Charles Krauthammer has an excellent op/ed that captures precisely the feelings of a large majority of Americans about the left's attempt to debase Christmas and empty it of meaning. Bear in mind as you read his essay that he himself is Jewish. Here are a few nuggets from his column:
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, the United States does not merely allow minority religions to exist at its sufferance. It celebrates and welcomes and honors them.
Krauthammer's essay is excellent, but we wonder if the dominant motive behind the relentless effort to reduce Christmas to a bland orgy of consumption and meaningless blather about "good will to all" is not religious insecurity but something a little different. We suspect that the primary impetus behind the move to reduce Christmas to a secular "holiday" is envy and its bitter offspring, contempt.
Envy arises from the fact that no other tradition in this country, religious or otherwise, has anything that compares with the beauty, magic, wonder, and mystery of Christmas. Contempt is the child of envy and impels those who despise Christianity to wish to see it extinguished root and branch. People whose hearts fester with envy and contempt wish to destroy for others that which they cannot have for themselves.
The irony is that those most determined to devitalize Christmas seem to be those most in need of it.
