What Holiday You Wish For

If I have religion statistics lining up straight enough inside my math-challenged head, Christians are overwhelmingly the largest religious group in the USA. With Catholics leading at approximately 25%, the tent is wide enough to include Mormons, Episcopalians/Anglicans, and Seventh-Day Adventists among many other minorities estimated at 0.3 to 2% each.

The nation's body, mind and soul do appear to be tucked safely in the loving arms of Jesus, leaving American Christians with nothing to fear at Christmastime other than warmongering Christian soldiers marching in their midst. Throughout American neighbourhoods everywhere, the warmongers are available in the great original Military-Industrial-Complex flavour and the fancy new War-on-Christmas variety. Maybe I'm missing something as a reluctant participant-observer, but I wonder if Jesus himself would find it hard to to tell "his" soldiers and peacemakers apart. They all call themselves Christian, swear frequently to obey God and love their neighbours when not busy fighting to protect home and country, and favour a rather materialistic celebration of Christmas followed by comical bunny-hop routines on Easter— while remaining blithely oblivious to the real meaning of What Jesus Would Want True Christians to Do on Every Other Day of The Year.

"Majority rules!" they say to any lovable neighbour bold enough to simply express concern, or foolish enough to file a lawsuit, over the unconstitutional privileges and perqs enjoyed by a clique of self-annointed religious groups who divert and subvert our tax dollars and public resources, not to mention the members and machinery of government, from local to federal levels. What incentive or reasoning can we humanists, secularists, universalists, and constitutionalists ever cite to inspire a fundamental change of course inside the Christian-American creature-comfort zone— where public displays of religion are accepted always and only because they customarily are by and for Christians, who often talk as if the good-neighbourly wall separating Church from State applies to every other group except them?

What if...

...a day ever arrived when Christians no longer enjoyed a strong political and numerical majority in the United States? Imagine, just for instance, Muslims were 30 or 35 percent, or if Scientologists moved up into 2nd place.

Do you think the imaginary Muslim 35% would be able, let alone willing, to fit into what today's so-called Christians presume to be "mainstream" America?

Would they quietly go along with the current program of missing two or more days of work due to Christmas being a national holiday?

Would they insist their holy days should be officially recognized, either with or without Christmas?

The fantastic scenario ought to be no more discomforting in your imagination than the current reality is for the millions of good Americans who have a religious identity other than Christian.

If you're a Christian, please take a moment to turn the table in your mind's eye: would you and your kids be willing and able to fit into a school system run according to Muslim, Mormon, or XYZ beliefs? Picture a Christian child attending "normal" schools, whether public or private, where taking off schooldays for Christmas and Easter would require special permission and extra effort, made harder by her parents' constant struggle to juggle their own schedules as minorities at a typical XYZ-dominant American workplace.

The best answer is the truly American way, secular and constitutional from top to bottom. It's called The Wall Between Church And State, and it guarantees essential freedoms of and from religion, for everyone.

Let's repair the wall separating Religion and State and take good care to maintain it. Make that wall higher, thicker and stronger, to gently yet firmly constrain every fundamentalist, crusader, and plain honest believer, from the meekest Christian to the peacenik Muslim, alongside the Hindu, Baha'i and Jew, with all their games, names and rules of their goddesses and gods, too.

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