The Silence of Christmas and the Scream of the
Tsunami: Soul-Speak in a Suicidal Culture
Ravi Zacharias
The very first Christmas card that I
received this December was from a Sikh
friend in Thailand. He and his family
fondly wished my family and me a Merry
Christmas and a joyous New Year. As the
cards continued to come in from all over
the world, I realized that some were from
Buddhists, some from Hindus, and yes,
there were even similar greetings from
Muslims. Growing up in India I remember often being greeted at Christmas with
the words, “Bada din mubarrak,” which
literally means “Greetings on the Big
Day.” We would accordingly greet them
in response and welcome them to our
house for some sweets and delicacies. A greeting such as this was not
exactly meant to be a doctrinal test for
orthodoxy, either by the greeter or by the
greeted. I don’t recall my Hindu friends
questioning the “bigness” of the day and
asking for a change in the greeting. Even
unbelievers understood the courtesy of
wishing someone well on that special day. Yet, here in North America a strange reversal has been taking place. All around
us “Christmas bashing” has gone on.
After all, not everybody believes in it,
so why should anyone be wished well at
Christmas?
The ubiquitous American Civil Liberties Union, ever present to eradicate belief
from the public square, lent its oppressive
muscle to those who denied any government or state agency the freedom to put
up a Christmas tree, or children to sing
Christmas carols in schools. In keeping
with that hollowness, a vacuous ceremonial pronouncement came at the lighting
for the “People’s Tree” on Capitol Hill. This way the ceremony only offended the
people for whom the tree was a celebration of the true meaning of Christmas and
protected the rights of those who want the
benefits of the season without the reason.
One civil libertarian, yes, one, demanded of a school in New Jersey that no
Christmas tunes be played because it was
not just the words that offended his sensitivities but the melodies as well. I heard
one well-known talk-show host, a guru
of psychological harmony and wellbeing,
acknowledge that she would be offended
if she were wished a “Merry Christmas.” Is the day coming when someone will be
uncomfortable with “Good Morning” as
a greeting because the word “good” is
a derivative of God and they would not
want to offend an atheist?
To be sure, this bigotry has come
from our new cultural ethos of tolerance—something by which cultural liberals mean a society that allows only their
views to be expressed in public while
banishing everyone else’s views to their
private chambers. And so the “Happy
Holidays” rolled in on the heels of “Turkey Day” with the spirited haters of the
season venting their vitriol against those
whom they castigate for “audaciously
claiming” these to be religious holidays. (Fortunately, most of them do not realize
that the very word “holiday” is derived
from the word “holy” or that would send
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AMERICA, RETURN TO GOD!
them poring through a revisionist dictionary to re-baptize that word as well!) This microcosm is only a small
portion of the bigger picture: Western
civilization is on the verge of spiritual
bankruptcy as it moves steadily towards cultural suicide.
As I have pondered this, I have
been wondering what has happened to
the West in general and to America in
particular. Where has this culture lost
its way? Europe, of course, long secularized, mocks America’s religious belief and wonders when we will come of
age. I suppose they are delighted to see
this outrage towards Christmas as at least
a small glimmer of hope for them that we
too will join their ranks of secularism writ
large in our worldview. Italy’s European Affairs Minister,
Rocco Buttiglione, reminded Europeans
how pagan they have become when he
wrote in an article that by European
standards, George Bush would be
considered unfit for his job not for
any other reason but for his religious
beliefs. Even worse, said he, European
legislators marvel that President Bush is
“not ashamed” to express these beliefs. These are the very beliefs that prompted
Buttiglione himself to withdraw his candidacy for the European Union’s Justice
and Home Affairs Commissioner. Is it
possible, do you suppose, that Europe’s
anti-God stance made him realize that
their definitions of justice and home affairs amount to nothing, and therefore,
why would he want to become the Minister of Nothing? That aside, a venomous and brazen
anti-Christian attitude is now wielded
in the West. We must ask ourselves an
awful lot of questions to understand how
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this came to be. How did it come about
that while so-called Muslim scholars
do not hesitate to admit that Islam and
democracy are not compatible, a Muslim
can still have democratic rights to call his
festivals by their names while Christians
cannot? How is it that while Muslim
radicals attacked the United States—and
still set their sights on its destruction and
on killing those within their own moderate ranks who would challenge them—the
Koran is required reading at some academic institutions in the West, though
in those same institutions the Bible is
mocked in their classrooms? How is it that a Muslim in Canada can
get away with demanding that the Shari’a
law be introduced into the Canadian
