THE MAYOR OF SOMERVILLE, Massachusetts, is sorry. Really sorry. He recently called the city’s annual December celebration a “Christmas party.” And we can’t be having that. What he meant to say, he explained, is “holiday party,” because the word “Christmas” contains . . . um, a word they don’t use in Somerville, Massachusetts.
But wait a minute. Doesn’t “holiday” also contain a reference to that which dare not speak its name? The city marketing director of Wichita, Kansas, noticed. She led a task force that decided to call their annual Winterfest installation a “community tree”–since otherwise Wichita’s etymologically astute citizens might hear the “holy day” in “holiday” and tremble for their children’s safety.
In fact, what are we doing with trees at all? A few years ago, the city manager of Eugene, Oregon, banned decorated trees on public property during the month of December. And rightly so. Even a secularized symbol for Christmas is still somehow implicated in it all, a co-conspirator in the attempt to turn America into a theocracy. You can’t finally eradicate the religious suggestion lurking in the pines, just as you can’t wring every last drop of St. Nicholas out of Santa Claus. And if we allow a tree with ornaments on public land, the next thing you know people will be calling out, “God bless us, every one!” and “Peace on earth, goodwill to men!” And then, of course, the Inquisition.
Officials in Plano, Texas, were merely following this logic to its natural conclusion this year when they prohibited students from bringing even red and green napkins to school around Christmas. Or rather, the holidays. Or rather, that time of year when certain thoughtless students might be tempted to use red and green napkins, in contravention of the Plano Independent School District’s pronouncements on table-linen sensitivity.
Such “attempts to de-Christianize Christmas are as absurd as they are relentless,” Weekly Standard contributing editor Charles Krauthammer wrote last week in the Washington Post. And does no one notice how antiquated these attempts seem? How 1970s it all feels: disco shirts, and platform shoes, and the flurry of Christmas lawsuits from the ACLU? When the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals declared unconstitutional the phrase “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance, the decision felt not merely outrageous, but also curiously old-fashioned–dated and quaint, somehow, as though the superannuated judges couldn’t see just how far a changed world had left them behind.
Since the November election, there has been much chatter among Democrats about the need to recapture some portion of America’s religious vote. Hillary Clinton asked the left to use the Bible to help make its case. From her perch as House minority leader, Nancy Pelosi called on her fellow Democrats to be less publicly embarrassed about their private faith. Even while commentator after commentator fulminated in the liberal press about the victory of theocracy in the national election, a parade of candidates hoping to chair the Democratic party has passed through Washington, all insisting they know how to resanctify their party–which has grown ever more secularized and ever more defeated since the 1970s.
Well, here’s an easy place for them to start. Mock the mayor of Somerville. Rebuke the marketing director of Wichita. Denounce the school-district officials in Plano. Let a little Christmas back into Christmas.
But perhaps the Democrats are incapable of this anymore. The professional antireligion litigators have become a machine that runs of itself, and the Democratic National Committee seems to have forgotten where the off-switch is. The attempt to scrub religious symbolism from the public square must “flatten political rhetoric and make it less moving and interesting,” presidential speechwriter Michael Gerson recently tried to explain to reporters. More, it will damage “one of the main sources of social justice in our history. Without an appeal to justice rooted in faith, there would be no abolition movement or civil rights movement or pro-life movement.” Occasional mentions of God in President Bush’s speeches are not “code words; they’re our culture,” Gerson said. “It’s not a code word when I put a reference to T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets.”
Exactly twenty years ago, back in 1984, Richard John Neuhaus predicted much of our current situation in The Naked Public Square. Noting that millions of believers had come, through the 1970s, to feel “a powerful resentment against values that they believe have been imposed on them,” Neuhaus saw that the likes of Jerry Falwell had been called into existence by the radical secularists. America is an “incorrigibly religious” nation, he warned, and so it should stay, for “politics is most importantly a function of culture, and at the heart of culture is religion.” We strip the public square at our peril.
The Naked Public Square was one of the seminal books for the modern conservative movement. But it was also a deeply liberal book–at least as liberalism used to be understood. Expounding a tradition of liberal political thought about religion that runs from George Washington’s 1790 letter to the Jews of Newport, Rhode Island, through Tocqueville’s observations of the young republic, and down to Reinhold Niebuhr’s political theology, Neuhaus understood how the attempt to strip the public square derives, at last, from a disdain for the richness of life–a distaste for the democracy of difference, the clash and mingle of real human beings.
In the two decades since Neuhaus published his book, the Republicans have taken his advice to heart and found a way to speak again of God and faith in a liberal democracy. If the Democrats are serious about reclaiming the religious vote they began to abandon back in the 1970s, they might begin this holiday season by forcing themselves to say two simple words: Merry Christmas!
