The straw man meets Christmas
If you watch Fox Snooze (and I feel sorry for you), you may have heard Fox commentators/blowhards Bill O’Reilly and John Gibson pontificating about the alleged “War on Christmas.”
According to O’Reilly, Gibson and other conservative demogogues, secular forces are working to eliminate Christmas from the US of A, leading to the downfall of this great Christian nation.
(I use those words sarcastically, please note.)
Their latest tactic is to enumerate how many retailers use the word “Christmas” in their adverts. The Liberty Counsel, a conservative Christian group associated with the late Jerry Falwell, has published a “naughty and nice” list of major retailers; nice retailers preserve Christmas, naughty ones use the generic word “holiday.”
Avoiding the word “Christmas” is just more evidence of a vast anti-Christian conspiracy, O’Reilly & Co. contend.
This nonsense derives from Christians losing several court cases in which the American Civil Liberties Union has successfully argued that the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause precludes governmental agencies from erecting overtly religious displays.
No creches in city hall, in other words.
Those Christians given to delusions of paranoia have taken these signs and wonders as evidence of an anti-Christian movement in the United States. O’Reilly and Gibson, in particular, have created a straw man argument with their “war on Christmas” diatribes.
A straw man argument is a logical fallacy. You caricature the opposing viewpoint and focus your attacks on the “straw man,” instead of the opponent’s actual statements, hoping to score a few points in your favor.
Think “axis of evil” here.
O’Reilly, et alia, have created the “war on Christmas” out of whole cloth, using it as a foil to deride every imagined anti-Christian slight. Naturally, the Christian Right eats up this kind of drivel, since they love to portray themselves as martyrs for the Lord’s Work.
Banning public displays of Nativity scenes is just one form of evidence. Saying “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas” is another. Erecting giant Hanukkah bushes alongside giant Christmas trees is yet another. And of course there’s the near-deification of Santa Claus as the “reason for the season.” The list goes on.
As usual, O’Reilly is full of it.
There is no “war on Christmas.” There are no thought police hauling pedestrians away for wishing each other a Merry Christmas. You can still buy Christmas cards in the grocery and send them through a government-sponsored mail system. The networks show an endless supply of Christmas movies and TV specials, ranging in quality from mostly awful to sometimes superb. The FCC has not yet clamped down on yuletide broadcasts. You can still hang Christmas lights on your house.
All that is in fact protected by the First Amendment rights of free expression and free worship.
No, the “war on Christmas” is just a reason for O’Reilly, Gibson, Michelle Malkin, Ann Coulter and others to spout their inflamatory right-wing rhetoric, while they feed their fans’ paranoid fantasies about the demise of Christianity as they know it.
If you get right down to it, there is nothing in Scripture that says anything about celebrating Jesus’ birth. Our current celebration of Christmas is a custom that has developed over centuries, accumulating layers of meaning and non-meaning along the way. For the early Church, the main celebration was Christ’s resurrection, without which, after all, there would be no Church in the first place.
Since no one recorded Jesus’ birth anywhere (Social Security was still years in coming), the Church assigned his birth to Dec. 25, a date conveniently close in time to some major pagan celebrations. The fanciful descriptions of persecution and baby-killings, mangers and donkeys, wise men and angels, and shepherds tending their flocks by night, not to mention the immaculate conception itself, all echoed Greek and Roman heroes’ birth stories. It made it easier for the pagans to accept Jesus as yet another hero to admire if not worship.
Trees, wreaths, ornaments, lights, cards, gifts, yule logs, shopping, black Friday, even the words “Merry Christmas” are just accretions to the ancient origins of the holiday. To be successful, a real war on Christmas would have to obliterate nearly 2,000 years of custom and collective memories.
I don’t see it happening anytime soon.
November 20th, 2007 at 4:59 pm
Inaneness occurs on both sides of this non-existent war. Here in Seattle, there was a major kerfuffle last year, when a rabbi threatened to sue the airport because they’d put up Christmas trees as decoration. He insisted that they put up a menorah next to the trees; the airport responded by taking the trees away altogether. (See http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/295372_xmas10.html).
Tolerance is needed all around, that’s clear. I always think the “Happy Holidays” greeting is kind of stupid in terms of avoiding offending someone. But that’s just me.
November 21st, 2007 at 9:43 am
Agreed. In fact, the menorah would be a bit inappropriate, since it’s for a different season’s holiday. I wonder what the rabbi was thinking …
Christmas trees, for me, are not so much a Christian symbol as an Euro-American seasonal custom. You can decorate trees with all sorts of decorations, including dreidels and tiny menorah, if you like. So fussing about Christmas trees seems pretty inane.
If it had been a creche, then I could see why people might get upset.
Happy Holidays is a non-specific greeting for people too lazy (or embarrassed) to ask what religion the greetee professes. It does include Christmas and New Year’s, I suppose, but it’s wimpy — rather like “have a nice day.”