Whose Country Is It, Anyway?
Half a century ago, American children were schooled in Aesop's fables. Among the more famous of these were "The Fox and the Grapes" and "The Tortoise and the Hare."
Particularly appropriate this Christmas season, and every Christmas lately, is Aesop's fable of "The Dog in the Manger."
The tale is about a dog who decides to take a nap in the manger. When the ox, who has worked all day, comes back to eat some straw, the dog barks loudly, threatens to bite him and drives him from his manger.
The lesson the fable teaches is that it is malicious and wicked to deny a fellow creature what you yourself do not want and cannot even enjoy.
What brings the fable to mind is this year's crop of Christmas-haters, whose numbers have grown since the days when it was only the village atheist or the ACLU pest who sought to kill Christmas.
The problem with these folks is not simply that they detest Christmas and what it represents, but that they must do their best, or worst, to ensure Christians do not enjoy the season and holy day they love.
As a Washington Times editorial relates, the number of anti-Christian bigots is growing, and their malevolence is out of the closet:
"In Leesburg, Va., a Santa-suit-clad skeleton was nailed to a cross. ... In Santa Monica, atheists were granted 18 of 21 plots in a public park allotted for holiday displays and ... erected signs mocking religion. In the Wisconsin statehouse, a sign informs visitors, 'Religion is but myth and superstition that hardens hearts and enslaves minds.' A video that has gone viral on YouTube shows denizens of Occupy D.C. spewing gratuitous hatred of a couple who dared to appropriate a small patch of McPherson Square to set up a living Nativity scene."
People who indulge in such conduct invariably claim to be champions of the First Amendment, exercising their right of free speech to maintain a separation of church and state.
They are partly right. The First Amendment does protect what they are doing. But what they are doing is engaging in hate speech and anti-Christian bigotry. For what is the purpose of what they are about, if not to wound, offend, insult and mock fellow Americans celebrating the happiest day of their calendar year?
Consider what this day means to a believing Christian.
It is a time and a day set aside to celebrate the nativity, the birth of Christ, whom Christians believe to be the Son of God and their Savior who gave his life on the cross to redeem mankind and open the gates of heaven.
Even if a man disbelieves this, why would he interfere with or deny his fellow countrymen, three in four of whom still profess to be Christians, their right to celebrate in public this joyous occasion?
This mockery and hatred of Christmas testifies not only to the character of those who engage in it, it says something as well about who is winning the culture war for the soul of America.
Not long ago, the Supreme Court (1892) and three U.S. presidents—Woodrow Wilson, Harry Truman and Jimmy Carter—all declared America to be a "Christian nation."
They did not mean that any particular denomination had been declared America's national religion—indeed, that was ruled out in the Constitution—but that we were predominantly a Christian people.
And so we were born.
Around 1790, America was 99 percent Protestant, 1 percent Catholic, with a few thousands Jews. The Irish immigration from 1845 to 1850 brought hundreds of thousands more Catholics to America. The Great Wave of immigration from 1890 to 1920 brought millions of Southern and Eastern Europeans, mostly Catholic and Jews. As late as 1990, 85 percent of all Americans described themselves as Christians.
And here one must pose a question.
How did America's Christians allow themselves to be dispossessed of a country their fathers had built for them?
How did America come to be a nation where not only have all Christian prayers, pageants, holidays and holy days been purged from all government schools and public institutions, but secularism has taken over those schools, while Christians are mocked at Christmas in ways that would be declared hate crimes were it done to other religious faiths or ethnic minorities?
Was it a manifestation of tolerance and maturity, or pusillanimity, that Christians allowed themselves to be robbed of their inheritance to a point where Barack Obama could assert without contradiction that we Americans "do not consider ourselves to be a Christian nation"?
What are these Christmas-bashers, though still a nominal minority, saying to Christians with their mockery and ridicule of the celebration of the birth of Christ?
"This isn't your country anymore. It is our country now."
The question for Christians is a simple one: Do they have what it takes to take America back?
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No, Christians, at least the fundamentalists and the evangelicals, particularly those of the dispensationalist persuasion, will not take the country back because they have taken the thirteenth chapter of Romans out of its biblical and historical context and placed it in the context of modernity, a context antithetical to the one from which and in which St. Paul was speaking. They have rejected the hierarchies of creation - God to His creation, father to family, bishop to church, magistrate to the local commonwealth - and have replaced it with the abstractions of Rousseau, Locke and Hobbes. They hold to the autonomous individual, to the abstractions of life, liberty and property in the Lockean sense thereof, and to the abstract corporation of the Hobbesian. There allegiance is either to themselves, i.e. they can interpret Scripture as they will in its "Christian" context, or to the state. They have lost all notion of subsidiarity and the authoritative and intervening commonwealths which relate in subsidiarity. Churches are best with the pledge to the United States Flag, a pledge written by a defrocked Baptist preacher who was essentially a national socialist. They sing the blasphemous song - The Battle Hymn of the Republic - and in their dispensationalist framework they have more allegiance to Israel than they do to the Christ.
