A Christmas for Everyone

On Christmas Eve, I happened to turn on the television at 11:45 p.m. On CBS, I encountered a program called “A Christmas for Everyone”. According to the TV listings, it was a Christmas special featuring a minister a rabbi and an imam. While the listing sounded a lot like one of those old jokes (you know, a minister, a rabbi and an imam walk into a Christmas service…), I thought the program was appalling. I could not tell whether this was a local New York program or a CBS national program. Either way, however, it seemed in very poor taste, a triumph of political correctness run amok. It is one thing for schools to have holiday programs where they have Christmas songs, a few Hannukah songs, and some smattering of other cultural works. Some place have Kwanza music (although frankly, I have no idea what that is.) One year, the program at my daughter’s school had a Buddist chant from the chorus at the “Holiday Program”. School events are for children who are required by law to attend, so being inclusive of minorities as well as majorities makes sense. Actual holidays, are something else altogether. Christmas is not a holiday to be celebrated by a rabbi or an imam. These people are representatives of religions that do not accept the very premise of the holiday. I did not stay to see the content of the TV show, but I wonder if the imam spoke of the “misguided worship by the infidels” or if the rabbi spoke of the “celebration of the birth of the false messiah”. Jews, Muslims and Christians can be tolerant of each other and accept that not everyone believes the same thing, but there is no need to include those other beliefs in a basic celebration of one of the defining moments of each religion. Will there now be recitation of verses from the Koran and readings from the New Testament at Yom Kippur services? Will Muslims start lighting Sabbath candles and saying blessings in Hebrew at the end of their Friday Sabbath? Maybe all Buddhist monks will now wear crosses and celebrate Easter.

A multicultural society is one that allows each group within the society to follow its own beliefs and practices. “A Christmas for Everyone” was not a celebration of multiculturalism. Instead it was a new variation of the old melting pot ideal for America. Instead of the melting pot being for the homogenization of national identity (something that the PC crowd now decries), this was a melting pot for religious beliefs, something antithetical to the very idea of freedom of religion. In America, people are free to worship as they choose; they should not be subject to pressures to incorporate other religions into their own.