Light Brings Salt

Volume 3, Issue 09 February 27, 2005

Iron Range Bible Church

Dedicated to the Systematic Exposition of the Word of God

The Silence of Christmas and the Scream of the Tsunami: Soul-Speak in a Suicidal Culture
Ravi Zacharias

The very first Christmas card that I received this December was from a Sikh friend in Thailand. He and his family fondly wished my family and me a Merry Christmas and a joyous New Year. As the cards continued to come in from all over the world, I realized that some were from Buddhists, some from Hindus, and yes, there were even similar greetings from Muslims. Growing up in India I remember often being greeted at Christmas with the words, “Bada din mubarrak,” which literally means “Greetings on the Big Day.” We would accordingly greet them in response and welcome them to our house for some sweets and delicacies.

A greeting such as this was not exactly meant to be a doctrinal test for orthodoxy, either by the greeter or by the greeted. I don’t recall my Hindu friends questioning the “bigness” of the day and asking for a change in the greeting. Even unbelievers understood the courtesy of wishing someone well on that special day. Yet, here in North America a strange reversal has been taking place. All around us “Christmas bashing” has gone on. After all, not everybody believes in it, so why should anyone be wished well at Christmas?

The ubiquitous American Civil Liberties Union, ever present to eradicate belief from the public square, lent its oppressive muscle to those who denied any government or state agency the freedom to put up a Christmas tree, or children to sing Christmas carols in schools. In keeping with that hollowness, a vacuous ceremonial pronouncement came at the lighting for the “People’s Tree” on Capitol Hill. This way the ceremony only offended the people for whom the tree was a celebration of the true meaning of Christmas and protected the rights of those who want the benefits of the season without the reason.

One civil libertarian, yes, one, demanded of a school in New Jersey that no Christmas tunes be played because it was not just the words that offended his sensitivities but the melodies as well. I heard one well-known talk-show host, a guru of psychological harmony and wellbeing, acknowledge that she would be offended if she were wished a “Merry Christmas.” Is the day coming when someone will be uncomfortable with “Good Morning” as a greeting because the word “good” is a derivative of God and they would not want to offend an atheist?

To be sure, this bigotry has come from our new cultural ethos of tolerance—something by which cultural liberals mean a society that allows only their views to be expressed in public while banishing everyone else’s views to their private chambers. And so the “Happy Holidays” rolled in on the heels of “Turkey Day” with the spirited haters of the season venting their vitriol against those whom they castigate for “audaciously claiming” these to be religious holidays. (Fortunately, most of them do not realize that the very word “holiday” is derived from the word “holy” or that would send them poring through a revisionist dictionary to re-baptize that word as well!) This microcosm is only a small portion of the bigger picture: Western civilization is on the verge of spiritual bankruptcy as it moves steadily towards cultural suicide.

As I have pondered this, I have been wondering what has happened to the West in general and to America in particular. Where has this culture lost its way? Europe, of course, long secularized, mocks America’s religious belief and wonders when we will come of age. I suppose they are delighted to see this outrage towards Christmas as at least a small glimmer of hope for them that we too will join their ranks of secularism writ large in our worldview.

Italy’s European Affairs Minister, Rocco Buttiglione, reminded Europeans how pagan they have become when he wrote in an article that by European standards, George Bush would be considered unfit for his job not for any other reason but for his religious beliefs. Even worse, said he, European legislators marvel that President Bush is “not ashamed” to express these beliefs. These are the very beliefs that prompted Buttiglione himself to withdraw his candidacy for the European Union’s Justice and Home Affairs Commissioner. Is it possible, do you suppose, that Europe’s anti-God stance made him realize that their definitions of justice and home affairs amount to nothing, and therefore, why would he want to become the Minister of Nothing?

That aside, a venomous and brazen anti-Christian attitude is now wielded in the West. We must ask ourselves an awful lot of questions to understand how this came to be. How did it come about that while so-called Muslim scholars do not hesitate to admit that Islam and democracy are not compatible, a Muslim can still have democratic rights to call his festivals by their names while Christians cannot? How is it that while Muslim radicals attacked the United States—and still set their sights on its destruction and on killing those within their own moderate ranks who would challenge them—the Koran is required reading at some academic institutions in the West, though in those same institutions the Bible is mocked in their classrooms?

How is it that a Muslim in Canada can get away with demanding that the Shari’a law be introduced into the Canadian legal code but would scream outrage if a westerner in a Muslim country were to ask to be tried by his own legal system? Why is it that the Hindu American Foundation is filing amicus briefs in two cases before the Supreme Court siding with the removal of the Ten Commandments from public display—one engraved on a war memorial from years before—when they would be incensed if a Christian in India asked that all Hindu relics and art from Indian courtrooms be removed because the country, by its own pronouncement, is “secular”? I know it doesn’t sound politically correct to ask such questions but wouldn’t they ask the same questions if they were in this position of being singled out for banishment?

You see, it is a bigger issue than Christmas carols being banned. Something has gone radically wrong in the West. The powers that are at work behind the scenes think they know what they are doing by pandering to the destroyers of America’s historic faith, but in reality, they don’t have the foggiest notion of what is actually at stake here. While in America we may think that by evicting the “Christian God” from its public square it is rending the arena neutral, we are ignorant of the reality that, in the long run, Eastern religions will not allow them such a “no man’s zone.” Europe will find out that once Turkey is admitted into the European Union, their leaders will have to be careful about what public statements they may make about God. Nature abhors a vacuum, especially a spiritual one, and though this flirtation with absolute secularism may win the momentary dawn of a new era, it will lose the day to more strident religions than the Christian belief. Of that, I am certain. Ask any Muslim missionary that question and he or she will tell you that is so.

