Does Christmas Matter?
by Donald Devine
Issue 146 - December 23, 2009

What difference does Christmas make? Are its symbols of God, morality and religion of political interest to anyone beyond the religious right and seasonal retailers?

The Founders thought so. George Washington famously warned in his Farewell Address that the Constitution presupposed popular morality and even more that “reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.” Indeed, all of the American Founders thought pretty much the same, including Thomas Jefferson, who while proposing a separation of church and state thought religion the only solid foundation for freedom.

Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis; a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God? That they are not violated but with his wrath?

Even most theorists of a free society as understood by the Founders who did not hold orthodox religious views from Adam Smith in 1759 to the 20 th Century’s F.A. Hayek thought some traditional moral system was essential. Frank Meyer, the philosopher Ronald Reagan considered the major synthesizer of the doctrine that became modern conservatism, conceded that if the United States no longer held the traditional moral beliefs of its civilization, it would be impossible to support or sustain the American Constitution and its consequent freedom.

True, there has been great disagreement about what kind of religion and morality was required. Mr. Jefferson predicted in 1822 that "there is not a young man now living in the U.S. who will not die a Unitarian." While unitarianism did capture the Ivy League by the end of that century, only a miniscule proportion of American young men and women adhere to it today. Indeed, it quickly lost to out-and-out secularism in Old Ivy and in the Unitarian Church itself. What system of morality has persevered? To the deep consternation of many of the intellectual elite today, well over 90% of Americans believe in God - with 78% identifying as Christian and 10% aligning with other traditional faiths such as Judaism – while only 10% consider themselves as atheistic, agnostic, secular, Unitarian or nothing.

How deeply these beliefs are and need to be held and how traditional the values they identify with are, is another question. The prestigious and substantive Pew Forum surveys do show that about 40% in the U.S. attend religious services weekly – and almost all go occasionally during a year (not counting weddings and funerals), including even 27% of those without a religion. Critically, a majority of Americans say religion is “very” important in their lives and 78% say it is at least “somewhat” important, including 41 percent of those not identifying with a formal religion. Three fourths of Americans pray at least weekly.

Well, what about other free societies, such as in Europe? It is true that church attendance is only about ten percent for most of those countries, although Poland and Ireland are higher than the U.S. at about half of the population. Yet, even there when asked their beliefs, including choices of atheist, agnostic or “no religion,” in Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Norway, Finland and Denmark over 90% say they are Christian as do 88% in Switzerland, 83% in Britain, 82% in Italy, 76% in Germany, 71% in France 71%, and even 68% in Sweden. Non-Christian religions add from a 9 percent high in France down to 6 percent in Britain. Those with no religion represent 18% in Sweden, 17% in Germany, 16% in France, and 12% in Britain. On the other hand, over ninety percent of Europeans say they pray regularly.

Take France. Its revolution began the break with Christian religion, even outlawing it for a while, and it remains the archetypical post-Christian nation. Yet, following the recent 57% approval of the Swiss referendum forbidding new Muslim minarets (by itself an unexpected event in this similarly “secular” nation), French President Nicholas Sarkozy announced his country would conduct a dialogue on national identity including religious beliefs. While trying to reassure French Muslims so they “feel they are citizens like any other, enjoying the same rights,” he continued: "But I also want to tell them that in our country, where Christian civilization has left such a deep trace, where republican values are an integral part of our national identity, everything that could be taken as a challenge to this heritage and its values would condemn to failure the necessary inauguration of a French Islam." So, Christianity has some sort of special place even in France! Even 78% in Sweden pay the “religious fee” or tax they could avoid if they claimed no membership in a church.

