Why do Nativity Scenes cause such scandal and hatred?

"Fontgombault Sermon: Christmas Midnight Mass (RC, December 25, 2014). Excerpt:

Those few ounces of clay are bothersome because they ask the world, they ask each of us a question. We can hear its echo from the mouth of children, of little ones, of simple ones, of those who as the shepherds can hear the message of the Crib: “Daddy, Mum, why is this child lying in a crib? Who is his mother, and his father, and the donkey and the ox?” — “Child, you neither need nor have the right to know. It is the most gigantic deception in the world. For two hundred years now, civilised men, free-thinking men, self-enlightened men, have understood that they no longer needed the visitation of this child.”

Enlightened men have refused the Light. They are delivered back to the power of the beast and they deliberately sink into the darkness of their alleged knowledge; as they pass by the Crib, they ignore it, or even, like new Herods, they try to wipe out its presence. What are the lights of our cities as compared to the light of the sun? What is the complexity of our factories as compared to the hugeness of the universe and the structure of the human body, which nonetheless some would ascribe to chance?