Creche Encroachment

THE CHURCH-STATE WALL has been under siege for a few years now, and the recent damage to it is especially apparent this December.

For the first time in a long while, as the result of a ruling by the Supreme Court last year, municipalities will be able to use public funds to erect Christmas creches on public land. The reappearance of the creches is all the more ominous when considered in the context of the growing number of attacks on traditional church-state separations.

Last spring, Congress approved a bill awarding "equal access" to school facilities to religious groups, and over the summer Geraldine Ferraro battled the Archbishop of New York over her public stand on abortion.

Now this fall, publicly funded Christmas crecnes reappear with the blessing of the Supreme Court, as a chilling reminder of just how vulnerable the church-state wall is. And formerly faithful supporters of that wall remain silent--indifferent or incapacitated. Even the usually liberal Boston Globe recently editorialized, "A Christmas creche is not a cause for silly litigation."

But, unfortunately, the Globe editors, the New Right, and--saddest of all--the Supreme Court, miss the point.

Christmas is a religious holiday, celebrating an event uniquely important to the Christian faith. The creche is a symbol of that religious holiday. The Supreme Court, though, decided that Christmas is a seasonal holiday as well, and as such, the creche a seasonal symbol. We agree that Christmas has become a secularized, even commercialized, affair and acknowledge that holiday decorations are a familiar, unthreatening fixture.

But the creche cannot be considered secular in any way, and we therefore consider the Court's reasoning offensive to Christians, for it trivializes the significance of a hallowed symbol.

More important, we consider their ruling offensive to non-Christians. E.B. White once wrote: "Democracy, if I understand it at all, is a society in which the unbeliever [or the minority believer] feels undisturbed and at home.... The concern of a democracy is that no honest man shall feel uncomfortable, I don't care who he is, or how nutty he is."

But millions of Americans this December will feel uncomfortable at the sight of Christmas creches erected on public land at public expense. The nicest Christmas present the Supreme Court could give us this year would be a return of the creches to where they belong: on private property, paid for with private funds.