The Greatest Gift For All

Christmas is a time of traditions. If you have found
time in the rush before Christmas to decorate a tree,
you are sharing in a relatively new tradition. Although
the

Christmas tree has ancient roots, at the
beginning of the 20th century only one in five American
families put up a tree. It was 1920 before the Christmas
tree became the hallmark of the season.

Calvin Coolidge was the first president to light a

national Christmas tree on the White House lawn.

Gifts are another shared custom. This tradition comes
from the

wise men, or three kings, who brought

gifts to baby Jesus. When I was a kid, gifts were

more modest than they are now, but even then people
were complaining about the commercialization of
Christmas. We have grown accustomed to the
commercialization. Christmas sales are the

backbone of many businesses. Gift-giving causes us
to

remember others and to take time from our harried
lives to give them thought.

The decorations and gifts of Christmas are one of our
connections to a Christian culture that has held Western
civilization together for 2,000 years.

In our culture, the

individual counts. This permits an individual person
to put his or her foot down, to take a

stand on principle, to become a

reformer and to take on injustice.

This empowerment of the individual is unique to
Western civilization. It has made the individual a
citizen equal in rights to all other citizens, protected
from

tyrannical government by the rule of law and

free speech. These achievements are the products of
centuries of struggle, but they all flow from the

teaching that God so values the individual`s soul
that he sent his son to die so we might live. By so
elevating the individual, Christianity gave him a voice.

Formerly, only those with power had a voice. But in
Western civilization, people with integrity have a
voice. So do people with a sense of justice, of honor,
of duty, of fair play. Reformers can reform, investors
can invest, and entrepreneurs can create commercial
enterprises, new products and new occupations.

The result was a land of opportunity. The United
States attracted immigrants who shared our values and
reflected them in their own lives. Our culture was
absorbed by a diverse people who became one.

In recent decades, we have begun losing sight of the
historic achievement that empowered the individual. The
religious, legal and political roots of this great
achievement are no longer reverently taught in high
schools, colleges and universities. The

voices that reach us through the millennia and
connect us to our culture are being silenced by

"political correctness." Prayer has been driven
from schools, and

Christian religious symbols from public life.
Diversity is becoming the consuming value and is
dismantling the culture.

There is plenty of room for cultural diversity in the
world, but not within a single country. A

Tower of Babel has no culture. A person cannot be a
Christian one day, a pagan the next and a

Muslim the day after. A hodgepodge of cultural and
religious values provides no basis for law—except the
raw power of the pre-Christian past.

All Americans have a huge stake in Christianity.
Whether or not we are individually believers in Christ,
we are beneficiaries of the moral doctrine that has
curbed power and protected the weak. Power is the horse
ridden by evil.

In the 20th century, the horse was ridden hard. One
hundred million people were exterminated by

National Socialists in Germany and by

Soviet and

Chinese communists simply because they were members
of a race or class that had been demonized by
intellectuals and political authority.

Power that is secularized and cut free of civilizing
traditions is not limited by moral and religious
scruples. V.I. Lenin made this clear when

he defined the meaning of his dictatorship as
"unlimited power, resting directly on force, not limited
by anything."

Christianity`s emphasis on the worth of the
individual makes such power as Lenin claimed
unthinkable. Be we religious or be we not, our
celebration of Christ`s birthday honors a religion that
made us masters of our souls and of our political life
on Earth. Such a religion as this is worth holding on to
even by atheists.

COPYRIGHT

CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

Paul Craig Roberts
[email
him] was Assistant
Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration.
He is the author of

Supply-Side Revolution : An Insider`s Account of
Policymaking in Washington;
 Alienation
and the Soviet Economy and

Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy,
and is the co-author with Lawrence M. Stratton of


The Tyranny of Good Intentions : How Prosecutors and
Bureaucrats Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name
of Justice. Click

here for Peter
Brimelow`s Forbes Magazine interview with Roberts
about the recent epidemic of prosecutorial misconduct.