legal code but would scream outrage if
a westerner in a Muslim country were to
ask to be tried by his own legal system? Why is it that the Hindu American Foundation is filing amicus briefs in two cases
before the Supreme Court siding with the
removal of the Ten Commandments from
public display—one engraved on a war
memorial from years before—when they
would be incensed if a Christian in India
asked that all Hindu relics and art from
Indian courtrooms be removed because
the country, by its own pronouncement, is
“secular”? I know it doesn’t sound politically correct to ask such questions but
wouldn’t they ask the same questions if
they were in this position of being singled
out for banishment? You see, it is a bigger issue than
Christmas carols being banned. Something has gone radically wrong in
the West. The powers that are at work
behind the scenes think they know what
they are doing by pandering to the destroyers of America’s historic faith, but
in reality, they don’t have the foggiest
notion of what is actually at stake here. While in America we may think that by
evicting the “Christian God” from its
public square it is rending the arena neutral, we are ignorant of the reality that, in
the long run, Eastern religions will not allow them such “no man’s zone.” Europe
will find out that once Turkey is admitted
into the European Union, their leaders
will have to be careful about what public
statements they may make about God. Nature abhors a vacuum, especially a
spiritual one, and though this flirtation
with absolute secularism may win the
momentary dawn of a new era, it will
lose the day to more strident religions
than the Christian belief. Of that, I am
certain. Ask any Muslim missionary that
question and he or she will tell you that is
so.
How Did We Get Here?
The truth is that America’s values
are based upon the bequest of a JudeoChristian worldview. Take a look at the
founding of the nation. The Federalist
Papers that argued for the unification of
the states did so for many reasons. One
was that “Providence has been pleased
to give this one connected country to one
united people—a people descended from
the same ancestors, speaking the same
language, professing the same religion,
attached to the same principles of government” for the quest of life and liberty,
which they deemed “unalienable rights,”
gifts from the Creator. They spoke
of “Nature, and Nature’s God.” They
pledged their commitment to the statutes
with “sacred honor.” The last verse and chorus of The Star-
Spangled Banner reads:
“Oh thus be it ever when freeman shall stand
Between their loved homes
and war’s desolation;
Blest with victory and peace,
may the Heaven—rescued land
Praise the Power that had
made and preserved us a nation.
Then conquer we must, when
our cause it is just;
And this be our motto: “In
God is our trust.”
And the star—spangled banner in triumph shall wave
O’er the land of the free and
the home of the brave.
This was composed in 1814. Not
long after that America, The Beautiful
was penned, in which it was recognized
that God had shed His grace on America
for good and for brotherhood. And in
1832 America was written:
Long may our land be bright
With freedoms’ holy light,
Protect us by Thy might
Great God, our King!
But it was not just America’s songs
that acknowledged God; it was her leaders’ thoughts as well. In his Gettysburg
Address in 1863 Lincoln closed with the
prayer, “That this nation under God, shall
have a new birth of freedom.” Earlier
that year, in The Emancipation Proclamation, he had closed with the words,
“I invoke the considerable judgment of
mankind and the gracious favor of Almighty God.” And years before that, the
Declaration of Independence ended with
the words, “With a firm reliance on the
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AMERICA, RETURN TO GOD!
protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our
Fortunes and our Sacred Honor.”
Now one wonders, what do these
words mean? Sacred... Honor...Holy...
Providence... God? You can be absolutely sure that if the American Civil Liberties Union had their way, these words
would never have made it into these
songs and documents as national sentiments. They simply “violate the sensitivities” of the irreligious or the die-hard
secularists for whom this world and this
world alone must define freedom.
How, then, did we get to the point
where such power is wielded by those
who, in the name of freedom, deny us
the right to preserve our historic traditions? A foreign friend once asked me
what the American Civil Liberties Union
stood for. I sarcastically said, “None of
the above.” But the more I pondered that
response the more I realized how true it
is. It is certainly not American because
it denies both the worldview that framed
America’s founding documents and
denies a vast majority of Americans the
right to enjoy their festivals the way they
always have been enjoyed. It is not civil
because it redefines civility by making us
think that tolerance only works one-way. It certainly does not understand liberty
because liberty is not the bequest of
naturalism. Naturalism begets a nature “red in tooth and claw” and makes
determinism inevitable. That is not
liberty. Liberty is the gift of the One
who made us with intrinsic worth and
taught us to respect life and property. And as for “union”, they spend millions
of dollars to spread disunity. So much for
their name and mission!
