Illinois' State Capitol is home to Baby Jesus during Christmas holidays
By Tom Brejcha, President and Chief Counsel, Thomas More Society -
This year we co-sponsored displays at the State Capitols of Illinois (7th year), Florida (2nd year), Rhode Island (3rd year), Georgia (1st year), Michigan (1st year), Texas (1st year), and Nebraska (1st year). Other groups have sponsored nativity scenes in Arkansas, Mississippi, Washington State, and Wisconsin. We also arranged for a display on the lawn outside the Governor’s mansion in Oklahoma. That makes 12 states in all, with 38 yet to go.
Is it worth all the effort to put up these displays in more venues, especially in State Capitols? The anonymous benefactor of our client, the American Nativity Scene Committee (ANSC), thinks so, and on reflection, so do we. The public debate that these displays trigger is a very healthy debate and one whose resolution is very important in terms of our re-shaping the contours of our more recently misshapen American culture.
Far too many folks react in a negative way to witnessing ANY public displays of religious symbols and beliefs. In many cases these are the same folks who insist that religious beliefs — and worse, the values that arise out of those beliefs — have no legitimate role to play in our public debates over the shape and content of our public policies. In that view, religious beliefs are mere “superstitions” which ought to be shunned by intelligent, rational citizens, let alone by policymakers. This yields a meager harvest of normative, values-sensitive “inputs” in our competitive marketplace of ideas, leaving our legislators and other politicians to grope about in what the late Rev. John Neuhaus called our “naked public square,” shorn and denuded of all religious values.
What values, exactly, do these Nativity Scenes convey and proclaim? Some will say, simply, that they are both a reminder and an endorsement of the Christian religion. But while this purely religious significance is undeniably true, it bears repeating that the manger scene and the figures of Mary, Joseph and the Baby Jesus — together with the angel, the poor shepherds and their animals and, later, the three Kings bearing their magnificent gifts — convey a host of other meanings, which have a secular significance and as well as a religious one.
These manger scenes are celebrations of birth, new life, and renewal and hope bound up with succeeding generations. As well, they celebrate the beauty of the family, of mother, father and child. That the shepherds attend the event with their animals bespeaks the natural bonds that unite all men and women, within the larger human community, and together with all other living beings, fellow creatures. Finally, the heralding angel adds the Divine, transcendent worth and dignity to this elemental human drama, and the arrival of the gift-bearing Kings signifies that rich and poor alike share equally in the joy that greets this newborn babe, the Christ Child.
To borrow from the title of one of the great modern pieces of American classical music, never was there any greater “Fanfare for the Common Man” as this scene, bathed in Divine light and steeped in grace.
First published on Thomas More Society's website