Still, European religiosity generally seems weak. Sarkozy also told Christians and others not to be ostentatious in their religious practices. Indeed, in the Swiss case, its bishops and the Vatican opposed the referendum limits, seeing them as restrictions on religious freedom generally. By contrast , most of the Muslim nations protesting the Swiss vote greatly restrict Christianity, if not outlaw it. Both the Swiss and Muslims fear the competition. In 2003, Pope John Paul II explained that Europe had lost its “Christian memory” and that this was “accompanied by a kind of fear of the future. Tomorrow is often presented as something bleak and uncertain. The future is viewed more with dread than with desire. Among the troubling indications of this are the inner emptiness that grips many people and the loss of meaning in life.” Surely, a confident religious belief system would not be intimidated by a mere 4% Muslim population in Switzerland or even 7% in France. Is such a fear a manifestation of the moral weakness the Founders feared?

The Founders considered moral beliefs critical not only for freedom and domestic tranquility but for the moral strength to confront opposing beliefs, especially dangerous ones that threaten force. Today, even the idea of confronting a foe by rational argument on moral grounds is ridiculed as hopelessly naïve. Only power – whether force or government regulation - is thought able to settle matters. America’s Founders agreed that power would decide the fate of their moral commitment - “our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor” - but they thought “a decent respect for the opinions of mankind” required a rational defense of their beliefs and actions based upon the “laws of nature and nature’s God.”

Who today would have the moral courage if given the opportunity to try to convince Osama bin Laden, for example, that his view of God was wrong and that a Christian view would be better for him and his people? Most people would consider this rather odd. Yet, we have just learned from James Mann’s new The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan that the former president tried to convert Mikhail Gorbachev, then head of the atheistic and repressive Soviet Union, to Christianity at the series of summits they held between 1985 and 1988. Notes taken at the time by two aides have been recently declassified and are now public at the Reagan Library as proof. President Reagan was convinced that underneath his avowed atheism Gorbachev harbored religious beliefs and could be persuaded appealing to them. Many years later in 2008, the former Soviet head was seen praying at the tomb of St. Francis at Assisi. In any event, he was convinced and signed a treaty substantially reducing nuclear weapons.

We also now know Reagan was himself religious – indeed historian and biographer Patrick Diggins considers him almost a religious fundamentalist, raised as such by his mother. His religion was less formal and broadly Christian than of a specific denomination but his Reagan Diaries makes it clear it was nonetheless deeply held, although he could also be serenely pragmatic as is made clear in Craig Shirley’s Reagan’s Rendezvous. In the nearby photo, notice the picture of the Christmas Incarnation on the wall of Reagan’s boyhood home in Tampico Illinois, looking down on him throughout his formative years. After he was seriously wounded by a potential assassin, President Reagan even became convinced that God had saved him to rid the world from nuclear annihilation, as is amply documented in the Diaries and Martin and Annelise Anderson’s new book, Reagan’s Secret War.

Such a deep moral outlook by such a political leader today seems inconceivable. Still, even widespread moral courage would not be enough to secure the liberties that concerned Jefferson. The Swiss referendum winners were immediately threatened with the possibility that the popular vote would be overturned by the European Union human rights court. Likewise, in the U.S., Federal courts routinely overturn local legislation and referenda as violating a supposedly Constitutional requirement for a “naked public square” that by exclusion would only allow a secularist or even anti-religious message to be heard, overruling the local governments and associations the Founders expected to deal with such matters. Politically, Christmas is most noted each year as the season of multiple Federal court cases removing religious icons from town squares in the name of free political expression.

As one celebrates the holiday this year, it might be appropriate to ponder why there is still greater freedom in the U.S. than in more secular Europe and even more so than under the other moral traditions worldwide? Could Washington and Jefferson have been correct that it is the greater status of religion in the minds of the people and its greater free exercise here? By refusing to accept the dictates of the courts as final by forcing more cases on Christmas displays every year are not local peoples and communities continuing to exercise their freedoms against the “tyranny over these states” Jefferson and his Declaration of Independence decried as an offense against the liberty endowed to them by their Creator?

Between Christmas Eve and day, eight of ten Americans will exercise their liberty by going to church. Washington and Jefferson may rest content – if the courts and government will allow them to.

Donald Devine, the editor of Conservative Battleline Online, was the director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management from 1981 to 1985 under Ronald Reagan and is Senior Scholar at Bellevue University’s Center for American Vision and Values.

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