There is a war on Christmas, on the American Christmas: an unprovoked attack conducted after an offensive of deceptions by truth-twisting tyrants concealing with self-righteousness their true objectives of money and power. Sound familiar?
And as all too usual these days, the opposition has been weak, muddled and slow, apparently in the belief that it’s too absurd to take seriously and will all die down on its own. Maybe theyre right. Then again, that’s kind of how the Kerry campaign viewed the Swift Boaters.
It could be a mistake. Because by being dismissed, the Swift Boaters Against the American Christmas make their point: they don’t get the proper respect. Maybe they are due the respect of confronting their charges. Before we find ourselves in another weird war.
—more–
crossposted at kos,elsewhere…
The WMD
It started when certain politically minded people affiliated or allied with certain fundamentalist Christian groups and churches declared that terrorist WMD had been found in schools, town squares and retail stores.
John Gibson, a Fox News producer, wrote the Bible, called The War on Christmas. It was promoted and inflated by the likes of Bill O’Reilly and Agape Press, with the slogan “Reliable News From a Christian Source,” and a logo above which modestly floats a halo. (Link a few paragraphs to come.)
The basic charge is that the links of Christmas to Christianity are being destroyed by the WMD of law, regulation, profit-motive and political correctness. They have lots of examples.
Too bad there don’t seem to be any Joseph Wilson’s willing to investigate their claims and debunk the ones that are exaggerated and untrue.
Instead, many play into the hands of the promoters of this war by dismissing any concerns or emotions Christians might have about the disappearance of their religious symbols in this important time of the year for their religion.
So the promoters get away with such absurdities as claiming that people are afraid to say “Merry Christmas” instead of “Happy Holidays,” and this threatens Christianity.
The result is that a lot of sincere people are successfully exploited to up O’Reilly’s ratings, sell books and most of all, to attract money and power to the POLITICAL organizations and activities of the far right.
It’s no wonder that an essay on the subject by preacher Ralph Baker in Agape Press begins by musing that polls show George Bush won in 2004 because people were upset by homosexual marriage. That’s what this is really about.
Because you can only flog that horse(gay marriage, baby killers, soft on crime) so much and so often. The political preachers need something new and alarming to scare people with, so the gullible will send them brand new scads of hard-earned money reflexively, compulsively. It’s the political religious right’s version of impulse shopping—with the impulse being to get the buzz of righteousness, and quell the fear and distaste for the power of the evil ones.
What’s This War Really About?
In the aforementioned essay, preacher Ralph Baker announces: “Attention Christians! Christmas is definitely ours.” He attacks retailers and others who have joined “in efforts to steal the true meaning of the Christmas season and replace it with a secularized, paganized, non-religious holiday.” The word “neutered” also appears in conjunction with “secularized.”
Notice the conflation of the terms. “Secular” these days means non-religious, though in the past or in certain religious settings it means believers within the religion who aren’t in the clergy–what Catholics more often call laypeople now. For fundamentalist Christians “secular” often seems to mean “not fundamentalist Christians” and perhaps even “not my kind of fundamentalist Christian.”
“Paganized” as meaning “non-religious” is an even clearer tip-off. It goes back to the early Catholic Church, that fought against “pagans,” meaning any religious belief not Christian. As Europeans expanded into places like America, it became synonymous with “heathen,” meaning primitive peoples whose beliefs didn’t rise to the standards of religion, because they weren’t European and Christian.
“Neutered” is interesting. It speaks more directly to the fear that this Swift Boating exploits: that the power of secular society, of not specifically “our kind of Christianity,” is overwhelming them, making them feel inferior.
Yet lurking in the term is the sense of being denied power. Exclusive power. The power to say, well, Jews and Buddhists can celebrate Christmas, because it’s Christian of us to let them. Or maybe we won’t. Because it’s ours. Our identity is at stake, and specifically our power over Christmas.
