Light Brings Salt
Volume 3, Issue 09 February 27, 2005
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
The very first Christmas card that I received this December
was from a Sikh friend in
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
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
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
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
How did we get here?
The truth is that
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
Long may our land be bright With
freedoms’ holy light, Protect us by Thy might Great God, our King!
But it was not just
Now one wonders, what do these words mean? Sacred…
Honor…Holy…
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
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.”
(Part 2 Next week)
© 2003 Ravi Zacharias International
Ministries.