Ken over at Popehat points out the latest Wall Street Journal bizzaro-world editorial; one which bears further gawking.
According to editorial page Deputy Editor Daniel Henninger, the cause of the current economic crisis can be boiled down to the cultural trend to offer your neighbor a “Happy Holidays” instead of the more traditional “Merry Christmas.”
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.
Yeah. That’s right. You lose your Christmas spirit, you lose your house. Duh.
What really went missing through the subprime mortgage years were the three Rs: responsibility, restraint and remorse. They are the ballast that stabilizes two better-known Rs from the world of free markets: risk and reward.
Responsibility and restraint are moral sentiments. Remorse is a product of conscience. None of these grow on trees. Each must be learned, taught, passed down. And so we come back to the disappearance of “Merry Christmas.”
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.
Feel free: Banish Merry Christmas. Get ready for Mad Max.
Before you ask, yes, I believe he is getting paid to write editorials. I guess it follows that if we bring back Yule Logs and impose mandatory caroling, we’ll be out of the financial weeds in no time.
