not strike it down as an establishment of religion. On the other hand, charitable choice, which permits billions of dollars in federal money to support faith-based organizations, should not be a vehicle for allowing government to pay for programs that treat alcoholics by counseling them to accept Christ. Schools that teach that Shariah (or Jewish rabbinic law or canon law) is the ultimate source of values should not be supported by tuition vouchers.
Such a solution would both recognize religious values and respect the institutional separation of religion and government as an American value in its own right. This would mean abandoning the political argument that religion has no place in the public sphere while simultaneously insisting that government must go to great lengths to dissociate itself from supporting religious institutions. It would mean acknowledging a substantial difference between allowing religious symbols and speech in public places (so long as there is no public money involved) and spending resources to sustain religious entities like churches, mosques and temples. Public religious symbolism expressed in statues, oaths and prayers reflects citizens’ desires to see their deeply held beliefs expressed in those public situations where moral commitments are relevant: legislatures, schools and, yes, courthouses and statehouses. Religious proclamations or prayers may open sessions of Congress without costing anyone a dime.
But government money, even when nominally available equally to all, inevitably creates political competition between religious groups over how and where scarce money will be spent. Zero-sum appropriations drive zero-sum politics. A tuition voucher is never priced out of thin air: its amount is set by a political process that favors some schools (for example, Catholic schools that already have infrastructures and support from a centralized church) at the expense of others.
In the courts, the arrangement that I’m proposing would entail abandoning the Lemon requirement that state action must have a secular purpose and secular effects, as well as O’Connor’s idea that the state must not ”endorse” religion. For these two tests, the courts should substitute the two guiding rules that historically lay at the core of our church-state experiment before legal secularism or values evangelicalism came on the scene: the state may neither coerce anyone in matters of religion nor expend its resources so as to support religious institutions and practices, whether generic or particular. These constitutional principles, reduced to their core, can be captured in a simple slogan: no coercion and no money. If no one is being coerced by the government, and if the government is not spending its money to build religious-themed monuments or support religious institutions and practices, the courts should hold that the Constitution is not violated.
Admittedly, this approach goes against the trends of the last several decades, which are for stricter regulation of public religious symbolism and more permissive authorization of government financing and support for religion. At first blush, then, the proposal may strike both sides of the current debate as mistaken, since it requires each to give up some victories in exchange for an alternative solution. Nonetheless this approach is not only faithful to our constitutional traditions; it also stands a chance of winning over secularists and evangelicals alike and beginning to close the rift between them.
The solution I have in mind rests on the basic principle of protecting the liberty of conscience. So long as all citizens have the same right to speak and act free of coercion, no adult should feel threatened or excluded by the symbolic or political speech of others, however much he may disagree with it. If many congressmen say that their faith requires intervening to save Terri Schiavo, that is not a violation of the rules of political debate. The secular congresswoman who thinks Schiavo should have the right to die in peace can express her contrary view and explain why it is that she believes a rational and legal analysis of the situation requires it. She may lose the vote, but she is not excluded from the process or from the body that votes against her, any more than a Republican would be ”excluded” from a committee controlled by Democrats.
Legal secularists may fear that when facing arguments with religious premises, they have the deck stacked against them. If values evangelicals begin by asserting that God has defined marriage as the union of one man and one woman, then, say the secularists, the conversation about same-sex marriage is over. But in fact, secularists can make arguments of their own, which may be convincing: if the state is going to regulate marriages, shouldn’t they be subject to the same equality requirement as every other law? Some might even go further and ask the evangelicals how they can be so sure that they have correctly identified God’s will on the question. They may discover that few evangelicals treat faith as a conversation stopper, and most consider it just the opposite.
In any event, when the debate is over, the people will vote, and they will decide the matter. Legal secularists cannot realistically expect that they will win more democratic fights by banning the evangelicals’ arguments, which can usually be recast, however disingenuously, as secular. Once in a while they may, if the composition of the Supreme Court is just right, thwart the values evangelicals’ numerical superiority with a judicial override; but in the long run, all they will accomplish is to alienate the values evangelicals in a way that undercuts the meaningfulness of participatory democracy.
