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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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Faith & Purpose

“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

Mutual Aid

In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Living Under Law

Law being too tenuous to rely upon in [Ulster and the Scottish borderlands], people developed patterns of settling differences by personal fighting and family feuds.
Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures

German Philosophy

The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be inadequate. 
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West

Knowledge

Inquiry does not start unless there is a problem... It is the problem and its characteristics revealed by analysis which guides one first to the relevant facts and then, once the relevant facts are known, to the relevant hypotheses.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities

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

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.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

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

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

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Living Law

The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital

presented by Christopher Chantrill

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