It should go without saying that America is a Christian nation. It was founded as such and you could fairly say that there would not be an America today if America had not been Christian from the start. Go back and look at the Founders—today’s secularists wouldn’t believe some of the stuff George Washington said. In his Farewell Address, for example, he warned the country about straying from Christian virtue:
Washington might sound like a Baptist preacher to modern ears, but to the Founders, the Christian underpinnings of their project made perfect sense: A virtuous society does not need a million different laws to compel moral behavior; and having a million different laws is incompatible with freedom. They understood that you couldn’t have liberty without virtue. And that you can’t have virtue without God laying down some markers. In order for men to have rights that are inalienable and truths that are self-evident, the rights and truths have to come from someplace other than man.
Washington often made this case explicitly: “[R]eason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle,” he wrote. The other Founders, not exactly known for being Bible thumpers, agreed. “Our Constitution,” wrote John Adams, “was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
At our country’s best moments—the Founding, the Revolution, the Civil War, suffrage, the civil rights movement—it was led by Christian ideals. Today it’s a little less so. You may have noticed. The last several decades have seen a creeping secularization led not by the people, but imposed by the country’s elites—especially our judges. It’s hard to say exactly when it started, but at some point in the middle of the 20th century, American jurists decided that the Founders had made a terrible mistake in designing a country engineered around the Judeo-Christian tradition. And they figured that since they were the ones who had discovered this error, they might as well re-engineer society themselves.
Let me give you an example of how things worked before the change. In 1931 a Minnesota man named Clarence Christensen went to get a vasectomy. The doctor went snip-snip. And then, a few months later, Mrs. Christensen wound up pregnant. Because Clarence lived in Minnesota, and not Nazareth, he had more options than Saint Joseph. He decided to sue the doctor who botched his vasectomy for “wrongful birth.” And his case went all the way to the Minnesota Supreme Court, where the justices slapped him down. The judges agreed that the vasectomy was unsuccessful, but they refused to accept that Christensen had suffered any damage as a result, because the birth of any child was a “blessed”—their word—event.
Can you imagine a judicial verdict like this today—not just a verdict that takes as given the Judeo-Christian assumptions about family life, but that dares to sanctify any human activity as “blessed”? Of course not.
Just a few years later, in 1947, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a verdict in Everson v. Board of Education that created a “wall of separation” between church and state, which was somehow supposed to emanate (or penumbrate) from the Establishment Clause. The particulars of Everson were decidedly low-stakes—the case was about whether a public school district could provide busing for kids who went to private schools. But the Supreme Court went out of its way to raise the stakes to the limit, concluding that since private schools might be religious, then having the district carry the costs of busing kids to their parochial school was tantamount to the establishment of a state religion. Which is crazy.
That was just the start. From the late ’40s through the early ’60s, a series of cases dismantled the consensus on religion, virtue, and the state which had held since the Founding. In McCollum v. Board of Education, the court ruled that public schools couldn’t carve out time in the school day for religious instruction, even if it was non-compulsory, even if the teachers were unpaid volunteers, even if parents consented to it. In Abington School District v. Schempp, the justices decreed that schools couldn’t have the Bible read aloud, full stop. And if George Washington and John Adams weren’t down with that? Well, they could suck eggs.
After the ’60s, things got really out of control. So now we have Griswold, and Roe, and Obergefell, and a host of other legal decisions in which a handful of people wearing black robes retrofitted America as a secular state. An aggressively secular state.
As the philosophers understand, the law does not simply demarcate. It teaches. After a couple generations, people started to intuit from the new legal regime what society was “supposed” to look like. And they started to become more secular themselves. I could show you the Pew data, but the truth is, you don’t need the numbers. You can see it all around you.
And this secular state has not turned out to be the humanist paradise everyone said it would be. With each new bit of judicial tinkering—no-fault divorce, a universal abortion right, same-sex “marriage”—we have moved further into a world of unhappy outcomes.
At every step of the way, conservatives have cranked the klaxon alarm in warning, but we’ve seen the emergence of what the writer Rod Dreher calls the Law of Merited Impossibility: That is, conservatives warn of some consequence sure to result from the latest bit of social engineering. The secular progressives mock them, saying that such a thing is impossible. And then, five or ten years later, this new thing isn’t just possible, but liberals are demanding that it be compulsory. Think about the illegitimacy rate—which is now over 40 percent. Think about late-term abortions and the gruesome manner in which Planned Parenthood traffics in the body parts of the babies it kills. Think about gay marriage—which in the mid-1990s, liberals insisted was a figment of the conservative imagination. Where are we headed next? Not long ago, liberals insisted that it was impossible that polygamy and polyamory would ever be legalized, or that churches that decline to perform same-sex marriages could lose their tax-exempt status. Both of those ideas are now talked about openly on the left. Where are they headed? Just wait. You’ll see.
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What motivates the left in its quest to stamp out America’s religious tradition is, at heart, a devotion to relativism. Years ago Pope Benedict XVI, made the convincing case that modern relativism emerged from the failure of Marxism. The Marxists had promised a universally valid formula for the configuration of history that was based not on theology or morality, but on objective science. Yet science failed the Marxists. When it did, Benedict wrote, “The failure of the only scientifically based system for solving human problems could only justify nihilism or, in any case, total relativism.”