How did we get here?

The truth is that America’s values are based upon the bequest of a Judeo-Christian worldview. Take a look at the founding of the nation. The Federalist Papers that argued for the unification of the states did so for many reasons. One was that “Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people—a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government” for the quest of life and liberty, which they deemed “unalienable rights,” gifts from the Creator. They spoke of “Nature, and Nature’s God.” They pledged their commitment to the statutes with “sacred honor.”

The last verse and chorus of The Star-Spangled Banner reads:

“Oh thus be it ever when freeman shall stand Between their loved homes and war’s desolation; Blest with victory and peace, may the Heaven-rescued land Praise the Power that had made and preserved us a nation. Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just; And this be our motto: “In God is our trust.” And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

This was composed in 1814. Not long after that America, The Beautiful was penned, in which it was recognized that God had shed His grace on America for good and for brotherhood. And in 1832 America was written:

Long may our land be bright With freedoms’ holy light, Protect us by Thy might Great God, our King!

But it was not just America’s songs that acknowledged God; it was her leaders’ thoughts as well. In his Gettysburg Address in 1863 Lincoln closed with the prayer, “That this nation under God, shall have a new birth of freedom.” Earlier that year, in The Emancipation Proclamation, he had closed with the words, “I invoke the considerable judgment of mankind and the gracious favor of Almighty God.” And years before that, the Declaration of Independence ended with the words, “With a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our Sacred Honor.”

Now one wonders, what do these words mean? Sacred… Honor…Holy… Providence… God? You can be absolutely sure that if the American Civil Liberties Union had their way, these words would never have made it into these songs and documents as national sentiments. They simply “violate the sensitivities” of the irreligious or the die-hard secularists for whom this world and this world alone must define freedom.

How, then, did we get to the point where such power is wielded by those who, in the name of freedom, deny us the right to preserve our historic traditions? A foreign friend once asked me what the American Civil Liberties Union stood for. I sarcastically said, “None of the above.” But the more I pondered that response the more I realized how true it is. It is certainly not American because it denies both the worldview that framed America’s founding documents and denies a vast majority of Americans the right to enjoy their festivals the way they always have been enjoyed. It is not civil because it redefines civility by making us think that tolerance only works one-way. It certainly does not understand liberty because liberty is not the bequest of naturalism. Naturalism begets a nature “red in tooth and claw” and makes determinism inevitable. That is not liberty. Liberty is the gift of the One who made us with intrinsic worth and taught us to respect life and property. And as for “union”, they spend millions of dollars to spread disunity. So much for their name and mission!

Sometime following Christmas, writer Tom Wolfe was being interviewed on his most recent book, I Am Charlotte Simmons. The storyline is woven against the backdrop of the hedonism that now runs through the veins of the American academy. The interviewer asked him how he thought such thinking became legitimized in our culture. Wolfe was unhesitating in his answer: It was when Nietzsche pronounced “the death of God” in the late nineteenth century. I have asserted that sequence for years. One can argue with the exact dating of the transition but who can argue against the logic of that assertion? Dostoevsky had said that if God is dead anything is permissible.

Nietzsche died at the beginning of the twentieth century. Take a look at the slide from that time to where we found ourselves by the end of that century. Abortion of the unborn has reached astronomic proportions. Even Edward Kennedy, an extreme liberal, averred that we should be trying to curtail the number of abortions. One shudders to wonder who, amid the myriad babies that have been killed in the womb, have we decimated along the way? Could there have been a mind that could have developed a cure for cancer? Could there have been another Martin Luther King or an Einstein or a Churchill or for that matter, another Mother Teresa—those who fought for the weak? Proponents of the right to abort fail to deal with the reality of what we are silencing amid the noise of our “rights”. Millions, even nations, have been banished to the domain of the voiceless.

That is the logic of killing God, isn’t it? Having killed Him we had to find a justification for killing other realities as well. But that was going to take genius of a different sort. Killing God was easier because the “right to belief” has a ring of goodness to it. How were we going to attack different moral frameworks? We altered such realities by rewording our acts. Rather than calling it the “freedom to destroy,” which it really is, we call it “freedom of choice.” Those who treat life as sacred are now the killers—the killers of choice. Anyone who believes in the parameters of sexual sanctity is the killer of freedom and pleasure. Even marriage has been desacralized so that we no longer have homes, we have “civil unions,” and why should anyone argue against a “civil” union? By rewording something you alter its look.

But the mask is taken off when you get closer and listen more intelligently to the voice behind the masquerade. Did you see and hear, during the American election, the hatred being vented against the Right by these voices? Don’t forget they are the same ones who want laws passed against “hate speech.” Canada, interestingly, while considering the provisions of the Shari’a law for the Muslim, is at the same time making it illegal to speak out against homosexuality. The former would make blasphemy against the Islamic sacred beliefs a crime and the latter will stifle the pulpit on the sanctity of sex. The follower of the Shari’a will be able to make any pronouncements against the Christian faith and the person who believes sex is nothing more than a personal choice can castigate the Bible as sexist. So in effect, the Christian faith becomes the sole voice silenced.

(Part 2 Next week)

© 2003 Ravi Zacharias International Ministries.