The city tree is a celebration. The creche and the rest, castigation. Protected speech, true, though you wonder what happens when Muslims and Buddhists, Scientologists and Taoists all stake out spots. What the war-on-Christmas crowd doesn’t get is there are lots of religions, and if they all set up shop on Daley Plaza soon there wouldn’t be room for the big faux German Christmas folk village that’s already taken over the place.

Readers sometimes accuse me of being an atheist, based on my complete nonbelief in God. I always correct them. I am not an atheist. Atheists are zealots, too, elevating denial of the divine into a kind of faux religion, complete with pieties, and manage to be as aggressive and joyless as those who at least can blame a higher power for making them the way they are.

Rather, I am an agnostic. Agnostics know what we know but don’t make a fuss. We’re the Unitarians of the nonbelief community.

Why? Rob Sherman, for one. Anyone who has lived here long remembers the Buffalo Grove atheist gadfly, storming into board meetings, trying to get crosses off of water towers in such a heat of unpleasant legalistic dudgeon that it indicted the very notion of opposing government-endorsed faith. Northbrook could paint the bleeding heart of Jesus Christ on its water tower and I’d hesitate to complain, thinking of Sherman.

Maybe that makes me timid.

For instance, I was not glad to see that the Freedom From Religion Foundation has erected a white plastic “A” at Daley Plaza. “Very Hester Prynne-ish” my editor sniffed, though it stands not for “Adultery” but for “Atheism” and “Agnosticism” and a bunch of other free-thinking concepts.

Let’s put this new public pronouncement of belief, or rather, nonbelief, in context.

There is the 57-foot official Chicago Christmas tree, a gorgeous Colorado blue spruce festooned with 51,000 colored lights.

Then, a polite distance away, a brutalist 20-foot stainless steel menorah — the sort of menorah the Germans would have erected at the Nuremberg rallies if, you know, they were into that kind of thing.

Next to the menorah, a life-size Nativity scene with real straw and, lest anyone miss the point, a chiding placard noting that it was paid for by private donations from those who “wish to keep CHRIST in CHRISTMAS.” (And who is taking Him out? We nonbelievers, striding into your churches, disrupting your services? No? Oh, you mean people who don’t share your faith pointing out that they live here too and maybe you should consider honoring your religion in your own church?Yes, that is tough).

Not that I mind. Honestly. Have fun. I like Christmas. Carols. Lights. It isn’t my faith, true, but then Scarlett Johansson isn’t my wife either, yet I don’t mind seeing her.

The distinction I make is between celebration and castigation.

The city tree is a celebration. The creche and the rest, castigation. Protected speech, true, though you wonder what happens when Muslims and Buddhists, Scientologists and Taoists all stake out spots. What the war-on-Christmas crowd doesn’t get is there are lots of religions, and if they all set up shop on Daley Plaza soon there wouldn’t be room for the big faux German Christmas folk village that’s already taken over the place.

When you’re not really a victim, pretending to be one feels good, to you, because you don’t understand suffering, so can shroud yourself in the unearned dignity that those who have actually felt oppression — by your forebears, as it turns out — are entitled to. Those who complain about Christmas being edged out of the public realm are like singers who complain that they can’t put on blackface and sing “Swanee River” in a minstrel show. Yeah, that’s a shame, but there’s history here. Christians have been shoving their faith down people’s throats at pain of death for a thousand years, and the key miracle of modern society has been prying their fingers off the levers of government, science and education. Maybe if Christian zealots weren’t ripping pages out of textbooks, maybe if they were weren’t yanking contraceptives out of women’s purses, then Christmas would be welcomed by all faiths. But they do, and thus holiday trappings are a reminder of who has the whip hand, still.

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