Dan Rather
DID YOU celebrate Christmas? If you did, I hope you and your family were able to be together for this joyous holiday. If you did not, if you instead have celebrated Eid or will be celebrating Hanukkah or Kwanzaa, I hope that the season finds you, too, surrounded by those you love. And if you celebrate any of these holidays, I will venture a guess about you and those gathered around you: In your home and in your places of worship, the way you mark your beliefs - last year, this year and the next - will not change one iota, no matter how the holidays are or are not observed in our public schools, our shopping malls and by our government institutions.
It's more than a guess - it is the very promise of America. And despite charges from certain quarters that America is waging a 'war on Christmas', it is a promise that this country has and continues to fulfill to a degree not seen before on this earth.
Our government has not told and will not be telling Americans the proper way to celebrate the holiday season. And whether you choose to greet your neighbour with 'Merry Christmas' or 'Happy holidays' or 'Keep your reindeer off of my lawn' will be of no concern to your local constabulary or, for that matter, the FBI.
RELIGIOUS PERSECUTION
Real and pervasive religious persecution is what drove many of America's first European settlers from the old world. It is among the forces that bring people here still. This is important to remember when some in our society decry what they see as an unfair banishment of the religious trappings of Christmas from our governmental property and our schools. It is the right of Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus and their children to remain free of religious proselytizing that bears an explicit or implicit official stamp.
For those who feel differently, two questions: Would you like your child to come home from school full of the lessons he has learned in a faith you do not endorse? And would you feel comfortable putting the instructions and observances of your own religion in the hands of the same people who run the Department of Motor Vehicles?
It is a point too often overlooked, but to our nation's founders - most of them religious men - the separation of church and state was designed more to protect religion from the state than it was to protect the state from religion. It wasn't so much about keeping manger scenes off the statehouse lawn as it was about keeping the state's agents out of houses of worship.
America has changed mightily since its founding. We are a far more diverse people than we were then, with a greater variety of religious views. That this principle of keeping our faith and our government separate still works for us is a tribute to the wisdom of our founding generation, embodied in the words of George Washington that every man "ought to be protected in worshipping the deity according to the dictates of his own conscience."
HOLIDAY TREES
Is it silly for a department store to call the Christmas trees it sells 'holiday trees'? Of course it is. But Christians know better than to look for the true spirit of Christmas in malls. And throughout our history, Americans have known better than to expect our government and our public institutions to endorse any one form of worship - even, and perhaps especially, one practised by the majority. Our Constitution was drafted with the memories of real religious wars still fresh in American minds; respectfully, the 'war on Christmas' is not one of them.
Dan Rather is a former television broadcaster.
