At least 31 of the nation’s 50 state capitols will have Nativity Scenes of Christ’s birth in December 2020 and one of the attorneys behind the legal campaign defending such religious expression in the public square is confident the day is coming soon when every state will have such exhibits.
Photo of Nativity Scene being constructed provided by the Thomas More Society.
“The nativities are going up in more than half of the states and it’s based on a free-speech rationale that is very hard to defeat,” Thomas More Society Founder Thomas Brejcha told HillFaith Friday. “Even the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in Illinois and Texas publicly said we were totally justified in doing so.”
Brejcha said he has no doubt at all that within a few years there will be Nativity Scene displays in the capitol rotundas of all 50 states.
“I don’t have the slightest doubt about it. We may have a fight or two, but my response is ‘bring it on,’” he said.
And that’s the point — there is a fight, from people who hate Christmas and Nativity scenes. That’s what the Thomas More Society, a group of Catholic lawyers, has been fighting in America’s courts.
And how will that fight go during the next presidential administration?
Brejcha told HillFaith he worries that the potentially incoming presidential administration of former Vice President Joe Biden will throw up roadblocks to Nativity Scenes and other forms religious expression in the public square that are protected by the First Amendment.
“We may have a lawsuit, especially if the new regime comes to power in D.C., they are not supportive of religious expression in the public square, so we may have a fight or two,” Brejcha said.
The first War On Christmas item that caught my eye this year and the most notorious each had this in common: they explicitly declared that public celebrations of Christmas were “fascist.” In mid-December, I read that a living Nativity Scene featuring children in Toulouse, France needed to be shut down when the event was disrupted by protestors shouting “Stop the Fascists!” [Nativity scene triggers activists; Dozens scream ’stop the fascists!' at children, by Douglas Ernst, Washington Times, December 19, 2019]
