Time To Stop Crushing The Public Creche
THE YULETIDE work of the American Civil Liberties Union is never done.
While others frolic, the grinches of the ACLU tirelessly trudge out each year on yet another creche patrol, snatching nativity scenes from public parks and rubbing out religious symbols. Sometimes, on school property, they catch a rabbi or a minister mentioning God or carolers singing "Silent Night" instead of just songs about snowmen. Then they have to turn everybody in to a judge. Otherwise our liberties would be threatened.
Last year, for instance, the creche squad hit Vienna, Va., arguing that a nativity scene on town property violated the Supreme Court's so-called "plastic reindeer rule."
In a 1984 decision, the court said that a publicly sponsored creche on private land in Pawtucket, R.I., was permissible because it was part of a predominantly secular display including candy canes and plastic reindeer. In an attempt to ward off the creche gestapo, the creche in Vienna was surrounded with two plastic Santas, one reindeer and one snowperson.
No good. The ACLU found a judge who struck it down. Presumably a future Supreme Court decision will determine the precise number of reindeer needed to excuse the presence of one baby Jesus in a Christmas display.
This year, mindful of the legal fees it would have to pay if the ACLU struck again, the town ordered the Vienna Choral Society to ban all religious carols (including a Hanukkah song) from its performance at the annual Christmas pageant and stick to songs like "Jingle Bells."
To its credit, the choral society was unwilling to accept the town's pre-emptive censorship, and refused to perform. Now the town has a Christmas pageant that contains no hint of Christmas, at least as traditionally understood to refer to Jesus.
But an ACLU grinch in Richmond, Stephen Pershing, is apparently still not satisfied. According to The Washington Post, he thinks Vienna may be violating the Constitution by having any kind of Christmas program at all.
How did we reach the point where running off to judges to get every trace of religion extinguished from public life seems normal? The Founding Fathers would certainly be aghast at the ACLU's fundamentalist version of what separation of church and state requires. America's long history of privatizing religion has an equally long history of allowing it some public functions.
Many Americans say they don't understand the fuss over creches and carols. After all, creches can be moved to privately owned sites and the carols can be sung under private auspices.
True enough, but there are two Christmases now, and many Christians feel that the state is taking an increasingly active role in erasing the religious Christmas and in inflating the secular one starring Frosty, Santa and Scrooge.
Justice Anthony Kennedy made essentially this argument in his dissent in Allegheny County vs. ACLU, which banned a large nativity scene from a Pittsburgh courthouse. Government's enforced recognition of only the secular version of Christmas, he said, "would signify the callous indifference toward religious faith that our cases and traditions do not require. . . . Judicial invalidation of government's attempts to recognize the religious underpinnings of the holiday would signal not neutrality but a pervasive intent to insulate government from all things religious."
Referring to the majority decision, Kennedy wrote: "Taken to its logical extreme, some of the language quoted above would require a relentless extirpation of all contact between government and religion. But that is not the history or the purpose of the Establishment Clause."
No, it isn't. Our history and traditions fit what is now called "the accommodationist model": Allow some mild expressions of religion in the public arena, but forbid others that seem coercive or proselytizing. As Justice Kennedy says, a large Latin cross standing permanently atop the municipal building is one thing; a two-week nativity scene in the park is quite another. This is particularly so when menorahs and other religious symbols are welcome.
Most of us presumably can distinguish between a steady diet of Christian hymns at city hall and an annual Christmas concert that includes traditional religious carols. As Justice Kennedy argues, giving the whole program over to Frosty and Rudolph is a powerful secularizing message, not neutral at all.
There is also the troublesome fact that the Christian feast of Christmas is a national public holiday. Having granted it that status, the state logically should either allow minimal public acknowledgment of what it has wrought, or cancel the holiday and invent a new midwinter festival.
The suppression of the Christmas holiday is not going to happen, of course. Instead we get a series of evasive arguments and reindeer-ridden Supreme Court decisions. But the plain truth, in Justice Kennedy's words, is that a government-displayed creche "presents no realistic danger of moving government down the forbidden road toward an establishment of religion," whether or not the creche is "surrounded by poinsettias, talking wishing wells or carolers."
There is no real problem here. Isn't it time for anti-creche zealots to drop their tedious crusade?
John Leo is a contributing editor to U.S. News and World Report. His column appears Tuesday on editorial pages of The Times.
(Copyright, 1992, John Leo)