Even Covid-19 Can't Stop the Christmas Wars
Nativity scene lawsuits, tacky light displays and TikTok battles? Must be holiday season in America.
Too much, or just enough?
Photographer: Roy Rochlin/Getty ImagesTime again for my dispatches from the Christmas wars, America’s annual tradition of religious litigiousness and cultural sparring.
In this season of Covid-19, let’s begin our tour in Delaware, where Governor John Carney has backed off on restrictions that churches and other religious institutions had challenged in court. The problem wasn’t that the governor was regulating churches but that he was regulating churches in ways that he wasn’t regulating similar institutions. For instance, religious gatherings had age limits but secular gatherings did not, leading the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal to quip, “So gramps could go out to buy a quart of vodka but not to pray.”