When it comes to religious symbolism, typically some group will ask the state for a display or an acknowledgment of their holiday or tradition — a crèche or a statue, a song or pageant. Invoking Justice O’Connor’s endorsement test, legal secularists ordinarily object that if the state acquiesces, then it is embracing the religious symbol and excluding adherents of other religions. But this interpretation of what state support would mean may not be the best or most natural one. The fact that others have asked for and gotten recognition implies nothing about the exclusion of any religious minority except for the brute fact that it is a religious minority. There is no reason whatever for religious minorities to be shielded from that fact, since there is nothing shameful or inherently disadvantageous in being a religious minority, so long as that minority is not subject to coercion or discrimination.
Take the fact that the government treats Christmas as a national holiday. It would be absurd if Jews or Muslims or Hindus or Buddhists felt fundamentally excluded from citizenship by this fact — and I would venture to suggest that very few do. Most Americans are still Christians who celebrate Christmas, and the state acknowledges that fact, just as the culture does through the songs on the radio and the merchandise in the stores. The celebration may not always be deeply religious, but the atmosphere corresponds to the realities of the Christian majority. Just what is threatening to religious minorities about Christians celebrating the holiday or singing carols in school? What, exactly, is the harm in being wished Merry Christmas even if you’re not celebrating? The state has not made Christianity relevant to citizenship nor has it spent taxpayers’ money to advance the cause of the church. It has simply acknowledged the preferences of a majority. Some members of religious minorities may choose to spend December feeling bad that they are not part of the majority culture — but they would have this same problem even if Christmas were not a national holiday, since Christmas would still be all around them. The answer is for them to strengthen their own identities and be proud of who they are, not to insist that the majority give up its own celebration to accommodate them.
In the last 50 years, legal secularists have expressed concern that public manifestations of religion marginalize religious minorities and hence reduce the capacity of those minorities to participate in a common national public life. And at times, that has been a valid complaint, as with mandatory religious exercises in schools. But today the increasing presence of other non-Christian religious minorities, and an attendant atmosphere of religious multiculturalism, mean that public manifestations of religion — at least at the national level — are becoming increasingly pluralistic and inclusive. Consider the televised memorial service led by President Bush on Sept. 14, 2001, a day he had designated as a national day of prayer and remembrance for the victims of the 9/11 attacks. With the cabinet, members of Congress and the foreign diplomatic corps in attendance, the president assured the congregation that God created a world ”of moral design” and that ”the Lord of life holds all who die and all who mourn.” Suffused with theology as much as any presidential address since Lincoln’s second inaugural, the speech took on the problem of evil while commending the future of the republic to God’s grace.
Yet despite the high-Protestant venue — the Episcopal Washington National Cathedral — the president was preceded in the pulpit by the dean of the cathedral as well as by the Roman Catholic archbishop of Washington, an African-American Methodist minister, Billy Graham, a rabbi and an imam who quoted verses from the Koran. The display of inclusiveness was driven not only by political imperative but also by the recognition that this extraordinary national-religious moment must reach out to America’s religious diversity.
In this latest demographic version of a religiously diverse environment, where Protestants may soon cease to be a majority in the United States, the danger that Christmas crèches or prayer at high-school graduations will marginalize non-Christians is substantially decreased. Some parts of the country are still dominated by particular denominations or trends; but even in the heart of the Bible Belt, diversity is growing as a result of immigration and shifting population patterns. Indeed, the Ten Commandments monument that Judge Roy Moore erected in the Alabama Supreme Court was thought by its supporters, however inaccurately, to be nonsectarian, on the theory that Jews and Christians alike respect the ideals it represents. Although insensitivity and ignorance are still very much with us, today we are unlikely to see the religious majority refusing to allow religious minorities to display their symbols alongside those of the majority. The five-times daily broadcast of the Muslim call to prayer from a mosque may at first raise hackles, but when the comparison to church bells is made, public acceptance is likely to follow, as it did in the town of Hamtramck, Mich., last summer.
