Gather 'round the Christmas tree

A wrangle over whether a Christmas tree should be permitted in the main foyer of an Ontario courthouse, raging for over a week and still unresolved as this was written, evidenced as little else could how rapidly and how drastically the public face of religion has changed in Canada.

The issue exploded after Judge Marion Cohen ordered that the traditional tree, which for Christmases beyond memory had graced the vestibule of the Ontario Court of Justice in Toronto, be moved to a less obtrusive part of the building.

Visitors of various cultural backgrounds ''come to us with serious complaints and issues in their lives,'' the judge explained. ''They seek our assistance, knowing that we are bound to treat each of them with the respect and dignity to which each of them is entitled. The Christmas tree is a Christian symbol. Therefore it could convey the message the Canadian system of justice does not belong to them. They are different.''

Her directive did not go down well anywhere. Spokespeople representing Jews, Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs and the Ontario Bar Association, all criticized it. Ontario Conservative leader John Tory called it ''political correctness gone crazy.'' Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty said it represented a ''mistaken'' understanding of multi-culturalism.

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Two nights later, the tree was mysteriously restored to the building's foyer – by whom, no one was prepared to disclose. But the judge stood her ground and soon after the building opened the tree was banished to its former obscurity. Meanwhile the provincial attorney general called a conference to set a policy on courthouse Christmas trees.

Premier McGuinty, publicly appealed for ''respect'' toward all cultures and religions, including Christianity. The Ontario Legislature itself had marked the Hindu holiday of Diwali a few weeks ago, and the Islamic holiday of Eid shortly after. The legislature would mark the Jewish Hannukah with the lighting of the menorah. There had been no protests against any of this, he noted.

Nevertheless, the tree stayed banished, and the only religious group appearing to remain silent about it were the Christians themselves, Protestant and Catholic. Perhaps over the last few decades they have seen so many denunciations of, and prohibitions against, the public recognition of their faith that one more expulsion scarcely mattered to them. They no longer resisted.

In Ontario, the oldest of the Christians, those now in their 80s, many of whom survived the Great Depression and then went on to fight and help win World War II – thereby making possible our cherished Age of Tolerance – attended public schools that routinely put on Christmas concerts consisting almost entirely of Christian carols and hymns. The New Testament was read in public school classrooms where pictures of Jesus and his disciples adorned the walls, and the day began with the Lord's Prayer.

All this has vanished, so it seems, in a mere two or three decades, leaving many simply bewildered and asking: How did it all happen?

Its origins – the origins, that is, of secular relativism, which some convincingly describe as the new state religion of most western democracies, the religion which Madam Justice Cohen, whether she realizes it or not, is zealously imposing on her courthouse – go back a great deal farther than two or three decades. In the era of the '60s, we began to see the flower, but the seeds were sown much before then.

Secularism was already flourishing in the universities at the turn of the 20th Century. Some trace its beginning to the Age of Enlightenment in the 18th Century; others take it back to the Renaissance, and others farther still to the struggle between the nominalists and the realists in the medieval universities. Charles Gore, the 19th Century Anglican bishop and scholar, saw three causes for the secularist tide – Darwinism which appeared to discredit the old argument that some kind of mind must lie behind reality; Literary Criticism, which appeared to discredit the infallibility of the Bible, and Freudianism, which attributed all religious experience to sexual fantasy or dysfunction.

In any event, it seems evident that we are well into what G.K. Chesterton described as yet another ''Death of the Faith.'' Chesterton traced five points in history where Christianity was written off as dying and soon dead. The fifth is the one we're now experiencing. The first came on the day we call Good Friday. Every one of these five deaths, he said, occurred on what turned out to be the eve of a dynamic Christian expansion.

May it be so again. Merry Christmas.

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