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Excluding Christianity Won't Work, Liberals

by Christopher Chantrill
December 15, 2003 at 3:00 am

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EVERY YEAR around Christmas, the left moves the yard markers a little further on its campaign to remove Christianity from the public square. This year, some tender shoots in the IU-Purdue University at Indianapolis School of Law, students and a professor on sabbatical, complained about a Christmas tree display in the lobby of the school. And at an unnamed department at the University of California, Davs, they have decided to rename the “Holiday” party as the “Annual” party.

They really are something, our liberals, aren’t they? If we celebrate something that liberals don’t like, then we have to stop because liberals feel excluded. But woe unto anyone who doesn’t celebrate what liberals want to celebrate. Because then you are a sexist, a racist, or a homophobe. Then you are too eurocentric, and lacking in sensitivity for other cultures and lifestyles. Then you are guilty of failing to celebrate diversity.

Remember back in the Seventies, when radical students were burning, baby burning, and feminists were the roughest, toughest kids on the block. Then they made a fuss out of being “in your face.” Now all of a sudden, liberals are desperately fragile. They might break if they have to pass by a Nativity scene or be confronted by a Christmas tree as they hurry through a lobby on the way out to Starbucks. What could have gone wrong? How could the robust demonstrators and activists have withered into the shrinking violets of today? Is it Rush Limbaugh? Is it Jerry Falwell? Who could have reduced our rambunctious rebels of yesteryear into simpering wallflowers?

Now it’s conservatives that are playing at Rambunctious Rebels. No sooner had the news broken about the excluded victims of IU Law School than talk show host Greg Browning organized a Christmas Tree Brigade to circle IU Law with trucks, vans, SUVs and Christmas trees. “HONK IF YOU/LOVE/CHRISTMAS TREES/END PC NOW” said one protester’s reader board.

Of course, conservatives should fight these hypocritical liberals and expose them to the klieg lights of ridicule and publicity. It is good for pusillanimous university bureaucrats to have to worry about angry conservatives; they should have to work for their pensions. But driving Christmas out of the public square is not going to help advance the progessive millennium. Tactically, it may score a few points, but strategically, it’s meaningless. After all, the American elite has never really liked Christmas anyway. A generation ago they pulled the plug on outdoor Christmas lights. It took a decade before outdoor lights came back, bigger than ever.

Nor will the elite succeed in defeating the target behind Christmas, enthusiastic Christianity. Christianity has never needed elite sponsorship. In fact, it seems to thrive on elite disapproval

In the eighteenth century, the powers-that-be strongly disapproved of the Great Awakening and the mesmerizing preaching of George Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards. In the early nineteenth century they complained about the revivalism of Lyman Beecher and Timothy Dwight, and sneered at the uneducated Methodist circuit-riders who doubled the rate of church adherence in half a century. In the latter half of the nineteenth century the Protestant elite tried everything to head the Catholics off at the pass, including a frankly anti-Catholic public school system. So Archbishop “Dagger” John Hughes and the New York Irish built their own schools, and erected Saint Patrick’s Cathedral right on Fifth Avenue so that the Astors and the Morgans couldn’t miss it.

In our own time we have seen another eruption of Christian enthusiasm, beginning about the time in 1965 that Time magazine declared, a century after Nietzsche, that God was Dead.

Why is it, liberals, that after a century of your Social Gospel, people still flock to enthusiastic Christianity, and a new Pentecostal church opens in New York City every three weeks? Why is it that the Anglican Church in Nigeria has more members than in Britain and the United States together? Why is it that people in Latin America are increasingly walking past the Catholic Church next door to city hall in the Plaza de Armas to the storefront Iglesia Cristiana Pentecostes a couple of blocks away down a side street. Why have up to 80 million Chinese people started worshipping Christ in the “house church” movement?

While you are pondering that, why don’t you just leave Christmas alone? Otherwise in twenty years presidential candidate Chelsea Clinton may find herself echoing Howard Dean, and promising to take our Christmas trees back from Sean Hannity Jr. and Rick Warren Jr.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

Buy his Road to the Middle Class.

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Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.”  —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches... they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Class War

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Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
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Conversion

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Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
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Drang nach Osten

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E. G. West, Education and the State

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“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

presented by Christopher Chantrill

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