From Peggy Noonan:
A few years back I had a small patch of patio in Manhattan, in an apartment building up in the 90s off Park Avenue. It was a little outdoor area overlooked by scores of apartments. The patio was empty and sad looking when I got there, so I started to put in some flowers and bushes and then I put out a two-foot-high plaster statue of the Blessed Mother. It was as if I’d summoned the forces of hell. Maybe I had. One neighbor started putting flyers under my door explaining that idolatry and Mary-worship consigns its unfortunate devotees to hell. Other neighbors complained about the garden. People got mad.
I was taken aback. I think part of it had to do with class. You can tool the streets of working class Lodi, N.J., and see little Marys in the front and back yards and no one says boo. But you can go from one end of Park Avenue to the other, and never–and I mean never–see a Virgin Mary in a window or a roof garden. I know. I have searched. There are Catholics on Park Avenue, but mostly there are rich people. And believe me the rich of Manhattan seem either not to like religious symbols or they know to keep them to themselves. Display is vulgar (and working-class).The rich are lucky, but they are also human. Like most humans they think they have what they have only because of their efforts; or, as is often the case in America, they’ve been lucky so long they think they deserve it. They think they got it because they made better decisions and more sober choices. I think they forget God had anything to do with it. Displaying the signs and symbols of faith is just not very . . . Park Avenue.
Her point is that the answer to this discomfort about the display of religious faith is not to banish it, but to encourage it. To not empty the public square, but to fill it. Not to banish religion from the schools, but to teach it. And, as I said last week, I agree. I’ve never been a supporter of religious practice in public schools (which is not what Noonan advocates, but I just thought I’d better say it) at all – public school teachers need not be put in the position of spiritual leadership over small children – but this stripping of religion from American public discourse has just reached the point of insanity.
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