In 1918 a curious new amendment made its appearance in the US Constitution. It read: “The manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within the United States is hereby prohibited.” Thus began the famous “Prohibition” period in 1920’s America. Misdirected moral zeal? Perhaps. But there is no doubt that Congress was trying to respond to the problems alcoholism posed for American society.
In the end, of course, Prohibition didn’t last, and in 1933 Congress repealed the 18th Amendment with the 21st Amendment. We had tried to solve a real problem by applying an unacceptable solution.
Here we are in the 21st century, when the recent battles over the “constitutionality” of Christmas left us with the bitter flavor of a new and far more radical prohibition. In Boston there was the much-publicized spat over whether it’s a Christmas Tree or a Holiday Tree, as if someone would go to all the trouble of logging and erecting a 50-foot conifer in order to celebrate some vague sentiment of “the season.” In public schools “Merry Christmas” was prohibited, and even “Happy Holidays” was on the defensive. (Why is the day “holy” anyway?)
Times have changed. While the first Prohibition was an exaggerated response to a socially damaging vice, this new prohibition is responding to… Christmas. What’s wrong with Christmas? How does banishing Nativity scenes and calling Christmas carolling an “intolerant tradition” improve our moral life somehow? The answer is clear: it doesn’t. And if we examine the background, it becomes clear that the latter-day protesters either haven’t understood Christmas’ significance, or else they don’t want to accept it.
It’s impossible to imagine an event more exciting than the revelation that God has become man! There is no news better than the good news that we aren’t alone anymore, and that thanks to this Incarnation all people are brothers and sisters. And anyone who truly admired tolerance couldn’t help but be astounded at the universality of Christmas — a God become man out of love for all people, regardless of their race or social status or even their creed. But in fact the attack on Christmas was not an attack against Christmas at all, but an attack against what gives Christmas its meaning and joy and everlasting appeal. The furor over Christmas was just so much fallout from the eternal furor over Christ.
But the zealots of the 1920s and today’s ACLU zealots do have something in common after all. Both attempt to regulate morality in a manner that many Americans see as dangerous to freedom. I would be the last to say that all prohibitive laws are unjust: none of us would oppose a law forbidding such things as murder or theft.
But outlawing what is not evil is a different matter. And the same Puritan elements behind the attempt to ban liquor are behind the current attacks upon Christmas. Times have changed, and the new dogmatists are no longer trying to stamp out a real problem by imposing an oppressive morality. Instead they are attempting to apply this same dull-grey monotony to the joy of Christmas, a joy which is at the root of America’s confident greatness. “One nation, under God, with liberty and justice for all!” If you take God out of the picture, the phrase loses all of its force.
For if we go back to the document that began the remarkable adventure of the United States of America, we find the assertion that the inalienable rights — “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” — that form the core of our society are endowed by the Creator, by God. And it can’t be any other way. Or maybe the ACLU is the foundation of inalienable human rights? But God is this foundation, and He has proved it with His Incarnation. God is now a human being like us, and we recognize His image and likeness in all people, and in their inalienable rights.
The times have changed, but America is still America. This nation that so loves its freedom has always had to struggle against those who sought to curtail or corrupt its liberty. The battle for freedom has been waged and won against many enemies — from the prohibitionist zealots to the Ku Klux Klan. But today America is facing a new kind of zealot, one who wants to destroy the very foundation of our liberty and our human rights. And the attack on Christmas is a symptom of this new and much more sinister prohibition.
Christmas of 2006 is over, but the New Prohibition is not; and we must hope that Americans are willing to fight yet again to defend the precious gift of their freedom.
Br. John Pietropaoli, LC, is a Brother with the Legionaries of Christ studying in Rome.
