Dec. 23, 2007

By Harry T. Cook

On the occasion of my first Christmas at St. Andrew’s of Clawson I made a scene about a scene. That very first Sunday in December 1987 as I arrived to take my first services and to preach my first sermons, I beheld across the street from the church a nativity scene arrayed on the grounds of city hall.

My first call on Monday morning was a complaint to the then executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan. I told him that I was offended as a Christian minister and as an American citizen to see so brazen a violation of the First Amendment and the cavalier breaching of the wall of separation between church and state.

A very expensive lawsuit ensued, and within three years the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals found for the defendant in that litigation, namely: the City of Clawson. The ACLU was ordered to fork over some $10,000 in legal fees that had been incurred by the city in its defense of the display of Jesus, Mary and Joseph upon the lawn of its city hall. Subsequently, Santa Claus and reindeer were added to the m ©lange, rendering it by some jurisprudential theory acceptable as a part of a cultural rather than a religious holiday display.

Needless to say, my complaint to the ACLU did not endear me much to a number of my new parishioners 20 years ago. Some of them have neither forgiven nor forgotten. To this day I try to avert my eyes whenever I have to walk or drive by city hall at this time of year – not because the ACLU did not prevail, but because what you can see there today is exactly what the Founding Parents of America wanted to avoid more than 200 years ago.

It is clear from the history of America’s beginnings that our enlightened founders wanted to keep religion and government separate to protect both from each other, so that government could be of, by and for all people regardless of their creeds – if any – and so that religion could flourish free from government meddling.

Thus today it is an indisputable fact that organized religion is a privileged character in our society. Most churches occupy choice pieces of real estate on which no property taxes are levied. They enjoy excellent police and fire protection paid for by the home and business owners of their communities; no one is directly taxed to support them. They can preach any gospel they care to preach, and no one can say them nay.

There may be a lot of things wrong with our country, but its guarantee of religious freedom and freedom from religion is not one of them. And so this Sunday in many churches, Sunday School Christmas pageants will be presented. There is where the manger and the shepherds and the Magi and the angels belong. Because it’s a Christian story – a quite glorious metaphor for the gentleness Christians say they wish the world. But it is a Christian metaphor not to be foisted upon others who would see it as proselytizing.

Nothing, though, prevents Christians from being gentle, from promoting gentleness in all things. To do so, they don’t have to insist on an in-your-face nativity scene on the public plaza of a city that belongs to a people, some of whom may be Muslim or Jewish as well as part of the undeniable Christian majority or to those who foreswear religion all together. Majoritarianism is un-American – and, come to think of it, also un-Christian.

 © Copyright 2007, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.