Last month, I wrote a couple of posts highlighting the Religious Right’s claim that our current economic mess was due to a collective loss of morality that could be traced back to abortion, homosexuals, and an overall breakdown in the family.
But, as Think Progress discovered, those weren’t the problem at all. What really caused the economic meltdown was people not saying “Merry Christmas”:
Notwithstanding the cardboard Santas who seem to have arrived in stores this year near Halloween, the holiday season starts in seven days with Thanksgiving. And so it will come to pass once again that many people will spend four weeks biting on tongues lest they say “Merry Christmas” and perchance, give offense. Christmas, the holiday that dare not speak its name.
This year we celebrate the desacralized “holidays” amid what is for many unprecedented economic ruin — fortunes halved, jobs lost, homes foreclosed. People wonder, What happened? One man’s theory: A nation whose people can’t say “Merry Christmas” is a nation capable of ruining its own economy …
It has been my view that the steady secularizing and insistent effort at dereligioning America has been dangerous. That danger flashed red in the fall into subprime personal behavior by borrowers and bankers, who after all are just people. Northerners and atheists who vilify Southern evangelicals are throwing out nurturers of useful virtue with the bathwater of obnoxious political opinions.
The point for a healthy society of commerce and politics is not that religion saves, but that it keeps most of the players inside the chalk lines. We are erasing the chalk lines.
Keep in mind that this appeared in the Wall Street Journal and was written by the deputy editor of its editorial page.
If you want to know what went wrong with the economy, perhaps the fact that “the leading provider of business and financial news and analysis” has people like this running the show might have something to do with it.
