It’s that time of year again, when liberals try to kill Christmas. Why radicals, lacking either humor or perspective, want to play Grinch is a mystery to me. I imagine it’s a power thing, to make sure faith is reserved only for the government, not the churches.
This year, a deputy administrator in Wauwatosa (like it’s pronounced I guess) WI sent a note to city employees asking them not to use the colors red and green in holiday season decorations, because those paint colors are not “inclusive” or “equitable.”
I’m going to surmise that this far left administrator thinks the Pride Flag is “inclusive” and “equitable” even though it does not include any stripes for whites or heterosexuals. Christmas, on the other hand, is a Christian holiday, celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ, and we honor his birth at the head of the world’s largest religion.
Let the bah-humbug crowd bray. Conversions are on the rise — a South Carolina church baptized 141 people in one day, prompting the pastor to say, “God is just getting started.” It’s as if the cultural dissonance of our world — the open border, the emphasis on skin color instead of character, the vapid claims of brainwashed students that Hamas savages are oppressed, the censorship of free speech by government, the sexualizing of young children — maybe all that chaos is sending people to God.
Meanwhile intellectuals like Eric Metaxas — whose Letter to the American Church is a bestseller, urging a more muscular attack on Woke — are reinvigorating public debate about God. As the Wall Street Journal put it, “If religion in America is dying, someone will have to explain Eric Metaxas.” And Jordan Peterson — whose 17-episode Daily Wire TV roundtable discussion of the Book of Exodus was a big talker on YouTube — has said in recent years the world makes no sense without a transcendent power.
Over the last few weeks I have been gathering testimonials to this new appeal, eyewitnesses to the power of God by three individuals from very diverse backgrounds.
Paul Kingsnorth, an English novelist, recently converted from atheism to Orthodox Christianity, after an excursion through Buddhism, witchcraft and other spiritual landings. In a thought piece on Unherd, an important British purveyor of ideas, he observed that growing up as a Millennial, he learned to
“put career put career before family. To accumulate wealth as a marker of status. To treat sex as recreation. To reflexively mock authority and tradition. To put individual desire before community responsibility. To treat the world as so much dead matter to be interrogated by the scientific process. To assume our ancestors were thicker than us. Perhaps above all, and perhaps at the root of all, … to treat religion as something both primitive and obsolete. Simply a bunch of fairy stories invented by the ignorant. Simply a mechanism of social control. Nothing to do with us, here, now, in our very modern, sexually liberated, choose-your-own-adventure world. We were with Nietzsche, we moderns: we knew the God stuff was self-deluding balls, and soon enough the apostles of the New Atheism would be along to rub it in for us. Dawkins would sneer and Hitchens would bray and the pattern of the 21st century would open up before us: a slow, steady crawl towards a world unclouded by anything that could not be managed or measured by the people we believed we had become.”
You can read his essay, Our Godless Era is Dead, or watch his explanation below.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali was born in Somalia, raised in Kenya, educated by the Muslim Brotherhood. These days she is a citizen of the Netherlands, where she served in Parliament, and of America. After the twin towers were flattened on 9/11/2001, she turned away from religion, becoming an atheist. Now she has turned to Christianity.
I had publicly condemned the terrorist attacks of the 19 men who had hijacked passenger jets and crashed them into the Twin Towers in New York. They had done it in the name of my religion, Islam. I was a Muslim then, although not a practicing one. If I truly condemned their actions, then where did that leave me? The underlying principle that justified the attacks was religious, after all: the idea of jihad or Holy War against the infidels. Was it possible for me, as for many members of the Muslim community, simply to distance myself from the action and its horrific results?
She recalled that after the Muslim Brotherhood conquered Nairobi, Kenya in 1985, she was instructed to hate the Jews. “We cursed the Jews multiple times a day and expressed horror, disgust and anger at the litany of offenses he had allegedly committed. The Jew had betrayed our Prophet. He had occupied the Holy Mosque in Jerusalem. He continued to spread corruption of the heart, mind and soul.”
Now, with western civilization under assault, a global resurgence of dictators, and “the viral spread of Woke ideology,” she finds comfort in Christ. “We can’t fight off these formidable forces unless we can answer the question: What is it that unites us?” she wrote. “God is Dead seems insufficient. So does the attempt to find solace in “the rules-based liberal” world order. The only answer, in her view, is a “desire to uphold the legacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition.”
You can read her essay, also first published on Unherd, here.
Finally comes the testimony of Sarit Kurtman, a 28-year-old Israeli who with her husband and their 14-month-old daughter hid for 26 hours in the “safe room” of their home on Alumim Kibbutz, 4 kilometers from the Gaza border, after the brutal attack of Hamas terrorists on October 7. She speaks of the people around her who were injured, who fought on through the bullets, and calls their recovery “a great miracle.” She speaks from a hotel room, to which the kibbutz residents were evacuated. She longs to return to the kibbutz, to run through the fields with the joy of movement she once knew. She is poised but adamant. “But we will wait,” she says. “We will wait” until Israel finishes Hamas. Watch her below.
At this magical time of family, tradition and religion, I wish you and yours a wondrous Christmas. I thank you for supporting me during a difficult year — oh how I miss Jeffrey at this season — and look forward to continuing our conversation in January.
I know many are predicting a chaotic 2024 — a civil war perhaps, or a nuclear one, or perhaps even an alien invasion. It has that kind of “end of times” feel. But my wish for the new year is a peaceful transition, and a new president.
Merry Christmas & Happy New Year.
Merry Christmas to one and to all....keep the faith --I know it doesn't look like it, but we are winning-- one heart and one mind at a time!