The fact of the matter is that the United States now contains more Christians than any other nation in history. 2 “Surprising though it may seem,” writes Dinesh D’Souza, “the total number of non-Christians in America add up to less than 10 million people, which is around 3 percent of the population.” D’Souza has more bad news for the secularists: “In terms of religious background, America is no more diverse today than it was in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.” This is because most of the immigrants are coming from south of the border, and almost all of them are Christians. 3 In fact, the U.S. is more Christian today than Israel is Jewish. 4
Moreover, the world is becoming less multicultural: the world’s largest religions—Catholicism, Protestantism, Islam, and Hinduism—have expanded at a rate that exceeds global population growth. At the beginning of the twentieth century, exactly 50 percent of the world was Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, or Hindu. At the start of the twenty-first century, their combined numbers total 64 percent, and by 2025 it is estimated that these four religious groups will constitute close to 70 percent of the world’s population. 5
When presented with this evidence, secularists are unfazed: they accept the mantras of multiculturalism with dogmatic certainty. Indeed, if they had to admit that all their assumptions about the present and the future are built on faulty data, their whole world would collapse. Better to play make-believe. They do it so well because they’ve had so much practice at it. For example, we all know that America was founded on Judeo-Christian principles and that Christianity has been the foundational structure of American history. Yet there are still some, like Garry Wills, who claim this is a “right-wing fiction.” 6 Others persist in seeing secularism as our founding edifice. 7 But no amount of wishful thinking can get in the way of historical facts.
Conservative writer and chronicler of the American experience M. Stanton Evans does not exaggerate when he says of America’s Founding Fathers that “virtually all of them were professing Christians, affirmed their faith in God, and expressed this faith in public statements.” It is precisely because “a teeming record” shows this to be true that Evans says that “the notion that America’s founders were ‘secular liberals’… is absurdly false.” 8
In The Theme Is Freedom, Evans quotes George Washington imploring his troops “to live and act as becomes a Christian soldier.” Similarly, he quotes John Adams’s remark that the United States was established on “the general principles of Christianity.” 9 Can anyone imagine Washington urging his troops to act like good atheists? Or Adams saying that America was based on “the general principles of secularism”? As for Jefferson, it is worth recalling his prescience: “Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God?” 10
Secularists get angry when they hear someone say that “this is a Christian nation.” But this is exactly what the United States Supreme Court said in 1892. 11 Today, two-thirds of Americans say the U.S. is a Christian nation, 12 and most still look to religion as a remedy to personal and social problems. This does not sit well with the Anti-Defamation League, the nation’s most influential Jewish civil rights organization. For instance, it has tried to censor the words “The true Christian is the true citizen” from a courthouse in Riverside, California (the words belong to Teddy Roosevelt); 13 it also wants to censor the words “under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance. 14
Religious Jews, of course, do not feel that they are represented by the ADL. Rabbi Daniel Lapin, the founder of Toward Tradition, a Jewish group that espouses traditional values, says the question should not be “Is America a Christian nation?” but “Should America be a Christian nation?” To which he says, “As a non-Christian myself, I still insist the answer must be yes.” That’s because he sees, as do many other Jews, that “the choice is between a benign Christian culture and a sinister secular one.” 15 Don Feder agrees: “The choice isn’t Christian America or nothing, but Christian America or a neo-pagan, hedonistic, rights-without-responsibilities, anti-family, culture-of-death America.” 16 As devout Jews, Lapin and Feder are not about to convert to Christianity. All they are saying is that it is in the best interests of Jews to nourish Christianity, not secularism.