V. WHAT INCLUSION REALLY LOOKS LIKE
Atheists will doubtless maintain that any public religion at all — like ”under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance — excludes them by endorsing the idea of religion generally. But this misses the point: it is an interpretive choice to feel excluded by other people’s faiths, and the atheist, like any other dissenter from a majoritarian decision, can just as easily adhere to his own views while insisting on his full citizenship. So long as no one is coerced into invoking God, it makes little sense to accommodate the atheist’s scruples by barring everyone else from saying words that he alone finds to be metaphysically empty. Complete subjective inclusion is impossible, so if our goal is to include as many people as possible, we need to reach as widely as possible by letting the ordinary democratic process take its course. The Jehovah’s Witnesses, who in the 1940’s fought for the right not to salute the flag, never insisted that the salute or the pledge should be abolished altogether — they just wanted their children to be exempt from a mandatory ritual that violated their consciences and hence their religious liberty.
In some instances, pluralistic, public expressions of religion even hold out the possibility of enabling new religious minorities to participate fully in the American public sphere. Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists, for whom religion and immigrant status may be closely connected, may well seek opportunities for the symbolic recognition of their citizenship that can be gained in schools, legislatures and elsewhere. Acknowledging holidays like the Muslim Eid al-Fitr or the Hindu Divali in what has traditionally been a Christian country may validate a sense of belonging in a way that no secular civic symbol can. Such an embrace of minority faith might go beyond symbols like legislative prayers, which remain legal despite secularist objections, and extend to celebrating holidays in the schools or granting adherents those days off from work, which would be of questionable constitutionality under current law. Ultimately, the nation may have more success generating loyalty from religiously diverse citizens by allowing inclusive governmental manifestations of religion than by banning them.
Observing the political clout of the values evangelicals, many legal secularists cannot imagine how the former could possibly feel marginalized from American society. They must realize, however, that the evangelicals’ political strength has not often extended to the cultural realm, about which values evangelicals care the most. These evangelicals feel defensive not only because they believe they are losing the culture war and have trouble enacting religious values into public policy — though, in fact, they have made some strides on issues like abortion and same-sex marriage — but because they have difficulty making the religious sources of their ideas acceptable in the cultural-political conversation. To give a religious reason for passing a law is still to run the risk of that law being held unconstitutional as serving a religious rather than a secular purpose. So evangelicals end up speaking in euphemisms (”family values”) or proposing purpose-built dodges like ”creation science” that even they often privately acknowledge to be paradoxical.
A better approach would be for secularists to confront the evangelicals’ arguments on their own terms, refusing to stop the conversation and instead arguing for the rightness of their beliefs about their own values. Reason can in fact engage revelation, as it has throughout the history of philosophy. The skeptic can challenge the believer to explain how he derives his views from Scripture and why the view he ascribes to God is morally attractive — questions that most believers consider profoundly important and perfectly relevant.
This kind of exchange need not produce agreement on abortion or same-sex marriage or anything else. To the contrary, hard moral questions will remain controversial. But acknowledging a moral debate as a moral debate in which all sides deserve a say will have the effect of communicating to evangelicals that their voices count. In the long run, this approach is more likely to focus our national debates on substance instead of procedure — on what God or reason or whatever source of values teaches about human life and intimate choices, not about whether God belongs in the conversation at all. Secularists who are confident in their views should expect to prevail on the basis of reason; evangelicals who wish to win the argument will discover that their arguments must extend beyond simple invocation of faith.
VI. THE PROBLEM WITH MONEY
If we are to progress toward reconciliation of our church-state problem, it will not be enough for legal secularists to re-evaluate their attitude toward religious symbols and religious discourse. Values evangelicals must also change their ways and give something up — by reconsidering their position in favor of state support for religious institutions. The reason they should be prepared to do so is that such state support actually undercuts, rather than promotes, the cohesive national identity that evangelicals have wanted to restore or recreate. When filtered through vouchers distributed by the government and directed by individual choice, state financial aid for religious institutions like schools or charities does not encourage common values; it creates conflict and division.
