Goodbye Christmas?

[Zhukov]

Goodbye Christmas?
Charles Krauthammer


December 17, 2004


"Holiday celebrations where Christmas music is being sung make people feel different, and because it is such a majority, it makes the minority feel uncomfortable.''
-- Mark Brownstein, parent, Maplewood, N.J., supporting the school board's banning of religious music from holiday concerts.

"You want my advice? Go back to Bulgaria.''
-- Humphrey Bogart, in "Casablanca.''

WASHINGTON -- It is Christmas time, and what would Christmas be without the usual platoon of annoying pettifoggers rising annually to strip Christmas of any Christian content. With some success:

School districts in New Jersey and Florida ban Christmas carols. The mayor of Somerville, Mass., apologizes for ''mistakenly'' referring to the town's ''holiday party'' as a ''Christmas party.'' The Broward and Fashion malls in South Florida put up a Hanukkah menorah but no nativity scene. The manager of one of the malls explains: Hanukkah commemorates a battle and not a religious event, although he hastens to add ''I really don't know a lot about it.'' He does not. Hanukkah commemorates a miracle, and there is no event more ''religious'' than a miracle.

The attempts to de-Christianize Christmas are as absurd as they are relentless. The United States today is the most tolerant and diverse society in history. It celebrates all faiths with an open heart and open-mindedness that, compared to even the most advanced countries in Europe, are unique.

Yet more than 80 percent of Americans are Christian and probably 95 percent of Americans celebrate Christmas. Christmas Day is an official federal holiday, the only day of the entire year when, for example, the Smithsonian museums are closed. Are we to pretend that Christmas is nothing but an orgy of commerce in celebration of ... what? The winter solstice?

I personally like Christmas because, as a day that for me is otherwise ordinary, I get to do nice things, such as covering for as many gentile colleagues as I could when I was a doctor at Massachusetts General Hospital. I will admit that my generosity had its rewards: I collected enough chits on Christmas Day to get reciprocal coverage not just for Yom Kippur, but for both days of Rosh Hashana and my other major holiday, Opening Day at Fenway.

Mind you, I've got nothing against Hanukkah, although I am constantly amused -- and gratified -- by how American culture has gone out of its way to inflate the importance of Hanukkah, easily the least important of Judaism's seven holidays, into a giant event replete with cards, presents and public commemorations as a creative way to give Jews their Christmas equivalent.

Some Americans get angry at parents who want to ban carols because they tremble that their kids might feel ''different'' and ''uncomfortable'' should they, God forbid, hear Christian music sung at their school. I feel pity. What kind of fragile religious identity have they bequeathed their children that it should be threatened by exposure to carols?

I'm struck by the fact that you almost never find Orthodox Jews complaining about a Christmas creche in the public square. That is because their children, steeped in the richness of their own religious tradition, know who they are and are not threatened by Christians celebrating their religion in public. They are enlarged by it.

It is the more deracinated members of religious minorities, brought up largely ignorant of their own traditions, whose religious identity is so tenuous that they feel the need to be constantly on guard against displays of other religions -- and who think the solution to their predicament is to prevent the other guy from displaying his religion, rather than learning a bit about their own.

To insist that the overwhelming majority of this country stifle its religious impulses in public so that minorities can feel ''comfortable'' not only understandably enrages the majority, but commits two sins. The first is profound ungenerosity toward a majority of fellow citizens who have shown such generosity of spirit toward minority religions.

The second is the sin of incomprehension -- a failure to appreciate the uniqueness of the communal American religious experience. Unlike, for example, the famously tolerant Ottoman Empire or the generally tolerant Europe of today, America does not merely allow minority religions to exist at its sufferance. It celebrates and welcomes and honors them.

America transcended the idea of mere toleration in 1790 in Washington's letter to the Newport synagogue, one of the lesser known glories of the Founding: ''It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights.''

More than two centuries later, it is time that members of religious (and anti-religious) minorities, as full citizens of this miraculous republic, transcend something too: petty defensiveness.

Merry Christmas. To all.

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/charleskrauthammer/ck20041217.shtml

 

[Bonnie]

Gotta love Charlie!!

 

[dilloduck]

I would think it may wind up that part of Christmas may also be a miraculous battle---The Battle that Saved Christmas.

 

[Merlin1047]

Pettifogger????

Wow. Had to look that one up.

 

[dmp]

Excellent!

 

[insein]

This is part of a more underlying problem with this nation to day. The minority feels their rights out weigh the majority.

Just look at this election. 4 million vote differential between Bush and Kerry yet the minority thinks that they deserve the victory.

How about all this religious bullshit. 77% of americans consider themselves christians yet we have the most vocal efforts from the minority of atheists, muslims and jews trying to eliminate christian values from this country.

The whole PC culture is based on the minority outwieghs the majority. If one person is offended by something, the whole group has to bend their will and be offended so that the one person who spoke up isnt offended anymore.

This is what is wrong with our country today and its driving me mad.

 

[Trigg]

This is part of a more underlying problem with this nation to day. The minority feels their rights out weigh the majority.

Just look at this election. 4 million vote differential between Bush and Kerry yet the minority thinks that they deserve the victory.

How about all this religious bullshit. 77% of americans consider themselves christians yet we have the most vocal efforts from the minority of atheists, muslims and jews trying to eliminate christian values from this country.

The whole PC culture is based on the minority outwieghs the majority. If one person is offended by something, the whole group has to bend their will and be offended so that the one person who spoke up isnt offended anymore.

This is what is wrong with our country today and its driving me mad.

Things may be getting better though. I've seen more articles in the paper and elsewhere written on this topic than in previous years. People are getting sick of the stores and schools trying to take christ out of christmas.

 

[manu1959]

i thought i had the right to freedom of religion? what are the PC libs doing to my rights? where the hell is the aclu on this one

 

[Adam's Apple]

Thanks for posting the Krauthammer article. I had heard talk about it on Fox and was going to try to find it on the Internet. Other Jews who work for the Fox Network indicated that they do not feel the celebration of Christmas is a threat to their religion in any way. They put up Christmas lights, play the Christmas music, attend the programs at their children's schools, and get involved in the celebration to the extent that they can. That's how the American "melting pot" is supposed to work--until the ACLU came along with their agenda to replace the majority with the minority and their ensuing lawsuits to make it so.

 

[Bonnie]

I would think it may wind up that part of Christmas may also be a miraculous battle---The Battle that Saved Christmas.

He does work in mysterious ways!!!