I read a heart-warming story this week in The Farmville Herald about a live nativity scene put on by a Baptist church in Powhatan County, Virginia. Powhatan is a rural county southwest of Richmond, about two hours’ drive from here.

When I saw the photo reproduced at the top of this post, it made me think of the report from earlier this week about the town of Rüsselsheim am Main in Germany, where life-size nativity figures were beheaded by persons unknown, as shown in the photo below:

What happens when the beheaders of Rüsselsheim encounter a live nativity scene?

I assume the perpetrators in Rüsselsheim were Muslims. I also assume that a culture-enricher with a machete would find it far more satisfying to feel his blade cut through muscle, bone, and sinew than through those boring styrofoam figures.

It’s not like Islam has any moral qualms about “striking the necks” of unbelievers. They are, after all, idolaters — mushrikun, polytheists — who deserve to be killed. Decapitation is considered to be a quick, merciful means of dispatching them.

Intuition tells me that there must be numerous cities in Western Europe where the few remaining Christians would even now be reluctant to stage a live nativity production. They can’t talk about such matters, obviously, for fear of being brought up on “hate speech” charges, but they are well aware of what happens to Christians when a significant proportion of the local population is of the Islamic persuasion. People tend to lose their heads.

So public processions and performances related to Christmas, Easter, etc. will gradually be phased out. Christianity will retire within walled spaces, and have no public symbols or signage. Which is the way it’s supposed to be in Islamic countries, where Christians are dhimmis who pay the jizyah meekly and show themselves to be subdued.

Not in Powhatan, not yet. But definitely in Nickelsdorf, Aarhus, Lund, Aberystwyth, and Erquy. If not now, soon.

A side-note — this is the nativity scene I just set up in the living room here at Schloss Bodissey:

It’s a Bodissey family relic, vintage 1962. When I went through the boxes of Christmas stuff the year after Dymphna died, I discovered that one of the three Magi was missing. The stable didn’t look right with only two wise men in it, so I borrowed an elephant figurine to use for the duration of the season. It’s from India; I bought it in an Indian knick-knack store in Northern Virginia. It was a birthday gift for Dymphna the year before she died.

The elephant was carved out of a piece of (I think) alabaster. You can’t see it in the photo, but the holes in the elephant’s sides let you look into its insides and see a baby elephant inside its mother’s womb, carved out of the same piece of alabaster, as a single unbroken, connected figure. It’s quite remarkable.

The mother elephant seems suitable for a nativity scene, and it’s from the East, so it can serve just fine as a stand-in for the missing Magus.

I hope the culture-enrichers don’t find it, though, because Hindus are even worse mushrikun than Christians in the eyes of the Soldiers of Allah.