Today’s voucher programs, like the one in Florida that is currently under challenge before the Florida Supreme Court, focus on helping kids in failing schools. But imagine a broader voucher system. Many or most parents might well use the vouchers to send their children to private, mostly religious schools; more than half the beneficiaries of the Florida program do exactly that, and in other, more focused plans, the numbers have been upward of 90 percent. Because we value religious liberty so highly, most Americans would surely agree that it would be wrong to regulate and supervise religious schools closely enough to ensure that they teach some version of prescribed American values. That is precisely why the Constitution has been interpreted to protect the right to educate your children in private religious schools altogether. But given this right to educate according to your own values, what is to ensure that the curriculum in state-supported religious schools will promote common values? It is at least as likely that balkanized schools will generate balkanized values as that they will promote a common national project.
While the great majority of schools run by most religious groups do encourage loyal citizenship by their lights, we cannot simply assume that any school of any religious denomination will teach shared American national identity or values. Some schools will teach that the best form of life is to prefer your fellows — whether Protestants or Jews or Muslims or Catholics — to other Americans. No religious tradition is without at least a hint of such particularism, which is just one mechanism by which common citizenship may be undermined by some forms of religion. Different religious schools will also teach disparate values, increasing national disagreement when it comes to controversial issues. There is nothing inherently wrong with that type of values diversity, of course. Private schools unsupported by vouchers can in any case teach whatever they want about citizenship and loyalty. But while values evangelicalism claims to advocate national unity and inclusion through shared values, school-voucher programs cut exactly the other way, promoting difference and nonengagement. Permitting schools supported by private money to teach that there is no common American undertaking is not the same as encouraging that teaching through state subsidy.
Now consider what will happen when some delegate in a state legislature rises to argue that voucher payments should not be extended to schools that teach racism, or anti-Americanism, or sexism. Under the law as it is developing, the state cannot pick and choose but must pay for all the schools or none. Cutting financing for the offending school would require cutting it for every school. There will then inevitably ensue a debate about whether the outrage of financing this one school outweighs the benefits of financing all the others. In essence, this will be a debate about how bad the teachings of the religion under attack are, and how good the others.
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This situation, reminiscent of 19th-century legislative debates about the supposed ills of the Catholic Church, captures precisely the sort of divisiveness in politics that institutional separation aims to avoid. Only this time it will probably not be Catholicism in the dock but something else — Islam, say, or polytheistic Hinduism, or some religion so new that it still seems like a cult. The framers’ innovation of nonestablishment was designed so that the sovereign people should not spend their legislative sessions debating the relative merits of different faiths and their compatibility with American values. That is a recipe for real and deep division.
The tradition of institutional separation that must be reasserted goes beyond blocking money for religious schools. All attempts to use government resources to institutionalize religious practices countermand the American tradition of nonestablishment, grounded historically in the belief that government has no authority over religious matters. When government pays for social programs through the rubric of charitable choice, the programs must not be ones that rely on faith to accomplish their goals — or else the government is institutionally sponsoring the religious mission of the church in question. This is also why the state itself must not compose or mandate public prayers, which then take on the shape of state-imposed religious exercises in a way that is very different from voluntary prayers chosen and led by individuals in public contexts. The founding father James Madison himself understood that paying the chaplains of the House and Senate out of the public till was a constitutional anomaly, and he wisely, if belatedly, suggested that the members of Congress ought to pay for their services from their own pockets.
Surprising as it may at first sound, the changes from existing laws and practices that I’m advocating have a realistic chance of being adopted and even embraced by values evangelicals. It may already be possible to glimpse a growing recognition among values evangelicals that voucher programs do not necessarily promote common values but may do just the opposite. The ballooning of school-voucher programs that some expected in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2002 decision holding them constitutional has not come to pass. Faith-based charities have not yet managed to crowd out secular service providers, although more extensive government financing for faith-based social services remains a stated goal of the Bush administration. Given that voucher programs have not spread, it should be relatively easy for values evangelicals to abandon them — especially since they will be getting something in return, namely greater recognition and acceptance for their values-based arguments and the corresponding symbols of public religion.
