Only God knows

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Mike Deal / Winnipeg Free Press Santa seems to be keeping secrets from shoppers at the Grant Park shopping mall this week. (MIKE DEAL / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS) Photo Store

WASHINGTON -- The debate over the proper role of Jesus in American public life steams like a Christmas pudding on his -- or His -- 2,012th birthday. But this is nothing new.

From the Republican presidential rodeo comes a television spot by Rick Perry, the governor of Texas, cowboyishly handsome in calfskin and denim, but, in this clip at least, unmounted.

"I'm not ashamed to admit that I'm a Christian," the candidate grins, two weeks before primary balloting. "But you don't need to be in the pew every Sunday to know that there's something wrong in this country when gays can serve openly in the military but kids can't openly celebrate Christmas, or pray in schools."

From the studios of Manhattan comes the fey rebuttal on Saturday Night Live: the Saviour himself, on a cloud of dry ice and scriptwriters' blasphemy, floating into the locker-room to confront their conspicuously Christ-loving NFL quarterback, Tim Tebow.

"It's not a good week if every week, I, the Son of God, have to come in, drop everything, and bail out the Denver Broncos in the fourth quarter," declaims the risen (and descended) Christ, astonishing the footballers, admonishing his apostle to stutter-step his supplications a yard or two and informing the audience they should stay tuned to see Jesus drop in at the Country Music Awards, various beauty pageants, and "any black event where food is served."

"Got a big birthday coming up," the Saviour beams. "What do you get for the man who sacrificed everything?"

And then, in parting:

"By the way, Mormonism is true. Every single word."

In Michigan this festive season, residents of one town receive a letter that begins, "Hi neighbour, you have a nice display of lights," and then goes on to decry as pagan "Nativity birth gifts, mistletoe, yule-log bonfire, decorated evergreen wreath, and tree-worship."

"None of this honors the life of Yeshua the Christ," the note divines.

In Texas, a sitting judge orders a high school valedictorian to remove the word "Amen" from her oration, and a veterans' group in Houston is told its members cannot utter the words "God bless you" out loud in a publicly funded cemetery.

Here in Washington, Bibles are banned from being brought to hospitalized soldiers, while in North Carolina, a cross erected by military chaplains above a training base is burned, then defiantly rebuilt. Some of the court rulings are overturned. Some aren't. All ricochet in emails and tweets laden with fervent, righteous anger.

In the New York suburbs, two seventeen-year-old boys are suspended from high school for dropping to a bended knee -- "Tebow-ing" -- in the hall. It's as if Rick Perry's prayer for prayer has been answered. But it hasn't.

"It was a joke between a group of friends," one of the ringleaders explains.

At the National Museum of American History on the Mall in Washington, an historic, home-made, patchwork volume testifies to this genesis of this uniquely American stew of belief and disbelief, doubters and disciples, holiness and hysterics, tolerance and mockery.

It is Thomas Jefferson's personal, singular scripture -- The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth -- returned to public display this fall after years of meticulous conservation.

"I am of a sect by myself, as far as I know," the author of the Declaration of Independence once wrote, announcing his own apostasy. "No man can conform his faiths to the dictates of another. The life and essence of religion consists in the internal persuasion or belief of the mind."

For these unconventional sentiments, when Jefferson ran for the presidency in 1800, he was vilified from the pulpit -- much as the "Muslim" Barack Obama would be condemned by many in 2008 -- as "a manifest enemy to the religion of Christ, in a Christian nation," whose election "would be an awful symptom of the degeneracy of that nation, and... a rebellion against God."

("I admire the Islam," McCain let slip during his campaign for the White House. "But, no, I just have to say in all candour that since this nation was founded primarily on Christian principles... personally, I prefer someone who I know who has a solid grounding in my faith.")

Back to the gallery. Thomas Jefferson was 80 years old when he took a scalpel to the New Testament and rearranged it to suit his own life and essence, gluing columns in Latin, Greek, French, and English into this remarkable book, which begins with the second chapter of Luke -- "And it came to pass in those days" -- and concludes at Matthew 27: "There they laid Jesus, and rolled a great stone to the door of the sepulchre, and departed."

For 200 years, it has been noted with both pride and horror that the great Virginian ended his tome one verse before Christ's Resurrection on the morning of the third day. (Last year, one holier-than-heck Texas school board voted to drop the insufficiently Christian Jefferson entirely from the state's curriculum.) Yet this is the very Bible, shorn of miracles, that was presented for nearly a century to freshman United States senators.

"Question with boldness even the existence of a God," Jefferson's spectre advised them. "Because, if there is one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear."

A few blocks from his iconoclastic confection, at the Folger Shakespearian Library, another new exhibition marks the 400th anniversary of the tome that Jefferson dissected: the King James Bible.

The fact that this gallery was (co-)curated by the Toronto-raised and educated great-great-great-grandson of Abraham Lincoln's vice-president makes a visit even more fascinating.

At the Folger, we see the evolution of the English-language Gospel through the centuries, beginning with the annotated first drafts compiled by James's scholars, crossing the Atlantic with the unswerving Puritans, and enduring into the familiar cadences of Charlton Heston and A Charlie Brown Christmas.

"I'm not a prophet or even an expert on contemporary America," the curator, University of Toronto graduate Hannibal Hamlin, demurs from Columbus, where he teaches a course on the Bible as Literature at Ohio State University. "The country has changed a lot, but it's surprising how much religious rhetoric you hear in public debate."

"The First Amendment," Prof. Hamlin notes, "is less a call for a secular state. Freedom of religion had as much to do as the freedom to practise religion. It wasn't so much that people were looking for a non-religious state, but for a government that would permit a variety of faiths."

At Christmas 2011, that cacophonous variety rings out from every steeple and studio, as the Roman Catholic Gingrich, the Mormons Huntsman and Romney, and the cocksure charismatic Christianity of Gov. Rick Perry contend for the presidency, while citizens of every tribe exult in their freedom to crucify them.

"Is uniformity attainable?" asked Thomas Jefferson.

At Christmas in the republic he created, the answer remains: only God knows.

Allen Abel is a Brooklyn-born Canadian journalist based in Washington, D.C.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition December 24, 2011 I6