It seems as if every year at this time, we have to hear about the "War on Christmas".  Frankly I'm sick and tired of all the wars that we seem to have invented for ourselves that aren't really wars.  It seems that in an effort to make government more important in our daily lives than it has to be, people have invented wars for our government to fight.  We need to control what you eat, therefore we have a War on Obesity.  Heaven forbid you choose to smoke some pot, so we have to have a War on Drugs.  This latter war is the most like an actual war in that it involves men wearing body armor and sub-machine guns busting into homes of citizens in order to terrorize and kill them.  I find it somewhat ironic though, that in a season that is supposed to bring a message of peace and goodwill, that people would declare a war... on the season itself no less.

The cause of this "war" is clear.  People today are simply incapable of separating their daily lives from the influence of government.  If government does not support something, it is felt that somehow it must be wrong.  Therefore if "I believe something", there is a reflexive need for government to come out in support of it.  Anything less, and a war declaration must have been made.  I find this thought frightening, down to my very core.  This is no more clearly illustrated than in this story from the Boston Globe (via Marquette Warrior):

On the seventh night of Hanukkah in 1944, my father was in Auschwitz. He had been deported with his parents and four of his five siblings to the Nazi extermination camp eight months earlier; by Hanukkah, only my father was still alive. That year, he kindled no Hanukkah lights. In Auschwitz, where anything and everything was punishable by death, any Jew caught practicing his religion could expect to be sent to the gas chambers, or shot on the spot.

On the seventh night of Hanukkah in 2007, I was in the White House. President and Mrs. Bush have made it an annual tradition to host a Hanukkah celebration in addition to the customary White House Christmas parties, and my wife and I were honored to receive an invitation to this year’s reception.

As Gerald Ford said to Congress in 1974, "A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have."  With Hitler's Germany being the worst possible outcome, a government that is required to acknowledge religion, can also decide that some religions cannot be acknowledged.  Rick Esenberg has suggested that it's ok to celebrate Christmas and Hanukah publicly, but that we won't be seeing any celebrations of Scientology soon.  It was also recently reported that a few Congressman had the temerity to vote against a resolution honoring Christmas, even though they had voted for similar resolutions honoring Ramadan, and other religious holidays.

I wonder, what would have happened had any of those resolutions failed?  Would your faith have changed as a result?  Would you believe in God any less?  Do you believe in God more because government acknowledges it?  In other words, what value do these public displays and acknowledgements give you?  If we read more carefully into Rick's Journal column yesterday, it would seem that government acknowledgement of holiday's is needed to encourage people to be religious.  Yes, he said that:

But I am not so sure it makes sense to say that those who wish to keep Christmas ought to do it at home.

There is a danger in any rule or social custom that calls for a comprehensive exclusion of religion from public life. The notion that religion is something we ought to keep private is based on a particular vision of religion that has largely been abandoned by scholars studying the way in which religious communities are formed and interact with the larger community.

Here's why. Religion that is completely privatized is ultimately driven to the margins of life. To tell people that their deepest beliefs should be kept to themselves is to say that they don't matter much and are not important in their "real" lives.

After a while, in a world where we live much of our lives in public and in which government plays a much larger role than it did in the 18th century, people get the message.

And he makes a point, but we differ as to the solution.  Rick believes the solution is to require government to put on public displays of religion, while I believe that government simply needs to play a much smaller role in our daily lives than it currently does.  We shouldn't require government to publicly make religious displays, because we shouldn't care what government thinks, acknowledges, or doesn't acknowledge.  My faith does not require it, and frankly I don't want it. 

Businesses, churches, and private individuals are more than capable of filling the season with more than enough joy for the holiday season without a tree in the capitol.  More importantly, private individuals can do it better, and more appropriately than government can.  Because let's face it, when government has acknowledged religion, it tends to do so in a manner that "won't offend", which tends to water down the religious nature of the holidays.  After all, which is more important to us?  Santa, or Jesus, and when there is a Christmas parade down Main Street, who is on that last float?  So does governments acknowledgement of religion improve our faith, or take us away from the real meaning?

And remember the darker side of the Christmas story as reported by Matthew:

Then Herod called the Magi secretly and found out from them the exact time the star had appeared. He sent them to Bethlehem and said, "Go and make a careful search for the child. As soon as you find him, report to me, so that I too may go and worship him."

After they had heard the king, they went on their way, and the star they had seen in the east went ahead of them until it stopped over the place where the child was. When they saw the star, they were overjoyed. On coming to the house, they saw the child with his mother Mary, and they bowed down and worshiped him. Then they opened their treasures and presented him with gifts of gold and of incense and of myrrh. And having been warned in a dream not to go back to Herod, they returned to their country by another route.

When they had gone, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream. "Get up," he said, "take the child and his mother and escape to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you, for Herod is going to search for the child to kill him." So he got up, took the child and his mother during the night and left for Egypt, where he stayed until the death of Herod. And so was fulfilled what the Lord had said through the prophet: "Out of Egypt I called my son."

When Herod realized that he had been outwitted by the Magi, he was furious, and he gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under, in accordance with the time he had learned from the Magi. Then what was said through the prophet Jeremiah was fulfilled:
"A voice is heard in Ramah,
     weeping and great mourning,
Rachel weeping for her children
     and refusing to be comforted,
because they are no more."

After Herod died, an angel of the Lord appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt and said, "Get up, take the child and his mother and go to the land of Israel, for those who were trying to take the child's life are dead."

The solution is for government to have less influence in our lives, not require it to have more.  And as Elliot said:

My guess is if Islam or Wicca were the dominant religions in this country, fewer Christians would be in such a hurry to dismiss the importance of that wall.

Merry Christmas.