Providing a critique of pop culture, analyzing secular trends, the media, and Western worldviews.
The Scholar's Corner exists to challenge the Church to higher righteousness and to engage contemporary culture with the claims of Christ.
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African-Americans have often criticized White America’s attempts to build
a colorblind society as another form of subtle racism, for in refusing to recognize
the real differences of color, ethnicity, and culture, White Americans treat
African-Americans as if they don’t exist or pretend that African-Americans
are just an extension of White society. The injustice of this colorblind approach
is that it robs the country of the beauty of its diversity through a process
of denial. We act as if we can only be equal if we are all the same, but that
is not true unity. What makes us truly great as a nation is our mutual respect
for our differences of culture and history. The fact that we can get along even
though we are different, is part of the amazing miracle of the United States,
where the motto is E Pluribus Unum : Out of Many One! We have forged
one people out of many cultures and races. Compare our imperfect unity, with
all our problems and past evils of slavery and mistreatment of Native Americans,
to present day Serbia, Iraq, or Turkey, and we come out looking pretty good.
In those places, being of a different tribe (being Kurdish, e.g.) or different
religion (Sunni or Shiite) is reason enough for government-sponsored programs
of ethnic extermination. In contrast, we not only appreciate our different backgrounds,
we celebrate them in parades. Most Americans do take note of their ancestry and
roots, but we easily fall in love across racial, religious, and ethnic divides.
We do not gain our strength by pretending our differences do not exist, what
makes us strong is our ability to accept each other with full knowledge of our
diversity. That is the unique gift of the United States to the world.
That is why the ACLU has it all wrong when it wants to cleanse the public square
of all expressions of religious diversity. By denying the people their freedom
of expression and by repressing the popular celebrations of their faiths, the
ACLU has tried to create a “religion-blind” secular society, whose
perverse effect is to rob all Americans of their religious diversity and uniqueness.
The subtle message of the ACLU’s stance is that we can only be unified
if we each agree to deny our commitments to our religious values and agree to
remain silent about our beliefs in a secular and empty public square. In its
zeal to create a wall of separation between church and state, the ACLU has trampled
the First Amendment’s second clause: “ Congress shall make no
law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free
exercise thereof …” When the people
are not free to express their faith in the public square and give evidence of
that expression by religious symbols, the people are being prohibited from their "free
exercise." What makes far more sense, from a freedom of expression standpoint,
is to allow the public square to have menorahs set up on Hanukkah, crescents
on Ramadan, and crèches on Christmas. The free expression of our different
faiths is part of the tapestry of our diversity that makes our nation great.
The repression of that difference is creating a new “white” society
of enforced secular blindness. By refusing to acknowledge our diversity, we are
creating a fictitious unity that exists only by repressing our differences. That
is neither free, honest, nor true to the American vision.
When diversity is repressed and uniformity is enforced, you come up with atrocious
and offensive attempts to find the lowest common denominator between people.
You have religious celebrations reduced to shallow and meaningless instruments
of commerce, where Christmas and Hanukkah are called something inane like “Sparkle
Season.” Such a shallow attempt at being inoffensive is a slap in the face
to all people who are truly religious. It is offensive precisely because it attempts
to dismiss deeply held beliefs and reduce them to unimportant aspects of our
culture. No! Let the Jew be Jewish, the Christian be Christian, the Muslim be
Islamic, and the person of no faith hold his head up high. It is our ability
to get along despite our differences which makes us capable of true unity.
