Yesterday, Hubster and I took a holiday from work and family responsibilities and drove a distance to a Christmas chorale in a church in a much more conservative community than our own.
Together with the choir and the Christmas holiday celebrants in the packed church, we sang our hearts out for a couple of hours, visiting the beloved classic Christmas carols from many lands: Ireland, Wales, Germany, the Ukraine, our own USA, and on and on. It was, for us, a heavenly experience (pun intended).
In that church, we were far from our usual environment of multikult expectations that we appreciate everyone else's cultures first--and our own Western identity only under certain carefully regulated circumstances. Surrounded by Christians of many denominations all singing, with beaming smiles on their faces, "Oh come let us adore Him," accompanied by skilled musicians weaving magic into the air with their instruments, I snuggled into a deeply conscious enjoyment of some of the most magnificent aspects of Western culture, appreciating that, on top of everything else that the West has created in the last couple of thousand years, Westerners had not neglected to invent a universe of different ways to acknowledge and praise the Creator of All Life, using as their tools a treasure-chest of arts, sciences, and engineering feats.
Fellow blogger Trestin Meacham, introducing his new Sunday Firesides, pointed out that "fighting Marxism without using religion is like fighting a forest fire with a garden hose." Regular readers of this blog are well aware that I see other fights on our hands as well, most especially with those who do not honor life as a most precious and mysterious gift from God. In the end, neither the tyranny of Marxism nor the tyranny of Islam has anything to compete with the beauty and dignity of Christianity and Judaism, and most of the humanity of which secularists are so proud has been knitted together from remnants of Judeo-Christianity, a fact that most secularists, in their quest to disable Christianity, fail to recognize. If Christianity goes, so also go the good intentions of the secularists and socialists and the support of the society for those good intentions.
During those couple of hours in that church, I was struck by the realization that the best protection of our Western values is for us to stand shoulder to shoulder in our own cultural traditions, which are so beautiful. And I was struck, too, by the wisdom of our Founders in recognizing that Christianity makes the best soil in which to grow the Tree of Liberty.
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