The Sham
The only problem is that nobody is trying to take away their religious celebration. Nobody is going into their churches and saying they can’t celebrate the birth of Christ. Any more than Iraq was about to invade America.
The ambition of their war on the American Christmas is much more than that. Christians and even non-Christians who are enchanted with Christ’s message of peace and love have complained for decades about frenzied commercialism overpowering “the true meaning of Christmas.” But notice that Baker complains that its the “stealing” of the “true meaning of the Christmas season” that’s at stake.
The whole SEASON? That’s very interesting.
The American Christmas
It’s time now to define—and yes, to celebrate—the American Christmas. It is no longer unique to America, but it really got its spirit here.
Everyone who knows anything about all the various traditions and ritual associated with the Christmas season knows that they come from many countries and many religious beliefs, as well as more “secular” sources.
Christmas became powerful in America, partly because it was so commercialized, and like a lot of popular culture, it became a nexus for the exchange of cultural traditions. I grew up in a working class area of mostly Catholics from Italy, eastern Europe and Ireland, but with a strong presence in our bigger towns and cities of German and Scottish Protestants and European Jews. In my family, we had specifically Italian traditions and Christmas foods from my mother’s side, and eastern European from my father’s.
But there was tolerance in town and more–there was sharing. That was the spirit of–the meaning of–Christmas, as America practiced it. The songs we sang give it away—they came from many countries, many times, both religious and secular.
Out of this amalgamation came regional traditions. In western Pennsylvania to this day, for instance, homes are more intensely decorated with more elaborate lights and displays than where I live now in rural far northern California.
These of course were mostly Christians in a mostly (and very openly) Christian area. That kind of Christmas influenced many Jewish celebrations of Hanukkah, with more emphasis on gift-giving than before.
Now we have Kwanzaa, a new celebration for the African American community, with roots in Africa but also in this “spirit of Christmas” at its best.
And of course, there are holidays and holy days for virtually all religions that occur in mid-winter, rooted in one of the oldest human celebrations and religious occasions, the Solstice.
Not only was the birth of Christ transferred from the spring to the winter Solstice to take advantage of popular “pagan” celebrations (as the nuns in my school freely admitted), but many traditions came along with the Solstice from various ancient religions in Europe, like the tree, the holly and gift-exchange, and the Yule Log (Yule referring to the pagan holiday in Germanic and Scandinavian areas.)
It’s true that even when I was a child, pagans were to be feared or perhaps pitied (“pagan babies.”) But today there is a resurgence of so-called pagan religions, which are primarily earth-based. And this is legitimate a much part of America’s religious practice today as environmentalism is of politics.
So the American Christmas has expanded to include all of these, in sharing and community. The earth-based religions are particularly appropriate because there are no more powerful earth-based religions than those of the original Americans, the Native peoples.
These are appropriate in another way. Most Native people will tell you that they don’t always get along. They may even admit that they don’t often get along, or agree on very much. But there is one element that I’ve found essentially universal among Native traditionals–and that’s respect for religion, anyone’s religion (as long as it isnt harmful or imposed.)
The American Christmas follows the example of Native peoples who accepted Christianity along with their own religions. They may have left some parts out that they learned from white Christians (like intolerance and hypocrisy) but they included what spoke to them. They accept reverence and joy, and ways of understanding their relationship to life and the earth.
Without consciously realizing it perhaps, this approach became part of the Constitution, and has since become the most characteristic feature of the American Christmas.
Secular Terrorists?
Are Christians being denied the right to share in the American Christmas? Is Christmas Christianity’s 9/11?
I have no trouble believing that some overzealous bureaucrats, especially in school systems, have made stupid decisions about what can and cannot be included in holiday celebrations. And it wouldn’t surprise me if retail store managers with the imaginations of grocery carts go overboard in trying not to offend some customers.
And I know for a fact that some people are simultaneously atheist and asshole. But that’s life. And the law is the law, and the twin intent of tolerance and separation of church and state eventually protects everyone.
