It’s impossible to ignore all the signposts of the Christmas season—wherever you go the sights and sounds are unambiguously evocative of the holiday season. Still, sometimes as powerful as the familiar Christmas imagery is the impulse to secularize the holiday—to pull the Christ out of Christmas—usually out of the explicitly stated impulse to avoid giving offense or to remain maximally inclusive during a profoundly religious season that could be interpreted as exclusive to Christians. There’s a sense in which the attempt is obviously silly and inevitably a failure—everyone knows a holiday tree is a Christmas tree just as everyone knows our national imprimatur to shop intemperately is still a celebration of the birth of Christ. Still, the contradictory currents of our Christmas season—-the religious and the secular—are in many ways emblematic of a similar tension within our own peculiarly American foundations. Our tendency is to adopt the constitutional solution to the problem and neatly compartmentalize the domains specific to the church and to the state but this has proven difficult for many of the reasons Strauss often discussed—that the truly religious spirit refuses to relegate itself to a narrowly defined private sphere and the public sphere often zealously tries to suppress even benign expressions of spiritual sentiment. A much deeper problem, often discussed by Remi Brague and our own Peter Lawler, is that the secular and the religious components of our nation’s philosophical edifice may not be so easily separable—it might be the case that our basic premises, and maybe the basic premises of modernity itself, draw much more deeply from the Christian view of the world than is often surmised. So just as we try to take the Christ out of Christmas—and let Locke out of the Locke box—we might take the opprtunity to reflect on the possibility that our nation is so fundamentally and deeply Christian that even our very modern repudiation of this Christian celebration unwittingly absorbs and promotes much of its essential teaching.
