Merry Christmas

That's right, Merry Christmas. None of that denatured Season's Greetings crap. On this Christmas Day, as we survey the terrain from Cold Mountain, we are appalled at the religious bigotry that has taken over swaths of my ancestral homeland. Quite so, you say, how beastly Americans are to those poor Muslims. WRONG. Wrong and stupid.

I'm talking about the subtle bigotry and outright discrimination against Christians in the United States. From shysters imposing anti-Christian litmus tests on potential jurors, to the Ten Commandments forcibly removed from a courthouse, to store clerks required to use the grotesque "Happy Holidays" as a greeting, to the disappearance of Nativity scenes from village commons and shopping malls, Christians in America today find themselves belittled and their beliefs treated with contempt. The cheap cynicism that passes for a world view in the salons of the left requires no wisdom, no reflection, no introspection; nothing more than a bit of low cunning and a college freshman's vocabulary. It's a poor substitute for either reason or faith. Can it be that the acid contempt the left show for Christians comes from the little peeks they take into their own empty souls in the dark night? Can it be that under the slick post-modern banter, they have measured themselves against a man like Pope John Paul and found themselves badly lacking? Can it be that I give them too much credit and that all their words are really just echoes of empty minds and empty hearts?

This Christmas let us think of the Pope, whose back is now bent with the literal weight of the world and remember that he once marshaled the moral authority of the Church and the reflected power of the risen Christ to smash the locks on the gates of Hell on earth. Let us also think of Ronald Reagan, whose unshakable faith in America's destiny brought down the walls as surely as did Joshua's horn. Let us pray that we see their like among us again soon.