Still Honored

by Gene Shelburne

In Malawi my missionary friend Jim Albright read my recent column about the elementary school Christmas program that so carefully avoided mentioning Christ.

“It’s not happening here,” he e-mailed me from Africa. And he told me about the school program he attended last Christmas.

“St. Andrews International School (a secular school where the Albright’s fourth-grader Lydia is enrolled), put on ‘Nine Lessons and Carols,’ a program that is performed all across England. The Gospel accounts of the birth of Jesus were read by a student from each grade, by a teacher, by the headmaster, and by the provost of the Anglican cathedral where this was held.”

Jim said the Scripture readings “were interspersed with Christmas carols sung, some by the school choir, but most of them by everybody there. When we came to the last couple of carols, the sopranos in the choir added a descant, and the beautiful became even more so.

“I was so moved I wept,” Jim concluded. “Christ is still honored here. Even in this secular school. Even in the Scriptures read to all, some read by Muslim students.”

“Wait just a minute!” my soul screamed within me. How did we ever get to this state of affairs, where the public expression of Christian faith is approved in “pagan” Africa, but outlawed in “Christian” America? Some-thing’s out of kilter here, isn’t it?

My friends come home from Russia telling me they are invited to share their Christian convictions in schools and prisons and military outposts. In “godless, Communist, atheistic” Russia they can speak openly of their faith. But if they tried to witness in an American school, the ACLU would harry them into court and many of their fellow-Christians would mindlessly join the chorus of critics bent on silencing them.

Boatloads of believers came to the New World long ago looking for a place where they would be free to express their faith. They forged a nation with a unique Constitution that forbids the government ever to make a law that restricts “the free exercise of religion.” But in the western world today it would be hard to find a place where Christianity is more restricted than it is in America.

If we stay on this road, how long will it be before the people of Malawi and Russia have to send missionaries to our shores to revive the faith we banned in 1997?