Removal of Christmas in Italy

Diana West learns about the eradication of Christmas in Italy, and, in the “I’m just a commonsense person scratching my head at this crazy world” manner of newspaper columnists, says: “I just don’t get it.”

I wrote to her:

Dear Miss West,

You don’t get it? You’re a conservative, yet you claim to have no grasp of what liberalism is and what it seeks?

The eradication of Christmas is of a piece with every other liberal/left movement in the Western world. Anything that is seen as being in a “dominant” position means that society is not equal, and so it must be eliminated. Since Christianity if the religion of the majority, it must be removed from public life, in order to attain equality for everyone.

This movement is not going to go away, and the more non-Christians there are in the West, the stronger the motive—on the part of liberal Westerners themselves—will be to continue it.

All this is, is consistent liberalism. Your notion that the religion of the majority should be respected depends on society being inconsistent in their liberalism. Liberalism means equality of all persons. It means any larger whole such as religion or ethnicity or nationhood cannot be allowed to occupy a dominant position in a society, because that means putting non-members of that majority group in a second-class status.

So please don’t say that you “don’t get it.” If you saw a Communist regime appropriating everyone’s property and killing property owners and priests, would you say, “I don’t get it”? No, of course not. You would understand that this is the evil nature of Communism. By the same token, the removal of Christmas from the public spaces of Western society is the evil nature of liberalism, exacerbated by the fact of increasing ethnic/religious diversity. So, if you want to stop this movement, two things must happen: The abandonment of liberalism, and the reversal of the movement of non-Christians into the West.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 23, 2004 11:45 AM | Send