THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, December 25, 1994 TAG: 9412240120
SECTION: VIRGINIA BEACH BEACON PAGE: 06 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
SOURCE: Beth Barber
LENGTH: Medium: 52 lines
Happy holidays.
Merry Christmas.
Bah,
humbug.
It's Christmas morning. Take your pick.
If you are one of that 86 percent of Americans who poll-sters say belong to Christian denominations, the day has special religious res-o-nance.
If you are, like me, a baby boomer reared in the heydays of church attendance who shed organized religion at the dorm door, the resonance may not be religious. But the season is still special with memory, and with respect both for its meaning to Christians and Christianity's contributions to the way America is.
So maybe you, like me, wince at efforts near and far to take Christianity out of Christmas. Not just to commercialize the gift-giving or secularize the festivities, but to diminish, even to deny Jesus Christ official connection with it.
Now, I am opposed to or-gan-ized prayer in school, however ecumenical officials can make it. I'm not even keen on a moment of silence. I don't want Christian parents any more than non-Christian dictating the content of family-life curricula throughout the school district, much less the cosmos. And I am pro-choice to the core.
But when we get to the point at which the week before Christ-mas a public-school fifth-grader can't share a poem that mentions Jesus, we have sailed off the constitutional charts and into unnecessary churlishness.
Somehow some of us seem to believe that the tolerance at which this nation has worked so hard means that majorities - ethnic, racial, gender, political religious - must respect and be ``sensitive'' to minorities; but not the other way 'round.
In this season for peace and goodwill, much of the world as usual falls short. Religion is (a familiar paradox) often a factor why. But America falls less short than most, and one reason why is the influence of its Christians in their distinctive and collective ways.
To say so is not to slight the contributions of a single non-Christian soul, or to absolve Christianity of historical wrongs and Christians of personal faults. To say so at Christmas doesn't take personal allegiance to the Christian credo, only recognition of the season's Christian meaning, a timely willingness to give its due. by CNB