Christmas is a celebration of many things, but most of all, of truth.
The Christ child was a threat to a violent and avaricious ancient world just as he is to a modern world drowning in lies. The greatest lie of all is each person’s belief in its own ability to control the universe — and all other humans with it. From this belief springs every form of violence and conflict, every murderous ideology, and every attempt by man to oppress man.
Religion has at times in history played a role in man’s oppression of man, and this is part of the Christmas story, too. But true and sincerely held religious belief is also the greatest threat to the lies that justify such violence.
Like Herod, the wicked king who tried to find and slay the infant Jesus, tyrants always fear the power of others’ religious belief — theocrats and ideologues alike. The former fear and loathe dissenters and minorities, suppressing religious expression, belief, and practice outside of what the state sanctions, because they perceive it as a threat to their control. But the secular ideologues are even more frightened, unable to bear the thought of a power higher than themselves directing their populations to actions they cannot manipulate.
Christians in the West should, for that reason, take this holy Christian day as a moment to pray for and express solidarity with the Uighur Muslims being imprisoned and oppressed by China’s Communist regime in Xinjiang province. The regime of Xi Jinping, paranoid about the need to prevent unrest among China’s massive population in an unpredictable information age, is bent on suppressing and snuffing out minority religions and cultures. He is committing genocide. Xi is erasing an entire civilization within China’s borders. Meanwhile, far too many Westerners who call themselves Christians and pretend to be “woke” to current events are content to sit idly by or even turn a profit as the killing continues.
Unfortunately, the irrational hatred of religion and the desire to suppress belief and practice is not confined to foreign despots or genocidal regimes. Even in the United States, it is becoming unfashionable to believe in religious freedom, even though it is the first freedom listed in the Bill of Rights.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, will not be committing genocide any time soon, but it is not encouraging to see him fume openly on Twitter about how he lacks a free hand to force every California insurance customer to pay for abortions. Federal efforts to block his policy are not about the “patriarchy,” as Newsom ridiculously claims, but about his desire to prevent religious believers from having even the privacy of the six-to-nine-inch cavity within their skulls. He will not let them even live by their own personal moral beliefs in their own private lives. So, yes, the modern, liberal idea that religion is a private matter, left to the freedom of each person, is a lie in the hands of these radical secularists. If you are a believer, then demagogues of Newsom’s ilk cannot bear the thought of letting you believe, not even privately.
Pope John Paul II, who survived the occupation of his native Poland by the Nazis and then the Soviets, observed in 1995 that true freedom “consists not in doing what we like, but in having the right to do what we ought.” The crime of the regimes he had lived under was not that they lacked honesty or integrity, but that they turned these very virtues into crimes against the state.
Like George Orwell, John Paul knew that in a world of lies, it is dangerous to insist that two plus two equals four. This Christmas, however, that task falls to every person who loves truth. No one can ever be truly free under the tyranny of enforced relativism.
