You can email Mr. Fitzpatrick at Jkfitz42@cs.com. This article originally appeared in The Wanderer and is reprinted with permission. To subscribe call 651-224-5733.
The left’s control over our universities is just as unmistakable: we are no longer startled to find onetime defenders of academic freedom cracking the whip to enforce political correctness on matters of race and sex.
And yet, occasionally something pops up that puts you on your heels. A recent column by Betsy Hart, a frequent commentator on CNN and the Fox News Channel, focused on a case in point. Perhaps you have seen Hart’s column. But then again, maybe not. I found it buried deep in my local newspaper. It deserves more attention than that. The headline was “Christmas banned at schools.”
I guess we should have expected this. We always knew that the “separation of church and state” crowd had more in mind than stopping school prayer. Hart reports that in “public schools throughout the country” this past Christmas there was “no Christmastime allowed at Christmas. No Christmas songs that mention anything religious, no manger scenes. In fact, no ‘Christmas break’ – it’s routinely called ‘winter holiday’ now.”
And it is not just manger scenes and angels on high that were prohibited. In Kensington, Maryland, town officials “banned Santa from attending the local tree-lighting ceremony because of his ‘religious’ significance.” While you might think that the jolly old elf is a sign of the secularization of Christmas, the politically correct crowd is convinced that non-Christian children will associate him with a holiday that they do not celebrate.
There is more. Something else has been added to the stew. One would think, says Hart, that “the folks behind these” efforts to secularize Christmas would be “aghast to learn that students in some public schools this holiday season” were “not only allowed to have organized prayers,” but were permitted to do “so during school hours and that the prayers” were “overtly facilitated by the school.” Moreover, that “there has been little muss or fuss made about it” and “no lawsuit from the American Civil Liberties Union.”
Why not? The ACLU’s forbearance becomes less puzzling when one discovers that the “the students being allowed to have organized prayer are Muslims in New York City public schools, during their month long holy period of Ramadan, which began on Nov. 17. Special areas are set aside for the Muslim students to pray.” In addition, “the Muslim students’ schedules can be altered to avoid missing classes.” One Brooklyn high school “allows Islamic students to turn the auditorium into a makeshift mosque for their daily prayer vigil,” even though a nearby “Brooklyn intermediate school has just painted over a playground mural dedicated to the neighborhood youths who died because it featured Jesus Christ.”
I can remember former pastors of mine in the suburbs of New York City during the 1970s and 1980s trying to strike a deal with local school boards to secure classroom space in public school buildings for religious instruction classes that were to be conducted after school hours. They got nowhere. The educational authorities held that such a deal would violate the First Amendment’s separation of church and state. Yet now Muslim students in New York City are having their class schedules altered to permit them to attend prayer sessions during their school day — and the ACLU and The New York Times and the other guardians of the First Amendment raise no objections.
What is going on? I suggest that we are being given another indication that, when the liberals call for the separation of church and state, what they mean is a separation of American society from Christianity. Muslim students practicing their faith on public school grounds are not seen as a menace by the left because they are a minority with little power to shape the societal consensus.
Will the left be as open to Muslim prayer in the schools once Muslims become a force to be reckoned with on the national scene? Probably not. It will be interesting to watch what happens when that day comes. But until then, the growth of Muslim populations in certain areas of the country serves the secularist purpose. The growing Muslim influence in the country aides the effort to weaken the Christian consensus, which secularists view as the major obstacle to the ultimate triumph of their view of modernity.
This explains why educational authorities have also been open to courses and educational activities that focus on Third World religions, why school bulletin boards celebrating Kwanzaa are permitted by the same school administrators who would rush to tear down a poster with a Nativity scene. It is the same phenomenon that explains why “anti-war” demonstrations and civil rights marches by Catholic leftists are treated differently from Catholic anti-abortion protests. The separation of church and state? For the left, it is more a stratagem than a principle.