The ACLU’s argument is that if the people are allowed to set up symbols
of their faith in the public square from time to time to reflect the season,
such permission would constitute an establishment of religion by the state -
the state giving its sanction to one religion over another. If we were to take
the logic of the ACLU’s approach to restricting free, religious speech
to the next level, then public rallies by people of faith could be considered
an endorsement because the public streets are being used with city permission
and permit. If someone preaches the Gospel in the park that could be considered
endorsement because the parks are owned by the state. So, the next logical step
is to forbid public religious rallies and public preaching, because the very
permission by the city council constitutes and endorsement and establishment
of religion. That doesn’t make sense, and the ACLU would not pursue that
course (hopefully), because it would trample on the rest of our First Amendment
freedoms. But, how is allowing each religious group freedom to set up their icons
of faith an establishment of religion? In fact, by allowing all religions to
set up their symbols of celebration, the state would be declaring its neutrality
by not favoring one over another. It would be allowing all the people their free
exercise, without forcing them to pretend that their religious holidays are just
extensions of the state’s interest in secular commercialism. It is a farce
to be told that you can only have a crèche if you have a Santa Claus along
side it, because it reduces Christianity to an agent of the state’s interest
in commerce. On the other hand, it makes perfect sense to be told that a menorah
can be set up at the same time on the same city hall steps as the crèche
because Hanukkah falls in the same season.
The ACLU is now looking to support lawsuits where other plaques and placards
of historic interest are excised from public consciousness, as if our national
history is so offensive and the people so unable to cope with religious diversity
that the reminders of our religious past must be quarantined and removed from
public display. This secularism, rather than express neutrality towards religion,
makes the state an agent of hostility towards all religious expression. Removing ”under
God” from the Pledge of Allegiance is just the most notorious example.
However, the next steps are to efface all religious quotations and references
to God from public monuments, the Supreme Court building, our money, and all
public and historic buildings. Such a tactic constitutes an “animus” against
religion and makes the state a persecutor of the people’s religious expression,
both historic and present. This “neutrality” is a neutrality enforced
through a legal fiction, rather than one which leaves the people of the United
States truly free. It is one thing to separate the church from the state, it
is quite another to prohibit the people from publicly expressing their faith,
which is what the ACLU is doing by attacking the second clause of the First Amendment.
We are not so thinned skinned that a quote from Isaiah on a public monument is
going to destroy our personal religious beliefs, nor are we so stupid to think
the state is therefore endorsing our brand of faith. Perhaps atheists are so
offended by the very idea of religion that they can only conceive of a neutrality
in which all religious beliefs are eradicated and all religious expression forbidden,
but then that betrays the intolerance of secularists towards people of faith
and makes their use of the ACLU a covert attempt to repress diversity in the
U.S. The ACLU now considers historic quotes on public buildings evidence of an
establishment of religion. They want to remove chaplains from the military and
the Congress, since these religious servants are supported by the public purse.
They want to remove references to Christmas and Hanukkah from public schools
and enforce a de facto secularism on the student body, teaching them
in effect that the only valid way to acknowledge our diversity is to ignore it
and the only way to acknowledge religion is to forbid all mention of it. It would
be far healthier to teach all the children a little bit about each faith as the
occasion arises rather than teach the children that the idea of religion is so
dangerous it must be constantly suppressed.
To my mind, there is no better representation of the beauty and diversity of
America than The Strip in Pittsburgh. (For all you non-Pittsburghers, The Strip
is the import and food warehouse district.) Walking down that street, you will
see a Vietnamese restaurant across from a Mexican food store, next to an Italian
bakery and pasta shop, near Korean and Asian food dealers, coffee importers,
chocolate and pastry shops, Greek food suppliers, vegetable and fish wholesalers,
and street vendors selling everything from Thai kabobs to soul food and barbeque.
This diversity is the spice of life which makes the ingredients of the American
stew so much richer to the taste. Here, people of all colors and backgrounds
work side by side and enjoy each other. Here, you can taste the richness of our
country and appreciate the beauty of our cultural cloth. We are stronger for
our differences. Our ability to accept one another with these differences makes
us one nation. It is this multicultural vision, where race and ethnicity are
celebrated for their contribution to the whole, which is the true American hope
and ideal. We would be a much poorer nation if we did not have each other’s
gifts to sample and exchange. That is the vision of American we need to celebrate
in our religious diversity as well: we should not repress it but express it,
and the state needs to get out of the way and let the people be themselves by
being free.
If the ACLU wants to help that vision, it needs to protect minorities from persecution,
surely, but it also needs to stop trying to make the public square a place devoid
of religion. That vision isn’t American, it isn’t human, and it isn’t
real. Only cardboard people live without beliefs and values, and censoring
our deeply held beliefs does nothing for the foundations of our freedoms.