In Santa Monica, California, you can see baby Jesus and his mother Mary in the stable this Christmastime. However, they are now caged and moved far away from the public parks, where the local atheists and city elders considered it sacrilegious.
Santa Monica’s Palisades Park hosted a life-sized, sprawling, multiepisode Nativity for decades, beginning back in 1953, and it became a tourist draw, gathering crowds from all around.
Soon enough, though, the atheists got angry that someone might be defiling public land with religious imagery. So, anti-Christian activists began swooping up permits for public displays to crowd out Mary, Joseph, and baby Jesus. In 2011, the city council agreed: There was no room for the Holy Family.
The city then banned all unattended displays, and the 2012 committee lost its case at the 9th Circuit.
That’s when a local black Baptist church stepped up and began hosting the nativity. Due to vandalism (whether by the atheist iconoclasts, dumb children, or itinerants) Calvary Baptist has to put the statues behind a chain-link fence.
The atheists had won, Palisades Park was stripped bare, and neutrality (emptiness) governed the public square once again.
But “neutrality” was never going to reign for long. Man knows there is something transcendent, and he seeks to find it and celebrate it.
So, in Silver Spring, Maryland, the local politicians planned a religious display of sorts for the annual Thanksgiving parade. Marc Elrich, the county executive (who in 2020 had endorsed crowded Black Lives Matter protests on public property while banning outdoor and indoor church services), wanted a “Values” float in the 2021 parade.
The Values Float, as laid out in the county’s request for proposal, would reject “traditional parade float themes” such as holidays and also reject the expectation that parades should be “mute on public policy.”
The float was to advance the county’s “values,” notably “Advancing Racial Equity and Social Justice,” “Fighting Climate Change,” and “Reimagining Public Safety.” Some critics noted these themes and the others (“Bus Rapid Transit!”) were in Elrich’s reelection campaign. But it’s just as accurate to point out that the Black Lives Matter, climate change, and “Defund the Police” themes here are the credal pillars of the new civic religion in wealthy liberal America.
Not a single local entity submitted a bid to build the Values Float.
While it took atheists and liberal politicians to clear baby Jesus out of the public square, white, liberal wokeism is being sidelined by its own banality.
