faithful people worry the secular world is trying to take christ out of christmas. of pupils those younger people, millennials christmas is becoming more of a cultural holiday than religious holiday. there a recent gallup poll on the importance of religion is a mixed bag, 51% of americans, 62% of christian saying it is very important but plenty of other thing is only fairly important or very important. how do you avoid losing the reason for the christmas holiday? no doubt christmas is becoming more secularized, but that cannot diminish the importance of the event the date commemorates. 2000 years ago the world was fixated on another government funding crisis, this when in rome and as a result of the crisis the emperor issued an edict to send people back to their hometown to register for taxation.
merry christmas to you. merry christmas to you. starting bear what is the meaning of the season and are we in america still embracing that meeting? are we seeing the fallaway i miss the other things you have to do in the holiday season, the wrapping and running last-minute christmas i mean. well, it has become more secularized. you know it s interesting, molly, some things never change. 2000 years ago the world was fixated on a government funding crisis. the emperor decided to have a worldwide census for the purpose of taxation. little did he know that his order would cause a jewish couple he had never met to travel to a tiny town he had never heard of to give birth to the savior of the world. 2000 years later most people in our audience can even tell you the name of that emperor octavian, but everybody knows the name of that baby, the baby
it s often called the oldest hatred. right. what s different is that today the extremists feel emboldened and they feel energized and i think there are a few reasons why. number one, the political environment contributes to it. when leaders fail to lead. and when they allow hateful rhetoric to fester and they don t call it out when it happens. so we just have to acknowledge that this is an incredible problem. jeffrey, let s talk about your piece in the washington post. and here s what it s called. the piece is called trump doesn t understand how anti-semitism works. neither do most americans. why doesn t trump what doesn t he get? he doesn t get that anti-semitism and the most dangerous forms of anti-semitism rests on a conspiracy theory. and the conspiracy theory historically has been that though jews are small in number they are very powerful and very evil. and in a secularized form in the 20th century when the jews were said to control politics,
emboldened and they feel energized and i think there are a few reasons why. number one, the political environment contributes to it. when leaders fail to lead. and when they allow hateful rhetoric to fester and they don t call it out when it happens. so we just have to acknowledge that this is an incredible problem. jeffrey, let s talk about your piece in the washington post. and here s what it s called. the piece is called trump doesn t understand how anti-semitism works. neither do most americans. why doesn t trump what doesn t he get? he doesn t get that anti-semitism and the most dangerous forms of anti-semitism rests on a conspiracy theory. and the conspiracy theory historically has been that though jews are small in number they are very powerful and very evil. and in a secularized form in the 20th century when the jews were said to control politics, economics, and the media and
machine that this had been battles fought over a very long period of time and a lot of blood has been has been shed and much of a beef you know that you have in this referendum in ireland where it should suggest a majority is in favor of abolishing this about for me you will which i do think it will be willing mean it seems that this follows the trend of arlon becoming more secularized than a summit or this last twenty years there was church has really a hemorrhage of of people at the pews at the very same times very curious that as arlin moves in their region of secularization we have a major european jewry to go buddy moving in the direction of preserving the principle of blasphemy nostra so i think that these two things are quite hard to actually you know put into on the same plate one must say that given what was said in these in these in this sentence in the european court it s very likely that blasphemy laws and blasphemy proceedings with stay with us for a long time to come ok m