"There's one group of people who get bullied all the time, and that's Christians," Pastor Patrick Wooden told the Los Angeles Times on December 17. "I know what it is like to be bullied. It is apartheid in reverse -- the majority is being bullied by the minority."
The proximate cause of his complaint is the campaign by Jews, secularists, and Jewish secularists to get people to say "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas."
Indeed, a similar dispute roiled South Africa following the passage of 1974's Afrikaans Medium Decree, which forced all schools to educate high-school students in the Afrikaans dialect, to the exclusion of native African tongues. Thus, rather than saying "Merry Christmas" in Bantu, black South African students had to say it in Afrikaans.
The analogy is rather better than even Wooden himself seems to realize. Apartheid already was the bullying of South Africa's black majority by the white minority.
The more you think about it, the closer the comparison seems to fit. Take the legal system. Christians, as we know, are marginalized in the American judiciary. Only seven of the nine Supreme Court justices are nominal Christians, and of the seven, just two -- Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas -- regularly approve of efforts to codify theological norms as legal ones. More shockingly, from the appointment of Louis Brandeis to the Supreme Court in 1916 through the resignation of Abe Fortas in 1969, there has been consistently one Jewish justice -- though Jews never even approached one-ninth of the U.S. population. After things were briefly restored to the proper all-Christian lineup during the Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, and Bush Senior years, Bill Clinton appointed two non-Christian justices, Steven Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
More recently, the judicial system has further marginalized Christian belief by deeming it unconstitutional to place a replica of the Ten Commandments in an Alabama courthouse. This despite the fact that these Ten Commandments are not merely the basis of Christian (and, to be fair, Jewish) morality but also the foundation of our legal system. From where else could we have derived such legal principles as the prohibition on murder, the mandatory honoring of thy father and thy mother, and the well-known prohibition on coveting thy neighbor's wife (or his house, maidservant, manservant, ox, or ass)?
Black South Africans were similarly marginalized -- ineligible to serve as police, prosecutors, judges, or jurors, leading naturally to a discriminatory impact in the application of even racially neutral laws. In fact, blacks were not even allowed to vote, which is in many ways similar to how conservative Christian candidates for office in America often lose elections (though they do happen to control the presidency and both houses of Congress at the moment).
Of course, a few brave souls dare speak up against this anti-majoritarian repression. In South Africa, opposition to apartheid was led by both religious figures like Desmond Tutu and secular ones like Nelson Mandela. Similarly, Christian interests here in the United States are defended not only by clergymen like Pastor Wooden, but also by lay leaders like the Catholic League's William Donohue, who recently explained that Hollywood is "controlled by secular Jews who hate Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular."
My father, though he doesn't control Hollywood personally, is a secular Jew who's been known to work in the film industry, and he's often discussed with me the way he has managed to insert anti-Christian themes into his work. For example, in one of his films, Fearless, the non-Jewish Jeff Bridges was forced to portray a character named Max Klein with a son named Jonah. The similarities between such de-Christianification of the cinema and the comprehensive censorship laws enacted by the South African government in 1974 in order to prevent the news media from covering protests by anti-apartheid groups should be clear.
It is also well-known that many Jewish South Africans took the lead in campaigning against apartheid, though the country's Jewish community was a beneficiary of apartheid discrimination and the South African government often found itself aligned with Israel on international issues. Similarly, here in the United States, a few brave Jews like Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer have spoken out against the "absurd" and "relentless" campaign by "deracinated" Jews to "de-Christianize Christmas." Krauthammer, however, takes a soft line against these misguided souls, advocating "pity" rather than anger as the appropriate response.
This can hardly be judged sufficient. What should one feel besides anger when faced with an injustice as grave as America's systematic repression of Christians? Some liberal elites seem to feel that this is a laughing matter. But all it takes for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing, and all people -- whether Christian or otherwise -- have a duty to fight against what Bill O'Reilly has aptly termed an "anti-Christmas jihad."
Matthew Yglesias is a Prospect staff writer.
