Guest
Column
A
Modest Proposal
By
Tom O’Brien
I
did not want to ask this around the holidays and depress anyone,
but are Christmas and New Year’s unconstitutional?
The
question arises because of appeals of the federal court decision
saying the phrase “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance
violates church-state separation. A schoolroom, the court said,
can easily be a coercive place, where children, even if they are
told they have the freedom to abstain, may feel a pressure to
conform and hence lose some of their freedom.
But
is this peculiar to school? Or are there indeed many other times
when Americans must submit to an establishment of government and
religion? The father who brought suit against the pledge has said
he is targeting not just the phrase “under God” but
also the currency’s “In God we trust.” Admittedly,
no one makes us stand in attention, cross our heart, and use the
currency. But there is no other currency to use. Americans are
thus forced to use money with a religious slogan. We are also
forced, in other ways, to follow religious custom—for example,
through laws that close businesses on Sundays because of the beliefs
of the Christian sect.
A
few national holidays are even worse. While not a Christian feast,
Thanksgiving, for one example, was proclaimed a holiday by Lincoln
in gratitude for the preservation of the Union, alas, in his original
decree, to someone he called “the Almighty.” Thanksgiving
also honors the Pilgrims, a group of (to my way of thinking) un-American
religious zealots.
If
Thanksgiving is bad, the Christmas we just observed is even worse.
Just think of the contradiction here: How can “Christ-mas”
be a national holiday, unless it involves some special recognition
of the “Christ-ian” sect? True, these days it has
become more a commercial than a religious holiday. Nevertheless,
it honors the birth of yet another religious zealot. Even if Santa
has emerged as his coequal around holiday time, that jolly old
figure is also tainted by his origins as “Saint” Nicholas
and his gift-giving charity.
Some
tenderhearted folks may say Christmas is just a “traditional
holiday.” But that does not erase its danger, and you cannot
be too careful about such things. One false step, and soon we
could all wind up in a theocratic Ayatollah-ville right here in
America. The Founders wanted to sever us absolutely from the past.
The establishment of religion was part of that past; they wanted
none of it. It must, therefore, have been an oversight on their
part to allow our government to make Christmas a national holiday,
when, astonishingly, the government itself closes for business.
New
Year’s presents a different problem. True, the holiday itself
is not religious. But marking New Year as we do continues a religious
tradition nonetheless. Why will we designate the next New Year
“2004”? This is tainted dating. Even if we have stopped
using phrasing such as “a..d.” and use the new “c.e.”
(for the “common era,” with the old “b.c.”
replaced by “b.c.e..”), any such dating privileges
Christianity. Why not use Chinese years? Islamic?
Or
why not, as they did in the French revolution, sever past and
present by reducing time to American history? The French made
1789 “Year One.” In American time, 1787 should have
been renamed Year One.
The
Constitution, while without overt references to “God,”
does conclude (before the signatures) with “done in the
year of Our Lord one thousand seven hundred and eighty seven.”
But clearly the phrase “Our Lord” and use of the date
as 1787 violate the Constitution—another oversight by the
Founders that we should amend now. To force citizens to use 2003
today, on checks, contracts, and other legal papers, is to abridge
their freedom by making them acquiesce in a special recognition
of Christianity.
When
the Founders warned against establishing religion, they were not
afraid of persecution of the kind common throughout 18th-century
Europe. They were not concerned with the Inquisition, with burning
heretics, with autos-da-fé, with the thumbscrew and the
rack. Their minds were not even on the lesser evils still common
in relatively free countries like England, such as the exclusion
of minority believers (Jews, Catholics, and all other non-High
Church Anglicans) from positions in the government and the military.
They were not concerned with such concrete and in some cases terrifying
violation of human and political rights. No, no, no. None of this
bugged them. What they were really worried about was semantics.
xpnd0True,
we cannot purge our entire vocabulary. For example, in the Declaration
of Independence, Jefferson wrote that men “are endowed by
their Creator with certain inalienable rights.” This phrasing
suggests Jefferson based his view of human rights on some sort
of wacky idea of mutual human “creaturehood,” and
this refuted royalist theories of the “divine right of kings.”
Alas, we can’t rewrite the Declaration, but we ought to
censor what it so carelessly implies. Like Athena from the head
of Zeus, America is a pure creation, not a democratic version
of the older civilizations of Europe. We must never imply, as
Jefferson did, that religion could ever have played a role in
shaping American values.
Purging
national holidays of religious reference and redoing the calendar
are constitutional necessities. As with freedom of speech
or the press, separation of church and state was meant by the
Founders to be taken in absolute terms. There is no shadow in
the transparent clarity of what the First Amendment means, no
qualification or equivocation, no middle ground in interpretation,
and no compromise possible. Greetings from the year 216.
Tom O’Brien,
a writer and editor in Washington, has published satires in the
New York Times and other journals.
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