It’s also true that this is no longer the America of the first half of the twentieth century. There are many more cultures represented from many more parts of the world—from all of vast Asia, from Latin America and more.
And there are Muslims in America now, and thanks to a certain ignorance and intolerance fed by reaction and over-reaction to a terrorist attack, there is fear and a defensiveness, a feeling that to fight so-called Islamic fundamentalism, we need to circle the wagons of Christian fundamentalism. Yet Christ is a respected figure in Muslim belief, and some Muslims in America celebrate Christmas.
Perhaps it was more comfortable for Christians to bring their religious beliefs into places where in a more diverse society it’s simply not appropriate. And it never was all that Constitutional.
But is this a war on Christmas? Hardly.
“Happy Holidays” is just an inclusive alternative, a greeting that is simply being polite, though usually unnecessarily so, since the American Christmas includes everyone.
No, the real war is the attempted war on the American Christmas by those who want to have it all to themselves, or to lord it over others, or simply to exploit believers for their own power and wealth.
Some Christians want to assert that Christmas is only about Christ, and is only for Christians. In their churches it can be true. But it simply isn’t the case otherwise. In America the season called Christmas belongs to everyone.
Using political and economic power to try to reestablish a hegemony from the past is just plain un-American.
All religions are entitled to their holy days and their sacred places. But it seems to me, admittedly only partially qualified to observe that hoarding the Christmas holidays, the public Christmas, for Christians only, is fundamentally un-Christian, as well as un-American.
End the War Before It Begins (This Time)
Let’s not wait until war fever strikes and the missiles start flying, and the dogs of war are unleashed. Let jackasses like O’Reilly make fools of themselves, but don’t underestimate the danger.
They’ve selected their weapons, and they’re not all hot air. They also include economic power, chiefly boycott and threats of them. Here’s Ralph Baker again:
There is an alliance building right now among major Christian ministries — such as the American Family Association (AFA) — to identify and target those companies who want our money but not our Christ. .. This is not just another economic boycott effort. It is a witness to the world that Christmas is important to the world because Christ is important to the world. This is exactly why the world has paused for 2,000 years and acknowledged the baby in a manger. That little baby has meant billions of dollars to retailers. It is time that they acknowledge Him.
That’s the weapon, the Swift-Boating combination of false premise, false reasoning and (very likely) false information. All for a political end, that in this case threatens religious freedom by turning the shopping mall into their church, by establishing one religion’s official ownership of a shared American holiday, and an official religion.
Let’s name the danger: the legitimizing of intolerance, the destruction of the American Christmas: part celebration of Christ’s birth, part celebration of the silent growing within the earth of the new life of spring, part Hannukah, part Kwanzza, leading up to the various New Year’s–European, Russian Orthodox, Chinese, Hindu, etc.
Most of these, you notice, are religious celebrations. But even if Mr. Scrooge’s newly discovered spirit of Christmas is secular, or even if celebration of family and friends, memory and hope at year’s end is defined as agnostic, it’s all the American Christmas, the best intent of the holiday season. (The worst is of course that it can never fulfill the inflated expectations, and all the projections, tensions, loneliness and pain come rushing out.)
Some of us will stick with one tradition and the expressions of one faith. But some of us will not only mix “secular” celebrations with religious, but we will attend high Mass and Hanukkah, sing a Native ceremonial song or a Buddhist chant at solstice. I don’t know if whites are invited to Kwanzaa events, but I was invited to a black fundamentalist church one Christmas, and had a great time.
In fact this is the one time of the year that America can feel like the America we’d like it to be: not just tolerant but open, compassionate, interested in learning about each other, and in sharing for our mutual joy, and our strength as a nation.
So happy holidays, happy Yuletide, merry Christmas, joyful Solstice, and may America be blessed by the Great Mystery. And bah, humbug, if that lights your Yule log.