Richard Bernstein, a Jewish writer not associated with religious conservatives, is as critical of multiculturalism as Lapin and Feder. For Bernstein, it is the “narrow orthodoxy” that marks multiculturalism that is most disconcerting. He even goes so far as to say that the bureaucracy that has grown up around multiculturalism is run by people like Robespierre. Now, today’s nihilists may not be responsible for a Reign of Terror, but their resort to punitive measures against those who cross them is real. There are important differences: Robespierre was executed; today’s brutes get federal grants. “It is an ardently advocated, veritably messianic political program,” Bernstein says, “and, like most political programs that have succumbed to the utopian temptation, it does not take kindly to true difference.” 17
In 1994, Bernstein chose to title his book Dictatorship of Virtue: Multiculturalism and the Battle for America’s Future, and 11 years later Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, just before he became Pope Benedict XVI, chose the words “dictatorship of relativism” to describe the fruits of multiculturalism. He used this term to describe the reigning idea that each individual is capable of possessing his own morality. This popular view, it must be said, is not only sociologically illiterate—no society in history has ever survived without a moral consensus—it leads inexorably to moral anarchy.
Moral truths, which are central to Christianity, must be accepted by the masses lest chaos prevail. Ironically, it was the pope’s fellow Germans who gave us the diabolical idea that moral absolutes are nonsense—nihilists such as Nietzsche and Nazi enthusiasts such as Heidegger. It is not a matter of speculation what happens when truth is discarded. “There is no such thing as truth, either in the moral or in the scientific sense.” Those words were penned by Adolf Hitler. 18
Pope Benedict XVI rightly observes that multiculturalism has bred not only a contempt for the moral truths that adhere to the Judeo-Christian ethos, it has led to “a peculiar Western self-hatred that is nothing short of pathological.” 19 Hudson Institute president Herb London agrees, noting that multiculturalism “paradoxically assumes that non-Western cultures are somehow more equal, more worthy, than their Western counterparts.” He nails it just right when he says, “This Orwellian phenomenon preaches the gospel of equality, but proceeds as much from self-loathing as from egalitarianism.” 20 We saw this attitude on display in the late 1980s when Jesse Jackson led students at Stanford University in their successful campaign to abolish a Western Culture program. They chanted, “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Culture’s got to go.”
The same sentiment was evident in the 1990s when Yale University gave up $20 million given to them by Lee M. Bass: he wanted the money to be spent on efforts to expand the Western civilization curriculum, but highly politicized members of the faculty wanted to replace it with a multicultural program. The faculty won and Bass got his money back. 21 Yale may have been exceptional in this regard, but the multicultural assault on Western traditions was anything but exceptional. For example, in 1992, five hundred years after Columbus discovered America, radical faculties in high schools and colleges took the occasion to bash Columbus as a Christian oppressor. Yet it wasn’t Columbus, as Robert Royal points out, who introduced the Indians to human sacrifice, cannibalism, slavery, and torture. 22
No one has done a better job of chronicling the ideologically skewed nature of the multicultural curriculum than Diane Ravitch. The prolific author, who has taught at Columbia and New York University and served as Assistant Secretary of Education in the first Bush administration, investigated assigned textbooks used at all levels of education. What she found was a disturbing agenda. “The textbooks sugarcoat practices in non-Western cultures that they would condemn if done by European
s or Americans,” she writes. As she puts it, “Textbook after textbook tells the story of the ‘spread’ of Islam. Christian Europe invades; Islam spreads.” Unlike Christianity, which is subjected to microscopic criticism, “The treatment of Islam, for example, lacks any critical analysis.” The spin is so wildly dishonest—Islam is “tolerant and egalitarian”—as to verify the pope’s charge that multiculturalism in practice constitutes self-hatred on the part of its Western proponents. 23
Further proof was afforded in 2008 when the American Textbook Council issued a disturbing report, Islam in the Classroom: What the Textbooks Tell Us. The report focused on ten widely adopted junior and senior high school history textbooks. The bias is startling: “Islam is featured as a model of interfaith tolerance; Christians wage wars of aggression and kill Jews. Islam provides models of harmony and civilization. Anti-Semitism, the Inquisition, and wars of religion bespot the Christian record.” The Crusades, according to this propaganda, were not a reaction by Christians to Muslim violence, rather they were “religious wars launched against Muslims by European Christians.” In short, “While Christian belligerence is magnified, Islamic inequality, subjugation, and enslavement get the airbrush.” 24
As Ravitch learned, there are “bias” guidelines for testing that amount to censorship. One of the subjects that teachers are told is “sensitive” is religion. For example, they are instructed to avoid talking about religion, including holidays—even Thanksgiving! The “language police,” as Ravitch properly calls them, are not above tampering with the words of authors. For example, in one textbook, the novel The Ox-Bow Incident was reprinted, but many passages were redone: “By the Lord God” was switched to “By heaven”; “By God” was changed to “By gum”; “My God” became “Hey!”; and in another instance was altered to read, “You don’t mean it.” 25 None of this was done to protect kids—it was done to censor any reference to religion or God.
