Secularization of Christmas

[Rick Duncan]

In the current worldonline, Joel Belz has one of the best takes I have read on the secularization of Christmas. Here is a money excerpt:

 

There are two radically different ways to see the secularization of this Christmas season. One is to grouse and complain and moan about how bad things have gotten. The other is to take notice of, and thank God for, the failure of the secularists to win their point.

 

I decided this Christmas season, for example, to keep a record of every time I noticed Christ's name being specifically mentioned in an overtly secular setting—almost in spite of the sponsors' determination to do otherwise. So in a Wall Street Journal ad, at a ballet performan! ce of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, during an NPR-PBS fundraiser (of all places), at a newscast of a new mayor's inauguration reception, in the lobby of a funeral home where they take great pains to offend no one, in a USA Today front-page story referencing Narnia's Aslan as the "King of kings," in a commercial on my car radio for a used car dealer—all that got into my notebook before December's first week was over.

 

If you don't let the children sing His praise, Jesus said, the stones will do the singing instead. Well, all these secular stones were singing with amazing specificity.

 

Joel's excellent piece provides a very refreashing way of looking at the issue.

 

Cheers, Rick Duncan

 

 

Rick Duncan
Welpton Professor of Law
University of Nebraska College of Law
Lincoln, NE 68583-0902

 

"Merry Christmas--It's ok to say it." --Alliance Defense Fund Slogan

"When the Round Table is broken every man must follow either Galahad or Mordred: middle things are gone." C.S.Lewis, Grand Miracle

"I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered." --The Prisoner

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