Christmas Bombing: The annual assault on religious freedom - religion and state

National Review, Dec 31, 2002 by Rod Dreher

The question is not merely rhetorical. The First Amendment Center's Haynes says the public schools have become a battleground because many Christians believe the schools have become not neutral about religion, but actively hostile to their own faith. "This fight isn't about the tree, or the menorah, or the creche. This is a fight about whose schools are these, and whose country is this. People feel left out, they feel hurt, and small incidents become huge because they feel like this is the only way they're going to be heard."

And the campaign to take Christ out of Christmas is not just about public buildings; it's all over the culture, with the social pressure to suppress the religious aspect of the holiday ratcheting up. Korten says that many Americans, in their zeal to be more sensitive than thou, have come to regard religion as the intellectual equivalent of secondhand smoke. "You know, 'Go over there in the corner and do it where nobody can see you,'" Korten says. "They're trying to force it into circumstances that are as private as humanly possible, and that is ridiculous."

Some resistance is developing. Canada's National Post has been running a salutary series of articles detailing the ways in which what one professor calls "the umbrage industry" has been strong-arming Christianity to the sidelines. The paper revealed that The Gap had a policy (now abandoned) forbidding its employees to wish customers "Merry Christmas"; that a longstanding gift-box program run by Evangelicals seeking presents for Third World children was under fire for allegedly being a front for religious conversion; that the Royal Canadian Mint had un-baptized its "Twelve Days of Christmas" program by renaming it "Twelve Days of Giving"; and so forth. There's no end to this foolishness.

Or is there? In the Canadian Midwest, Manitoba premier Gary Doer became a folk hero by renaming the "Multicultural Tree" in the lobby of the provincial legislature. It is now called -- wait for it -- the "Christmas Tree." Little acts of rebellion mean a lot. S. Renee Mitchell, a black columnist for the Portland Oregonian, wrote recently that the multicultural mind-games her little boy's school had been playing with him had left him feeling guilty about celebrating Christmas. This mother did not appreciate the "self-appointed thought police" ruining Christmas for her son, and said so: "We're stampeding so hard to embrace every other religious holiday that we're trampling on our own traditions. God forbid if we asked Muslims to change Ramadan."

Mitchell is on to something with that last comment. The best way to fight for fair treatment of Christians is to use the multiculturalist nannies' own logic against them. This is Bill Donohue's bread and butter, and the Catholic League president cuts his co-religionists no slack for refusing to defend themselves and their faith tradition. Says Donohue, "Christians are such wimps."

Another satisfying, though thus far underused, way to spite the diversity killjoys is through satire. The mother of all anti-P.C. holiday fare is the Christmas episode of South Park, the cheerfully vulgar cartoon program on Comedy Central. As one chuckling religious- liberties activist put it, "Everything you want is right there in that episode."