Sometime following Christmas, writer
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Tom Wolfe was being interviewed on his
most recent book, I Am Charlotte Simmons. The storyline is woven against
the backdrop of the hedonism that now
runs through the veins of the American
academy. The interviewer asked him
how he thought such thinking became
legitimized in our culture. Wolfe was
unhesitating in his answer: It was
when Nietzsche pronounced “the death
of God” in the late nineteenth century.
I have asserted that sequence for years. One can argue with the exact dating of
the transition but who can argue against
the logic of that assertion? Dostoevsky
had said that if God is dead anything is
permissible.
Nietzsche died at the beginning of the
twentieth century. Take a look at the slide
from that time to where we found ourselves by the end of that century. Abortion of the unborn has reached astronomic
proportions. Even Edward Kennedy, an
extreme liberal, averred that we should be
trying to curtail the number of abortions. One shudders to wonder who, amid the
myriad babies that have been killed in
the womb, have we decimated along the
way? Could there have been a mind that
could have developed a cure for cancer? Could there have been another Martin Luther King or an Einstein or a Churchill or
for that matter, another Mother Teresa—
those who fought for the weak? Proponents of the right to abort fail to deal with
the reality of what we are silencing amid
the noise of our “rights”. Millions, even
nations, have been banished to the domain of the voiceless.
That is the logic of killing God, isn’t
it? Having killed Him we had to find a
justification for killing other realities as
well. But that was going to take genius of
a different sort. Killing God was easier
because the “right to belief” has a ring of
goodness to it. How were we going to attack different moral frameworks? We altered such realities by rewording our acts. Rather than calling it the “freedom to
destroy,” which it really is, we call it
“freedom of choice.” Those who treat
life as sacred are now the killers—the
killers of choice. Anyone who believes
in the parameters of sexual sanctity is
the killer of freedom and pleasure. Even
marriage has been desacralized so that
we no longer have homes, we have “civil
unions,” and why should anyone argue
against a “civil” union? By rewording
something you alter its look. But the mask is taken off when you get
closer and listen more intelligently to the
voice behind the masquerade. Did you
see and hear, during the American election, the hatred being vented against the
Right by these voices? Don’t forget they
are the same ones who want laws passed
against “hate speech.” Canada, interestingly, while considering the provisions
of the Shari’a law for the Muslim, is at
the same time making it illegal to speak
out against homosexuality. The former
would make blasphemy against the Islamic sacred beliefs a crime and the latter
will stifle the pulpit on the sanctity of sex.
The follower of the Shari’a will be able
to make any pronouncements against the
Christian faith and the person who believes sex is nothing more than a personal
choice can castigate the Bible as sexist. So in effect, the Christian faith becomes
the sole voice silenced.
Did you hear the Hollywood elite
speak with passion against The Passion
of the Christ? The actor Jon Voigt scathingly attacked Mel Gibson for focusing
so much on the gruesome. What? Did I
hear him correctly? I had to see humor
in that attack, for two miracles had taken
place. A relativist had finally admitted
that violence on the screen can be overdone, and second, that the screen can
change behavior in the viewer. Please
take note. Voigt—who starred in Deliverance, which I am told is a graphic, disturbing film—and others like him resented a film for being ideologically driven
but crowned Michael Moore’s film with
the highest praise. They were disturbed,
they said, because the film was too violent. Are these not the same purveyors of
violence who are outraged by censors? Why all this anger, I ask? This is
not a little tempest in a teapot. This is
a firestorm intended for one purpose
alone—to silence Christianity. Can
you see the trend? First, we kill God.
Then, we kill man. And to justify it
all, we kill language. But language is
guaranteed as part of our freedom. How
does a purveyor of free speech kill the
right of others to have the same privilege? This is cleverly done by transferring
their hatred onto those they wish to silence—and the word “phobia” is added
to anything they are against. Funny,
they have never thought of themselves as
Christophobes. To drive home the last stake and elevate their view they co-opt the scientific
community and come up with an educated response. Enter Richard Dawkins
of Oxford, who has proposed that religion
is a virus that has made its way into the
software of some DNA, and therefore, it
must be expunged. This is liberalism’s
cure for the malady that plagues their
freedom. Moral absolutes, according to
such demagoguery, are the bane of our
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AMERICA, RETURN TO GOD!
existence brought into play by the virus
of religion. Here is the conclusion. No, they are
not against absolutes. They are only
absolute relativists. No, the destroyers of
our cultural values are not against freedom. They are only against the freedoms
of those who challenge them. No, they
are not against phobias. They are only
against the phobias that others have. No,
they are not against the sacred—the head
of the ACLU is brilliantly ordained as
a reverend. They are only against God. No, they are not against killing. They are
only against those who kill for different
reasons to theirs. I do not recall hearing anything
from Michael Moore when Saddam
Hussein slaughtered his thousands.
