Of the various Christmas sightseeing destinations offered a child in 1960s Los Angeles, the Santa Monica cr\u00e8ches\u2014a series of small stage sets erected on the bluffs above the Pacific Coast Highway–were particularly alluring.\u00a0\u00a0 The life-sized mannequins that populated the chicken-wire enclosures had an obvious ancient provenance in the nearby J.C. Penney\u2019s, with their heavy mascara, California tans, and stiff smiles under their Bedouin robes, yet the magic of mimesis\u2014of reproducing human life in artificial form\u2014worked its usual magnetic appeal.\u00a0<\/p>\n
This year, only three of the series\u2019 fourteen Christmas scenes have appeared in Palisades Park after a local atheist complained <\/a>about the monopoly on this prime piece of real estate enjoyed by religion.\u00a0 Complainant Damon Vix and some fellow non-believers applied for space in the park to broadcast their own message; Santa Monica decided to allocate the territory by lottery and the non-believers won the vast majority of spaces.\u00a0 Vix says that he never intended to dominate the area, but rather simply to receive an equal opportunity to make a pitch for reason.\u00a0 Many of the atheists\u2019 spaces have deliberately remained blank, so as not to antagonize viewers, Vix told the New York Times<\/em>; a photo in the Times<\/em> shows a now pathetically empty chicken wire cage hung with a quote from Thomas Jefferson: \u201cReligions are all alike\u2014founded upon fables and mythologies.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n My first reaction to this controversy is: What a ridiculous battle to pick.\u00a0 My second is: Does every public dissent from faith, my own included, inevitably come off as equally unpleasant?\u00a0 (Quick answer to the latter question: No, see<\/em> Christopher Hitchens.)\u00a0 Vix has merely reinforced the view of millions of believers that non-believers are\u2014for starters–killjoy blights on the polity who are only out to destroy joy and good cheer, and who would leave a vacuum in the human spirit as ugly as the atheists\u2019 empty cages.\u00a0 Equally distressing is the tone-deafness of another skeptic, the co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, who tells the Times<\/em> that the Santa Monica situation was \u201cone of the cutest success stories of the season.\u201d\u00a0 The Wisconsin-based group erected its own manger this year\u00a0in the Wisconsin State Capitol, featuring Einstein, Darwin, and\u2014I cringe to write it–Emma Goldman.\u00a0 Way to further associate religious skepticism with Godless communism, guys!\u00a0 (And skeptics should avoid Seventh Day Adventist-type mimicry: If you\u2019re going to be a vegetarian, don\u2019t ape the meat eaters with mock salmon loaf.)\u00a0<\/p>\n I am not even sure that non-believers should be picking battles at all, as opposed to simply asking the questions that logically follow from religious belief\u2014such as why anyone thinks that God cares about his prayers for relief from mortgage debt or arteriosclerosis when God tolerates the daily slaughter of innocents by natural disaster and every kind of disease under the sun.\u00a0<\/p>\n For me, the cr\u00e8che episode raises troubling questions about how skepticism can best challenge or talk back to the ever-weakening domain of faith, without coming off as crude, thin-skinned, or anti-social.\u00a0 I confess that most contemporary atheist crusades\u2014such as Rationalist slogans on buses–strike me as lame at best.\u00a0 (Is Secular Right any different?\u00a0 I hope so, but I cannot be sure.)\u00a0 And yet though I would not draw the line at the Santa Monica cr\u00e8ches, there are other public and government sponsored displays of religion that I, too, find deeply annoying and, if I controlled things, unacceptable, such as the prayer from Congress\u2019s resident chaplain that opens every day\u2019s legislative session, prayer in schools, Presidential prayer breakfasts, and Texas\u2019s official gubernatorial prayers for rain (still inexplicably unanswered).\u00a0 (Vix would undoubtedly say, with likely\u00a0justice, that he is not proceeding out of any personal annoyance but rather to uphold a fundamental Constitutional principle.)\u00a0 Every separation of Church and state that today we take for granted, such as the disestablishment of the official state churches in the early days of the Republic, undoubtedly struck many believers at the time as equally gratuitous and juvenile–not to mention deeply dangerous.\u00a0<\/p>\n The issue here is not just how to dissent from religion; any challenge to a widely-accepted practice will be perceived by the majority as the action of cranks who should just keep their mouths shut.\u00a0 And while Christianity in the West today can play the victim of an intolerant elite culture, it was of course unapologetic about suppressing heterodoxy before the Enlightenment and the market began chipping away at its hegemony over the public sphere.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0 Of the various Christmas sightseeing destinations offered a child in 1960s Los Angeles, the Santa Monica cr\u00e8ches\u2014a series of small stage sets erected on the bluffs above the Pacific Coast Highway–were particularly alluring.\u00a0\u00a0 The life-sized mannequins that populated the chicken-wire … Continue reading
\nI have no hard and fast rule for arriving at a socially acceptable etiquette for expressing disbelief.\u00a0\u00a0 Challenging Christian traditions, especially ones as innocuous and child-friendly as Christmas displays, is particularly fraught since Christianity has become\u00a0so tame and is so thoroughly integrated into our culture.\u00a0 (My heavily Jewish, Hollywood-dominated grammar school in West Los Angeles held an annual Christmas carol ceremony without anyone objecting.)\u00a0\u00a0 Perhaps the most that one can say is that anti-majoritarian principles should be applied with discretion\u2014knowing that everyone will interpret that mandate differently.\u00a0 Here, though, I would leave the cr\u00e8ches alone.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"