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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
Not surprisingly, fair-minded outsiders who weigh the same facts come to quite different conclusions.
Charles Haynes, a senior scholar at the First Amendment Center and the author of "Finding Common Ground: A Guide to Religious Liberty in the Public Schools," is one of the heroes of Gibson's book. Gibson writes about how he resolved a crisis that arose in Mustang, Okla., when, fearing a lawsuit, the superintendent of schools ordered a nativity scene cut from an elementary school Christmas pageant, infuriating many in the town. Haynes was eventually flown out to mediate. He had, writes Gibson, "made something of a career out of rushing in as if he were driving an ambulance, lights flashing and sirens blaring, after schools had made disastrous policy decisions on restricting religious liberty in schools."
According to Haynes, though, there is no war on Christmas. "I certainly wouldn't put it that way," he says. "The big picture is that there's more religion now in public schools than ever in modern history. There's no question about that. But it's not there in terms of the government imposing religion or sponsoring it, and that bothers some people on the right. They miss the good old days when public schools were semi-established Protestant schools."
In the last two decades, says Haynes, "religion has come into the public schools in all kinds of ways ... many schools now understand that students have religious liberty rights in a public school, so you can go to many public schools today and kids will be giving each other religious literature, they will be sharing their faith. You go to most public schools now and see kids praying around the flagpole before school."
The reason fights over Christmas iconography recur, says Haynes, is that "there are still some school administrators who are so afraid to deal with religion that they go too far in keeping it out, and it only takes a few bad stories in this era of the Internet for many conservative religious people across the country to think that public schools are hostile to their faith."
Ironically, when school officials do go too far, the ACLU is likely to challenge them, on the grounds that the government can neither promote nor restrict religious speech. "A lot of the things the ACLU does to help religious people and religious students are not high-profile cases; they don't get much attention," says Haynes. "The Christian student who is told she can't bring her Bible to school, the ACLU gets those kinds of calls, and often it doesn't become a lawsuit, but they will quietly tell the school you can't do this, you have to treat everyone fairly."
Indeed, one case that ACLU president Nadine Strossen loves to talk about is that of Rita Warren, a retired woman who calls herself the "Lone Ranger of the manger" and whose life mission is to put nativity scenes in public places. When she placed a plastic crèche on the lawn in front of the government building in Fairfax, Va., the government ordered her to remove it. Warren called the ACLU, and they discovered that the city of Fairfax had allowed others to erect displays on the property. "Once the government allows displays of any kind to be placed on public property, it can't then discriminate against some display because of the viewpoint," says Kent Willis, executive director of the ACLU of Virginia. "The government could not discriminate against her religious display any more than it could take specific action to promote her religious display. It has to treat us the same."
These stories rarely get much play, especially since the ACLU lacks a publicity apparatus that can compete with the religious right. "We're not in the business to defend ourselves as an organization," says Strossen.
Mike Johnson of the Alliance Defense Fund knows about the Warren case, but he dismisses it. "They always use this -- it's like their get out of jail card. This one case cannot change 80 years of history." Throughout those 80 years, he says, the ACLU's "ultimate and underlying agenda is to silence people of faith. They do not want God mentioned in the public square. If they could completely censor that out, they would ... The ACLU has a pretty sordid past. They were founded by a guy, Roger Baldwin, who was an avowed atheist, and he had a certain agenda. He wrote about being a socialist, and communism was his goal."
But Americans are catching on to the ACLU's malign influence and fighting back, says Johnson. Johnson's boss, ADF president Alan Sears, has just co-written a book with Craig Osten titled "The ALCU vs. America." The ACLU and its allies, they write, "terrorize local communities on an almost daily basis with letters, e-mails and telephone calls to silence Christmas and other religious activity." But the terrorists can be beaten: "It will take sacrifice, perseverance, and a concerted effort by millions of Americans to defeat the ACLU, its many allies, and their agenda. But with God's grace, we are confident it can and will be done."
As Johnson notes, O'Reilly invited Sears onto his show to talk about his book, catapulting it to No. 20 on Amazon. "You can only push the American people so far, and then there's a backlash," Johnson says. "The ACLU in recent years has just pushed Christian America to the limit. From its earliest stage, the ACLU has deliberately chipped away at the legal and moral and religious foundations of our republic."
The war on Christmas trope lets the right pretend to be playing defense when it's really on the offensive -- against the ACLU, separation of church and state, and pluralism, to name just a few targets. "The revolution against Christianity has been under way for a few years," writes Gibson, "and now the counterrevolution is gearing up."
