Culture Clips — December 28, 2004

Christmas and Christianity

Why Religion Remains a Mainstay of American Culture

Let me suggest that there is a link between religious freedom and the size and vigor of most American churches. We are more religious than any European state precisely because in this country there has never been a national church against which to rebel.

Matters are very different in Europe. The English were dismayed by the constant struggle between a nationally supported Catholic church and a nationally supported Anglican one, interrupted by a brief period of Puritanical rule.

The Scandinavians, when they came under the rule of Social Democratic parties, were expected to dismantle their state-supported churches, but instead they chose to make them instruments of their new welfare states governed by state-managed bureaucracies. The Swedes eliminated all religious qualifications for serving on church boards, so that, as Professors Rodney Stark and Roger Finke have pointed out, control of the Swedish state church has passed into the hands of atheists.

Since the French Revolution in the 18th century, the government has worked, with some ups and downs, toward state regulation of churches. An appointment to be a Roman Catholic bishop must be approved by the government, and an organization called the Observatory of Cults oversees "dangerous" religious groups, such as Jehovah's Witnesses and other evangelical movements. Messrs. Stark and Finke argue that state control, however weak, leads to a reduction in church affiliation.

There are European exceptions to this pattern. In Poland, the Catholic Church grew in membership and influence because it was an important part of the effort to get rid of Communist rule, and in Ireland the Catholic Church became more important as part of the struggle against the political legacy of the Potato Famine in the 19th century.

But in general, there has been in Europe very little that resembles the First Amendment to the American Constitution. Here, where the free exercise of religion is guaranteed and there is a ban on laws "respecting an establishment of religion," there has never been a national church. Without one, there is no enemy to defeat, and so there has never been a political reason to either rebel or become secular...

This fact worries many people in the Blue States just as it pleases many in the Red ones. Those who are alarmed by the extent of religious belief in this country have roused themselves to make the so-called wall of separation between church and state both higher and firmer. In insisting that we describe our late December holiday as having nothing to do with the birth of Jesus, in fighting to keep every nativity scene away from any government property, by arguing that our freedoms will be compromised by any reference to Christianity, they have succeeded only in intensifying religious beliefs among the great majority of our people who are angered by these assaults.

They would be well advised to let matters alone.

James Q. Wilson
Opinion Journal
http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110006074

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The Power of Christmas

The Battle of Christmas is becoming a major event in the current history of liberty. In city after city in the United States and Europe, a war of sorts is being declared on Jesus Christ. He has been designated persona non grata. In public life, He is officially abolished. European bureaucrats do not even want Christianity mentioned in the new European Constitution, or to have anything to do with the European Commission.

In one of our own fair cities, one may no longer speak of the "Christmas Season" — only of "Sparkle Season." Elsewhere, in personal greetings the correct phrase is no longer "Merry Christmas" but something more indirect and evasive like "Best wishes of the season."

What is going on? We seem to be returning to a degree of Christophobia, after a tremendous run of 1,669 open and happy Christmas celebrations since the very first one in 336 A.D. in Rome. After the killing of Christians by the Roman emperors had ceased, and Constantine at last removed the legal impediments to the public expression of Christianity in 313 A.D. (and, incidentally, a few years later fixed the date of Christ's birth on December 25), Christophobia faded, except for the totalitarian banishment of Christianity, and all religion, by the Soviet Union in the 20th century…

Jesus Christ taught humans to give unto Caesar what is Caesar's and unto God what is God's. One does not have to be Christian to take that lesson, or perhaps even to admit that Jesus Christ is the world's greatest teacher of the illegitimacy of totalitarian government. The very idea of everything belonging to Caesar is false in principle. The modern idea of democracy follows in the wake of this teaching of Christ.

In parallel fashion, a leading figure of Enlightenment thought in Italy today, Eugenio Scalfari, the founder and publisher of La Repubblica, has reminded readers of his own paper that Jesus Christ introduced into modern Europe the idea of the dignity of every single individual, especially the poor, the weak, and the vulnerable. That is what gave meaning to the terms Equality and Fraternity in the triadic slogan of the French Revolution. To come to the aid of the poor is an essential idea of modern democracy.

And this idea, too, springs in great vividness from the Christmas scene of the endangered infant, the poor shepherds, and the humble animals seeking shelter in the stable under the cold stars, celebrated by angels. It is the poor and the humble who are chosen by the Creator for His greatest gifts.

Michael Novak
National Review
http://www.nationalreview.com/novak/novak200412231143.asp

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Our Greatest Christmas

(Referring to the Battle of Trenton in the Revolutionary War, which began on the night of December 25, 2004)

Dining with Washington after surrendering to him at Yorktown, Gen. Charles Cornwallis, who had commanded the forces at Princeton that rushed to relieve Trenton, offered this toast: ``Fame will gather your brightest laurels rather from the banks of the Delaware than from those of the Chesapeake.'' Unfortunately, many small historians believe their function is to deny large men any laurels. [David Hackett] Fischer sternly reprimands such historians who have ``served us ill'':

``In the late twentieth century, too many scholars tried to make the American past into a record of crime and folly. Too many writers have told us we are captives of our darker selves and helpless victims of our history. It isn't so, and never was.''

One reason Americans have made so much history is that they have never believed in History. One of the unfortunate intellectual developments of the 19th century, principally in Europe, was the transformation of history into a proper noun. It denoted a vast impersonal force with its own unfolding logic, governed by iron laws of social development. Marxism was the most consequential doctrine of historical inevitability, but there were others.

 Such theories, which are varieties of ``historicism,'' induce fatalism by diminishing mankind's sense of agency. The theories mock the idea of great persons, and the belief that the free choices of small groups could knock History out of its preordained grooves.

Such ideas have largely lost their ability to seize the imaginations of people other than intellectuals, who often are the last to learn things. Still, it is exhilarating to be reminded by historians like Fischer just how radically wrong the historicists were, and are.