Where is his bleeding heart when tens
of thousands of Christians are martyred and brutalized in so many totalitarian regimes? Did we hear a whimper
from Hollywood a few short years ago
when a Christian leader was brutally murdered by the Iranian authorities? I can
accept the argument of the person who
cries out against the slaughter of innocents in the war in Iraq if at the same time
that person cried out against all slaughter
of innocents.
No, that does not happen. I could list
a dozen other such glaring inconsistencies. But herein is the cancer within
the soul of our cultural relativists. The
slide has taken place because the West
wanted to remove any warning sign that
cried “Stop!” to living with contradiction. Christianity makes such a challenge. Relativists decry the violence in The
Passion because it exposes the violence in our own hearts. They redefine
words because they refuse to recognize
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that “In the beginning was the Word.” Their peace is a bundle of contradictions
because they reject the Prince of Peace. They have killed truth because truth
is too coherent for them and they want
the benefit of incoherence. They are terrified of some “fundamentalist takeover”
and so assign phobias to their opponents. When you stop and think about it, it
has been the same right from the beginning of human history, hasn’t it? “Has
God said?” in the Garden of Eden was
followed by “You shall surely not die.”
The fear of God was replaced by the
fear of losing “freedom.” Adam and
Eve failed to realize then, and we fail to
realize now, that there is no such thing
as absolute civil liberty. If mine is to be
guarded someone else’s will have to be
restricted and the reverse is true. Absolutes always restrict for the right reasons. And it is all born out of one thing, “sacred
honor”—to honor God and your fellow
human being. Only in that sequence can
life be lived out logically. Cultural liberalism had better wake
up to the truth. The bottom line is that
humanity is broken on the inside. We
live with contradiction because life has
fallen apart within. We dress it up with
language like makeup plastered over a
corpse, as if we have given it life again. Until we see the truth of our own
brokenness we will be shattering everything and making a hell around us. This is where reality has a strange way of
calling our bluff. God does not leave us
destitute. In no uncertain terms He shows
us a glimmer of hope, not the bankruptcy
of the relativists’ answers but the image
of God deposited in their souls, revealed
by their questions. A Rude Awakening
And amid all our self-centeredness,
a rude awakening has come to us as an
earthquake of gigantic proportions rocked
continents the day after Christmas, and
tens of thousands of people were swept
into the sea. This is a tragedy too horrific to imagine. We have all sat glued to
our television sets numbed by the loss of
life. What is the question the cultural
liberal asks? How can God allow such
a thing? Where is God when such catastrophes happen? Maybe it is time someone whispered
that when Christmas was banned, the
right to ask any question of God ought to
have been banned as well. But the question haunts, doesn’t it, and there is no answer to be found in “The People’s Tree.” The thief who stole the joy and life of
Christmas Day was arrested the morning
after by the deluge of grief and death. In
the courtroom of reality he was found
guilty by his own interrogation. How?
Analyze the question. It is a self-defeating question for the scientific naturalist to ask why this happened because
very few animals were lost in the tragedy. They intuitively sensed the danger that
approached and fled long before the water
could reach the shores. What happens to
scientific naturalism’s theory of evolution
here, when creatures on the lower evolutionary scale were smarter than those
higher up the scale? If survival is the
ultimate good, this seems like “devolution” to me. As a matter of fact, I even
heard one person say that this is Nature’s
way of balancing the numbers in a crowded world. Naturalism breaks under the
weight of its own argument. Similarly, the philosophical natural-
ist poses the question in a self-defeating
way, for to ask the question is to assume
a moral framework and there cannot be a
moral world for the philosophical naturalist. According to this belief, our world
came from primordial slime; can good or
bad come from such chemistry? What
about the Hindu or Buddhist? He would
have to say that this was the karma of the
individuals who perished in the deluge Period. And the Muslim? The Muslim is
so committed to the absolute sovereignty
of Allah within which no freedom is
granted to the “creature” that his answer
would just be “Inshah-Allah”—the tsunami was just the will of God.