If Christians have anything to do with taking the country back, it will not come from the aforementioned groups.
"Around 1790, America was 99 percent Protestant, 1 percent Catholic, with a few thousands Jews."
That seems to answer Pat's question about why America is not Christian. It never had a strong Christian foundation. I view Protestantism as a rebellion against the Church.
Re: Mr. Peters above...
At the risk (admittedly large!) of sounding like a talk radio sycophant - ditto! Your post is most insightful.
I read today of the apparent rage that some HBO personality - Maher - has triggered among those on the Christian Right for his latest stupid utterance, this one apparently concerning QB Tim Tebow; there is talk of boycotting his show or canceling HBO. Of course to me this begs the question - what serious Christian would ever be involved in watching either Maher or his filthy network in the first place?
Mr. Colin,
Maher I know almost nothing of. I watched part of one of his shows once, back in the days when I watched a little television which I have not done in several years. In the few minutes in which I watched him, he exuded the common, the vulgar, the profane, the obscene.
I am afraid, with all due respect to Mr. Tebow, that what I have heard of his words and actions, "heard" because I do not watch professional football nor read the sports pages, smacks of a pornographic as well as a sentimental manifestation of Christianity. I could be wrong since I have no first hand knowledge of his actions or his words.
However, if winning back our country is something which Christians should be doing, then the existence of Mr. Maher and the works of Mr. Tebow, assuming I understand them correctly, give us little hope. Perhaps we should as Christians be more worried about playing our role as redeemed creatures and agents of our Lord to the end of His coming Kingdom. If the country is saved, it will be a byproduct of that duty.
Well, all I can say is that it is possible to take offense, but not give it.
Of course you won't live up to the personal standards of every stranger you meet, so it's not really possible to remain indignant at what every passing stranger says to you.
Why can't the same hold true for every bit of public posturing? What one would not mind when one or two people say it is something that one need not mind when a large organized group of people say it. Right? Wrong? Well?
"Around 1790, America was 99 percent Protestant, 1 percent Catholic, with a few thousands Jews."
That seems to answer Pat's question about why America is not Christian. It never had a strong Christian foundation. I view Protestantism as a rebellion against the Church.
Ever been to France?
On the other hand, that the non-practicing are reluctant to identify as Christian even in a confessional and cultural sense is definitely truer in the areas over which Calvinism held more sway. Holland is the most extreme example. My own anecdotal encounters suggest that this principle seems to hold true in Geneva and in certain sectors of Northern Ireland, as well.
It is also true that Calvinism made some notable historical attempts in France, although France does at this point have a large unbaptized population and in Catholic areas this is generally the acid test for any sort of remote confessional identification. Even so, most people here fully expect to see "crèches" (Nativity scenes) everywhere about this time of year and no one wants to miss out on the Galette des Rois (that's a nice little Epiphany cake for 6 January).
Mr. Moses, wow France sounds yet kind of nice. But the Muslim 'yutes' still gang rape white vomen riding alone on the metro. And the Jewish owned media still brainwashes in behalf of its own perceived interests. This is why there can be only one religio-politicus per nation per civilization. The last 100 years have proven that.
Precision: the people have been brainwashed top-down by successive governmental efforts and schools. Also, delinquency is on the rise among all youths, probably due to a lethal combination of broken families and bleak economic prospects.
Off Topic - Uh oh Dr Fleming, your Ron Paul piece at the Daily Mail seems to have vanished - link broken. Technical issues, or was it washed down the memory hole by the Daily Mail?
I wrote a note to the editor asking him if some of it was liable to be misunderstood. He thought it was likely, and we took it off for a few hours during which I tightened the argument and clarified my position. It is now back up. It was my idea, and they treated me as I like to think I treat my writers.
By the way, Richard Dawkins was asked a few questions on whether he has any opposition to Christmas, being a religious holiday. He said no, and bluntly said that since Britain was a "culturally Christian" country, there was no purpose in opposing a strongly established national tradition. He did not support attempts to stop Christmas.
So...there you have it? There is no atheist movement, no atheist agenda, no organized atheist campaign to undermine anything. It's just the pettiness of some fringe groups described in the column, and 99% of the people mind their own business. And 1% rabble-rousers are always going to be there.
Good to know atheists too are with the other 99% at the bottom. Darn the 1% they always win, by tagging along with the .01% at the frigid pinnacle. Many are called, but few are frozen? (humor) ... Let's see if I can find something related in Shakespeare with some gravitas? Maybe this - "Yet eyes this cunning want to grace their art: They draw but what they see, know not the heart." 2012 should either be anticlimactic or monumental; probably the former?