If you’ve never been exposed to the annual deluge of commentary from Christian pundits and lay persons regarding the so called “War on Christmas,” consider yourself lucky. In America today, especially in the Bible Belt, you can’t look twice before you find someone claiming that there is some sort of ?War on Christmas,” or better yet, the Christian religion as a whole. In my small town, churches raise thousands of dollars?every holiday season?selling little red signs that say, “Keep CHRIST in CHRISTmas.” They literally line the streets in front of nearly every home, owners surely convinced that some invisible enemy is trying to snatch up the baby Jesus from every nativity scene in town.
The Marginalized Majority
Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck,? Focus on the Family, and others would have you believe that their Christian faith and the Christmas holiday is under attack by secular agendas, liberal corporations, and the ever-present ?liberal media.? Their main complaint? Well, according to Focus on the Family, the problem they have is with the secularization of their holiday and with the word, ?Christmas,? or ?Christ? being marginalized by euphemisms and generic terms like ?Happy Holidays? and ?Season’s Greetings.?? John Gibson — former “Fox News” host, wrote in his 2005 book, The War on Christmas: How the Liberal Plot to Ban the Sacred Christian Holiday Is Worse Than You Thought: “The Christians are coming to retake their place in the public square, and the most natural battleground in this war is Christmas,” alluding to the days of Moral Majority campaigns where Christians were charged by Jerry Falwell to use their majority voice to stand up for what’s been taken from them by their invisible enemies.
How the term ?Happy Holidays? is offensive isn’t actually made clear in the way these pundits spin their web. In my understanding of the calendar, there are a myriad of holidays starting with Thanksgiving in November and ending with Boxing Day at the beginning of January. ?Happy Holidays,? in fact, is the very opposite of exclusive — it is incredibly inclusive. Regardless of this fact, some Christians believe that their one holiday should be the only one mentioned and lauded by retailers despite the fact that Hanukkah provides a massive amount of income for them without Hasidic pundits railing about the war on Hanukkah.
Inclusivity, it seems, is the problem.
For some reason these Christian pundits have convinced millions of Christians that their status as ?The Majority? (a shrinking one I might add) gives them all the reason to be pandered to and the right to influence government policy on every level. Majority rule is one of the cancers that the U.S. Constitution sought to stamp out in the new land of America. Majority rule brought us enough slavery, separatism, theocracy, and hate in the past. and so it’s best avoided. Majority rule is why the rights of consenting homosexual adults to marry is only just now becoming a possibility in more states than it isn’t. Majority rule sucks for anyone that isn’t part of the majority.
The Real War On Christmas
The real war on Christmas isn’t being fought against Christians. It’s being fought by these sorts of Christians, who believe we should all gather at the courthouse to look at the nativity scene, against everyone else. It’s not difficult to find examples of nativity scenes funded by and sitting on public property, yet every year towns find themselves being sued by the Freedom From Religion Foundation over this very clear violation of the Separation Clause — for some reason expressing your faith on your own property just isn’t enough.
If Christmas is supposed to be about the birth of a child who sacrificed his life for the sake of mankind, that meaning is completely lost when selfish people shove their beliefs in the face of others and demand special treatment.
Rather than a fight from the left, the right is actually the enemy of Christmas, here. It’s not the atheists, the liberals, or anyone else but the angry ninnies who take the joy out of everything and attempt to overrun communities and airwaves with intolerant bleating about how marginalized they are because there exist people in this world with different beliefs and different holidays that are celebrated at roughly the same time of year.
Bill O’Reilly’s “War On Christmas” — well, it’s a war against himself and the cantankerous old jerks that?treat his program like the gospel.
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Matt Oxley is a former Christian Fundamentalist turned atheist living in the small town of Eastman, Georgia. He writes about his experiences as an atheist, freethinking, activist ex-Christian at RagingRev.com. You can contact him at [email protected] or on social media?Twitter?| Facebook | Instagram | Tumblr