The question of “why” only has
meaning because the Christian faith
legitimizes it. And so the very question
betrays that the soul is not completely
dead in the West. Yes, the answers to life
from the relativist may betray that “God
has died,” but the questions from his soul
at a time like this reveal that he cannot
kill Him completely. A sovereign God in
his grace has given us the freedom to ask
such questions.
Signing of Mayflower Compact, 1620
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AMERICA, RETURN TO GOD!
You see, in our human courtrooms
revisionist wordsmiths in the role of
prosecutor may play tricks with the words
of others, but in the court of reality their
own words will accuse and indict them.
Whether we like it or not, only the reason
for the season gives reason to the question and only in that season is the reason
for the answer. That is why Christmas
will always be celebrated in the heart
even when it is denied public utterance. That is the bequest of the “Big Day.” A Warning and A Hope
I would be remiss if I did not end with
a warning and a glimmer of hope. Maybe
I can summarize it in two illustrations. Last year when I was in India, I went
to visit my grandmother’s grave. I do that
each time I go to Delhi. But there had
been a lot of rain and some of the graves
had sunk into the mud. With friends,
I looked and looked and couldn’t find
her grave. The caretaker said that he no
longer had the register in his possession
to tell me where she was buried. I knew
the general area but just couldn’t find it. I
began to get quite anxious about thepossible loss of her grave. Then all of a sudden, I saw her name
and the verse of Scripture that was inscribed above it. I was so grateful and
proceeded to arrange for another, taller
stone to be erected there. You see, even
a grave has significance because it is a
marker of a life, a relationship, and a
memory.
Those who seek to change our vocabulary are gradually eradicating the
relationship between truth and culture,
between the past and the present. They
want to remove all markers that brought
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us this far. They should be sure that if
they continue in this way the very worldview they have put into place will one
day eradicate them as well. Do you remember the words of Martin Niemoller who tried to warn those
who remained silent to the Nazi atrocities? He said,
First they came for the Communists, and I didn’t speak up
because I wasn’t a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn’t speak up because I
wasn’t a Jew.
Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn’t speak up because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me, and by
that time there was no one left to
speak up for me.
Those who wipe out the memory of
the Christian faith will find out that the
logic of their position may one day lead
someone to wipe them out as well, and
there will be no belief left to come to
their aide, for there will be no one left
with reason to speak of loving those who
despise you.
So what is the glimmer of hope? I
began this essay while I was in Beijing,
China, where all over the city I saw banners that said, Merry Christmas. I spent
one morning going through the Forbidden
City on Tiananmen Square. This historic
city was constructed in the fourteenth
century as the home of China’s emperors. As I walked in the cold with some friends
from one gate through to the next, deep
in the inner sanctum of the palace of the
Forbidden City I saw a small Starbucks. Yes, you read that correctly. And on the
window of that Starbucks it said Merry
Christmas. I stopped and pondered: How
odd it is that in the land of Mao where
individuals were humiliated for the sake
of the “People” I should see a sign wishing me a Merry Christmas, while in the
land where individual freedom is touted
as defining the nation’s reason for being,
the “People’s Tree” won the day. But I found out something more,
as I visited that vast land. The Chinese
Church is now one of the largest in the
world. No, Mao and his Cultural Revolution, standing on the shoulders of Marx,
could not stop the faith that has transformed millions throughout history. In a
land where the State has stopped at nothing in its attempt to crush the spirit, the
spirit has triumphed. The contradiction of
contradictions may be that God uses even
the wrath of men to praise Him. And so I thought: Maybe the East
will bring the message to the West to
awaken her to her heritage. Voices may
sing to us in foreign accents of that silent,
holy night, and no legal pronouncements
from our cultural iconoclasts of the West
will be able to stop them. That will truly
bring contradiction full circle so that we
might see the nature of truth that forces
off the mask of contradiction and shows
us that the cry in tragedy is really the
longing for Christmas to be true. What the civil libertarians need to
know is that God simply will not be conquered by our puny little outbursts and
our juvenile pronouncements. Christmas
did not end with the night of Jesus’ birth. In fact, there were those who tried to kill
Him then as well. They thought they had
succeeded but it was only a momentary
illusion. There was a day in which the
central figure of Christmas rose again
from the dead. That is why death itself
is not the greatest tragedy. The greatest
tragedy is when we have banished God
and are buried by our own questions. Christianity will never be banished to the
grave because it follows a Savior who
knows the way out. That is the truth for
life and it is worth celebrating. (From Just Thinking : The Triannual Communique
of Ravi Zacharias International Ministries, Winter
2005, pp. 1-12. www.rzim.org Reprinted with
permission.)
The Liberty Bell
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