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 1 in 5 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 celebrates 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.