Some on the left did indeed become nihilists. But the bulk of the liberal movement instead fell under the sway of relativism. And it’s easy to understand why. As Benedict observed, “relativism appears to be the philosophical foundation of democracy.” In a superficial sense, the social and political arenas demand a certain right to relativism. That’s how co-existence is achieved.
The problem is that relativism is a beast with an insatiable appetite and it quickly outgrew its confines. We now live under, as Benedict put it, “a dictatorship of relativism that does not recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one’s own ego and desires.”
I say all of this so you understand that the secular left’s quarrel with virtue and religion isn’t personal. For them, it’s just business. They want a relativistic world and the big impediment to it is the Big Guy. Relativism and theism can never sit well together; not for long.
When you look around at America today, it’s hard not to be impressed by the scope of the left’s victory. In barely three generations, they’ve managed to overthrow 200 years of culture. While it’s one thing to have a cultural revolution positioned against decadence and failure—those things happen all the time, often with frightening rapidity—this revolution was conducted against the most successful culture in the history of human civilization. And they routed it just the same.
There’s just one thing standing in the way of complete victory. And that’s Christmas.
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Christmas is intrinsic to the American character, both in the gauche, free-market sense, and also the sense of self-image—everyone wants to believe himself to be charitable and peaceable and kind. You can’t beat Christmas with a stick.
As such, it’s the last fortress of Judeo-Christian ethics in America. It’s the Alamo. Though that’s not really an apt metaphor, because the Alamo is where brave men fought and died. Christmas is actually a redoubt from which we can rebuild the culture. You might even call it a rock. A mighty fortress. A sure foundation.
The left understands this. Which is why they declared war on it.
The scope of this “war on Christmas” was popularized over the years by our professional culture warriors.. Every December Bill O’Reilly used to point to examples of private citizens and government officials doing their best to push Christmas into the closet. But just because it was Bill O’Reilly hawking the war on Christmas doesn’t mean it isn’t real.
There was the governor of Rhode Island rechristening—if you’ll pardon the expression—the Christmas tree in the state house as a “holiday tree.” There were the billboards put up by the group American Atheists urging children to “skip church” because Christmas is a “fairy tale.” And from sea to shining sea, towns and schools have been bullied into airbrushing Christmas from the public square. Just to give you a sampling: There’s the elementary school in Oklahoma that banned any “Christmas-themed songs” from its “December Play.” Then there’s the town in North Carolina that decided to take down a nativity scene it had displayed in front of the courthouse every December for generations after a couple atheists complained about it. A town in Indiana had a similar problem with its nativity scene and declined to take it down—so they’ve endured lawsuit after lawsuit from the ACLU and a group called the “Freedom From Religion Foundation” ever since. Please understand that this is just a thimbleful of seawater from a vast, roiling ocean.
For a long while, liberals tried ignoring Christmas, thinking that after relativism had subsumed ideas about Judeo-Christian virtue in the wider culture, Christmas would wither away. When that didn’t work, they tried creating alternatives to it. You’ve heard of “Kwanzaa,” right? Ever wonder where this holiday came from? It was invented in 1965 by a black-power activist named Maulana Karenga (neé Ron Everett) who conceived of it as a way to “[G]ive Blacks an alternative to the existing holiday and give Blacks an opportunity to celebrate themselves and their history, rather than simply imitate the practice of the dominant society.” Years later, after serving time in prison for kidnapping and torturing two women, he tried to revise history, saying “Kwanzaa was not created to give people an alternative to their own religion or religious holiday.”
Not that anybody got the memo. Kwanzaa is a nakedly political, socially engineered conceit—and as such very few people actually “celebrate” it. The best guess is that it’s observed by somewhere between 500,000 and 2 million people in the United States (though the numbers are so small as to make accurate measurement impossible). But that’s beside the point. Schools and towns across the country eagerly put Kwanzaa right up there next to Christmas and Hannukah and the winter solstice (which is celebrated by the roughly 350,000 wiccans and pagans in America) to suggest that these holidays are all interchangeable and whatever your faith tradition is, it’s just a matter of taste.
But that didn’t work either. Kwanzaa became a punchline, because everyone understands that the next person they meet who’s excitedly looking forward to Kwanzaa will be the first. So the left decided to be more aggressive, and try to push Christmas as far away from the public square as possible. And at the same time, when Christians point out these attacks every year, people on the left chuckle and deny that there is any campaign against Christmas. Which is preposterous. Like the sympathizers who insisted on the innocence of Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs, such people are either liars or dupes.
Well, that’s not very Christmassy of me. But then, the dictatorship of relativism did grow out of the ashes of socialism and sometimes it as though the Marxists, like the poor, will always be with us.
So what’s to be done? We should defend Christmas. Actively. Because it’s the one front of the culture war I can guarantee you that you’ll win. Every time. Raise holy heck whenever your kids’ school tries to quash the singing of “Joy to the World.” That’s what parents did when York Preparatory Academy in Rock Hill, South Carolina, tried to ban the hymn from their winter concert. The school backed down. In Frisco, Texas, a PTA member and the principal tried to ban not just a tree and the words “Merry Christmas,” but even the colors red and green from the kids “winter party” at Nichols Elementary. The community fought back and won.
Taken individually, these incidents appear small and unimportant. They’re not. Christmas is the last bulwark of public virtue in America. If it falls, all is lost. But if it stands, then it will eventually topple the dictatorship of relativism, just as it did the dictatorships of the last century.