It’s not just in textbooks that Christianity is mistreated—it’s also in the classroom. “On America’s elite campuses, today,” writes Yale law professor Stephen Carter, “it is perfectly acceptable for professors to use their classrooms to attack religion, to mock it, to trivialize it, and to refer to those to whom faith truly matters as dupes, and dangerous on top of it.” Carter rightly concludes that if similar things were said about other groups in society, it would be called “bigotry.” 26 Camille Paglia goes further by arguing that an honest multicultural program would constitute “a core curriculum based on the great world religions.” As only she can say, “I’m coming at this as an atheist—I believe that every single religion is saying something truthful about the universe.” 27 But to accept all religions would be to accept Christianity, and that’s where the problem begins. The secular saboteurs will have none of it.
Some college officials are totalitarians. No other word can be used to accurately describe what happened at two California colleges in 2008, Yuba and the College of Alameda. The president of Yuba College told a 20-year-old student, Ryan Dozier, that he had better stop handing out gospel booklets or face disciplinary action. Believe it or not, Yuba has a free speech zone on campus and it is limited to two days a week for one hour. Dozier faced possible expulsion for simply distributing Christian literature without a school permit, and campus police informed him he might be arrested for violating the college’s policy. At the College of Alameda, Kandy Kyriacou was caught praying on campus. When the student found out that her professor was ill at Christmastime, she prayed for her. Though her professor had no problem with the prayer, another professor, Derek Piazza, did. He reported the student to the administration, which quickly sent her a retroactive “intent to suspend” letter accusing her of “disruptive or insulting behavior” and “persistent abuse of” college employees. If she persisted with praying on campus, she was told she could be expelled. 28
The multicultural industry, which includes academia, publishing houses, and the whole of array of diversity consultants in the workplace, is so wealthy and so influential that its antireligious views have penetrated virtually every institution in society. When the Red Cross bans high school kids from singing “God Bless America” and “America the Beautiful” at its luncheons, it is positive proof that delirium has become normality. This almost happened in 2002, save for pressure from the Catholic League.
The problem began when the Red Cross Orange County Chapter in Santa Ana, California, banned students from Orange County High School of the Arts from singing the two patriotic songs at one of its events. When the American Red Cross issued a news release defending the gag rule, the Catholic League called on over a hundred organizations to drop their support for the Red Cross. Four hours later, the two conditions we demanded were met: the decision to censor the songs was reversed and an apology was granted. 29
Censoring Christmas and Easter
It’s a close call who gets more excited each year about Christmas: the 96 percent of Americans who celebrate it or the secular crusaders who want to censor it. Knowing that they lack the ability to ban Christmas altogether, the next best thing the secularists can do is neuter it. That is why they push so hard to promote every conceivable holiday that occurs in December, including Boxing Day (which isn’t even an American holiday), so that they can nullify Christmas celebrations. It’s all so contrived. Take Hanukkah and Kwanzaa, for example. As the proportion of Jews has declined significantly in the past 50 years, the prominence of Hanukkah, a minor holiday for Jews anyway, has skyrocketed (it is easier to get a menorah displayed in the schools than a crèche). Kwanzaa, which has nothing to do with Africa—it was invented in 1966 by an ex-con who served four years in jail for ordering the beating of a woman 30 —is celebrated by only 2 percent of Americans, or about 15 percent of African Americans; 31 yet Kwanzaa celebrations in the schools are ubiquitous.