Government financing of religion is, after all, a relative latecomer to the ideology of values evangelicalism. The movement from the start drew its energy from symbolic questions of culture and morality, not from any desire to see a merger of church and state. Catholics may have pressed hard from within the movement to make vouchers an important issue, but even they turn out to be relying little on those voucher programs for educating their own children; the voucher students in Catholic schools in Milwaukee or Cleveland are heavily inner-city non-Catholics. Evangelicals should also be prepared to acknowledge the historical fact that our constitutional tradition, flawed though it assuredly is, has always made institutional separation the touchstone of nonestablishment.
VII. THE EXPERIMENT REVISITED
The proposal is a simple one — and it looks backward to history in order to look forward. If we could be more tolerant of sincere religious people drawing on their beliefs and practices to inform their choices in the public realm, and at the same time be more vigilant about preserving our legacy of institutional separation between government and organized religion, the shift would redirect us to the uniqueness of the American experiment with church and state. Until the rise of legal secularism, Americans tended to be accepting of public, symbolic manifestations of faith. Until values evangelicalism came on the scene, Americans were on the whole insistent about maintaining institutional separation. These two modern movements respectively reversed both those trends.
The novelty of these developments does not mean they are wrong, of course. But in an America grown so religiously diverse that it can no longer easily be called ”Judeo-Christian,” we need to learn from our history if we are to have any hope of constructing a single nation that will endure. Muslims, Buddhists and Hindus will have to join Protestants, Catholics, Jews and atheists in finding a resolution to our church-state problem that all can embrace. A solution that will work for our generation must bind us to the past. But like all successful nation-building, it will work only if it also sets a foundation for our future.
Luigi Novi: How could it be, when he began writing material that led to it during WWI? Even when it he began writing it as a sequel to The Hobbit, it was only 1937.
I think you entirely miss the point of why LotR is seen as an allegory for WWII, since, you know, LotR itself was written over like a dozen years, including WII. Not WWI.
Luigi Novi: Where has anyone taken this position?
Umm, hello? Are you awake, Luigi?
Have you not read stories about the Potter books being banned from school libraries and such, whereas the Narnia novels can easily be found in churches and so forth, even though it involves magic and such as well?
It wasn’t a case of whether somebody took this position in this thread, but it does matter when you consider how some view the Chronicles of Narnia as nothing more than Christian propoganda.
I thought I was still allowed to point out the hypocracy, nonetheless.
PAD, according to a few different places in my vast library of esoterica, Jesus was born October 11. The same day as my sister, which might explain things about her. Right now, the only place I can think of is in a book by Hans Holzer, but I’ve seen it other places too, I think.
Craig, I have never heard any mention of whether or not the libraries that ban the Potter books also do so with Narnia.
This is one of those things that I just can’t figure out. The card opens with one of the Psalms and it’s not religious ENOUGH? Maybe if the Bush dogs had crucifixes dangling from their collars.
“This is one of those things that I just can’t figure out. The card opens with one of the Psalms and it’s not religious ENOUGH? Maybe if the Bush dogs had crucifixes dangling from their collars.”
Anyone remember the history of the French Revolution…the big one, with capital F and Rs (as opposed to the numerour other revolutions that occurred in France)? Skip ahead to the point where the various factions that formed a big portion of the revolution started turning on each other, as the more extreme factions started feeling like the others weren’t going far enough in their revolutionary actions.
This is what Bush is feeling now. In order to secure his victory (twice) he appealed to the more extreme conservative religious factions, making them think that he was “one of them.” And now, after helping him attain 2 terms in the White House, and also putting a lot of his buddies into the Congress and Senate, they’re looking for results. And despite the fact that this year’s Holiday card from the Bush’s is essentially the same as the past 5 years, it’s not enough. Because they want to see Bush step up and defend Christmas, by sending out Christmas cards.
Craig, I have never heard any mention of whether or not the libraries that ban the Potter books also do so with Narnia.
That’s because they don’t ban the Narnia books, because the Narnia books are seen as allegory for Christianity. I thought I made that clear in my initial post.
Craig, I think he was looking for some confirmation one way or another. Is there a source, perhaps some place where they condemn Potter but praise Narnia? I was able to find the one site I mentioned, which condemned both, but I don’t know any way to tell if that’s typical or an aberration.