Secularists such as Frank Rich of the New York Times and Salon’s Michelle Goldberg are angry at those who are fighting back against attempts to censor Christmas. Rich agrees with Goldberg that the war on Christmas is “a burgeoning myth,” maintaining that the grievances constitute nothing more than “anomalous idiocies and suburban legends.” 32 This dismissive approach is not shared by Adam Cohen of the New York Times. In an editorial, he lashed out at the Catholic League and others, accusing them of promoting a “campaign to make America more like a theocracy, with Christian displays on public property and Christian prayer in public schools.” 33 But if what Cohen says is true, it follows that America was a theocracy up until recent times: before the 1960s there was prayer in the schools and nativity scenes were everywhere. If this is what a theocracy looks like, no one in the United States seems to have noticed.
Irving Kristol says that when he was growing up, “there were practically no Jews” who cared about what Christians did at Christmastime. “I went to a public school,” he writes, “where the children sang carols at Christmastime. Even among Jews who sang them, I never knew a single one who was drawn to the practice of Christianity.” Even the performance of a nativity play didn’t bother most Jews, Kristol says, and there was “no public ‘issue’ until the American Civil Liberties Union—which is financed primarily by Jews—arrived on the scene with the discovery that Christmas carols and pageants were a violation of the Constitution.” 34
Burt Prelutsky is a Jewish writer who agrees with Kristol. In a piece he titled “The Jewish Grinch Who Stole Christmas,” Prelutsky wrote that “I blame my fellow Jews. When it comes to pushing the multicultural, anti-Christian agenda, you find Jewish judges, Jewish journalists, and the American Civil Liberties Union, at the forefront.” Regarding the latter, he says, “It is the ACLU, which is overwhelmingly Jewish in terms of membership and funding, that is leading the attack against Christianity in America.” He concludes by saying, “This is a Christian nation, my friends. And all of us are fortunate it is one.” 35 It is for reasons like this that comedian Jackie Mason joined Don Feder, Rabbi Aryeh Spero, and me in a press conference on the steps of St. Patrick�
�s Cathedral in 2005 proclaiming, “Jews Say It’s Okay to Say ‘Merry Christmas.’” 36
Rabbi Lapin adds that “Secular fundamentalism has successfully injected into American culture the notion that the word ‘Christmas’ is deeply offensive.” But he does not shy from chastising Jews in Palm Beach from tolerating discrimination against Christians: if a menorah is allowed on public property, he advised his fellow Jews, a nativity scene should be permitted as well. 37 Jeff Jacoby, who writes for the Boston Globe, says it bothers him as a Jew as he watches in disbelief every year the many attempts to turn “Christmas” events into “holiday” ones. For him, “suppressing the language, symbols, or customs of Christians in a predominantly Christian society is not inclusive. It’s insulting.” He adds that it is also discriminatory: Hanukkah menorahs are never called “holiday lamps.” 38
All of these writers are correct to say that secular Jews are disproportionately represented in the war on Christmas. But there aren’t enough secular Jews to pull this off by themselves. That’s why it makes more sense to speak of this as an assault by radical secularists. As I wrote in 2006 in an op-ed page ad in the New York Times on this subject, “it is important to recognize that the few who are complaining [about Christmas celebrations] do not belong to any one religious or ethnic group—there is plenty of diversity among the ranks of the disaffected.” 39 Don Feder gets it right when he says that “the secularist assault on Christmas” is something that is “unwittingly aided by the perpetually aggrieved and sensitivity-whipped.” 40 There is, unfortunately, a sizable number of Christians who have such a deep-seated need to prove to the world that they are not bigots that they are prepared to sell out their own religion in an effort to validate their bravery.
A survey taken in 2006 disclosed that approximately 7 in 10 Americans say that “liberals have gone too far in keeping religion out of schools and government.” 41 In 2008, a poll commissioned by the ADL found that 61 percent of Americans say they believe “Religious values are under attack in this country.” 42 One reason so many feel this way is the annual banning of crèches, but not menorahs, from the public schools. The situation got so bad in New York City that I arranged for the city to be sued.
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