We all know that the “War on Christmas” narrative is about as legitimate a statement as saying “Jingle All the Way” was Arnold Schwarzenegger’s premier film. Yet, here we are, getting all jacked up on egg nog and ranting about Starbucks cups, zombie nativities, episodes of Scandal, and how those damn dirty atheists and secularists are attacking Charlie Brown Christmas plays in Kentucky.
It’s the War on Christmas, goddammit! How dare anyone attack the holiday that belongs to Republican Jesus!
The reality of a “War on Christmas” is that it has never actually existed, though it exists with extreme prejudice today. I know that statement is a bit contradictory, but bear with me. So sit back, grab your holiday flagon of chuckles, and take a trip with me into history.
The “War on Christmas” burned into the public conscious by the harlots of falsehood over at Fox News is very new. It’s only ten years old, but their white hot rage and feverish battle plan of pitting the religiously devout against their alleged oppressors is an old tactic.
The original “War on Christmas” can be traced back to the Puritans, actually. In 1659, the Puritans objected to Yuletide festivities on grounds that they didn’t gel with Biblical teachings, ultimately banning the holiday in the Massachusetts Bay Colony until 1681.
How about that? The first assault on Christmas was not played out by those damn Jesus-hating secular terrorists. It was actually done by some of the most religious people to have ever existed.
Fast forward to the 1920s when known Jew-hater Henry Ford published The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem, a series of widely-distributed antisemitic articles, in his newsweekly, The Dearborn Independent. The paper had a circulation of 700,000. The articles were truly horrific and helped widen social divisiveness regarding Jews. On top of accusing Jews of threatening capitalism and undermining America’s moral values, as well as blaming them for World War I because that makes a lot sense, Ford pointed his guns at Jews when it came to what he perceived as an assault on the Christmas holiday with passages like these:
“Last Christmas most people had a hard time finding Christmas cards that indicated in any way that Christmas commemorated Someone’s Birth… People sometimes ask why 3,000,000 Jews can control the affairs of 100,000,000 Americans. In the same way that ten Jewish students can abolish the mention of Christmas and Easter out of schools containing 3,000 Christian pupils.”
But why the Jews? The Roaring ’20s were when infectious antisemitism had spread to the bloodstream of the United States. In fact, it was Henry Ford’s antisemitic works that were enthusiastically received and ordered into German reprint by a certain genocidal Nazi sociopath.
In the 1950s, the perpetrators of the attack on Christmas were no longer Jews, but Communists. Historically, this makes perfect sense. America’s social boogeyman in the 1920s was the vulgar “money grubbing” Jew, while America’s social boogeyman in the 1950s were the “godless Commies” who forced terrified schoolchildren to sit under their desks in the event they decided to nuke American soil.
1959 saw the publication of the pamphlet “There Goes Christmas?!” by the brand spankin’ new John Birch Society. The pamphlet accused the United Nations of targeting Christmas for the advancement of global communism. In the pamphlet, their fanatic seething told each reader:
“One of the techniques now being applied by the Reds to weaken the pillar of religion in our country is the drive to take Christ out of Christmas — to denude the event of its religious meaning.”
This is the same John Birch Society who decided to “Welcome Mr. Kennedy To Dallas” by handing out thousands of leaflets and posters that claimed President Kennedy was anti-Christian and a communist sympathizer, just days before he was tragically assassinated in Dallas’ West End. This is the same John Birch Society described by Don Terry at the Southern Poverty Law Center as a group of “conspiracy-loving, U.N.-hating, federal government-despising, Ron Paul-supporting, environmentalist-bashing, Glenn Beck-watching” arch-conservatives that to this day continues “waging its Cold War-era crusade against the Red menace and American ‘insiders'” who they believe are “hell-bent on handing the country over to the socialists at the U.N.”
Following the efforts of John Birch, the “War on Christmas” festered under the American social skin until 2004 when Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, and other Christian conservatives created the modern “War on Christmas.” America’s social boogeyman in 2004 was the same one that draws the ire of Christian conservatives a decade later — secularists. From Raw Story:
“[O’Reilly, et al.] spun corporate America’s profit-driven tendency to wish consumers an inclusive ‘happy holidays’ into a plot by godless liberals to banish Christianity from our holy shopping malls.
O’Reilly claimed that ‘It’s all part of the secular progressive agenda… to get Christianity and spirituality and Judaism out of the public square.’ Jews were understandably confused by that remark, but [O’Reilly] helpfully explained: ‘If you look at what happened in Western Europe and Canada, if you can get religion out, then you can pass secular progressive programs, like legalization of narcotics, euthanasia, abortion at will, gay marriage, because the objection to those things is religious-based, usually.'”
The next year, political commentator and former Fox News host John Gibson released The War on Christmas: How the Liberal Plot to Ban the Sacred Christian Holiday Is Worse Than You Thought, a 256-page paperweight that offered nothing but a few anecdotes about small town mayors and school administrators rejecting the erection of nativity scenes on public property. This is the same John Gibson who accused the BBC of “frothing-at-the-mouth” with anti-American bias — even going so far as to claim BBC 4 reporter Andrew Gilligan insisted during his Iraq War coverage that “the Iraqi army was heroically repulsing an incompetent American military” — as well as the same John Gibson who, upon reporting the death of Heath Ledger, opened his segment with funeral music and a clip of Jake Gyllenhaal’s line from Brokeback Mountain — “I wish I knew how to quit you” — to which he replied: “Well, I guess he figured out how to quit you.” Gibson defended his statements as “no point in passing up a good joke.”
Even with O’Reilly, Hannity, and Gibson striking at this alleged infraction against Christmas with the tenacity of Washington, Lafayette, and Rochambeau at Yorktown, a 2005 study by Media Matters released just before Christmas found that mainstream media outlets by and large still viewed the “War on Christmas” narrative as a big joke.
It was at this point the Heritage Foundation, the paragon of conservative think-tanks, jumped on the “War on Christmas” bandwagon. They were followed by the Liberty Counsel — the same group that defended homophobic Kentucky county clerk Kim Davis, as well as other bigots like her — who established the “Friend or Foe Christmas Campaign,” because that name doesn’t scream “the secular oppressors are killing Christmas!” Their campaign is notable for publishing a bastardized version of one of Santa’s most well-known character tropes, but instead of it being a “Naughty or Nice” list that determines if Timmy gets a bike or if Sally gets six lumps of coal, the Liberty Counsel’s version breaks retailers into “naughty or nice” columns that reflect which ones are best for Christian conservative shoppers to get their Christmas jollies in a store that subscribes to their brand of conservative political correctness.
Ultimately, the divisiveness intensified and the conflicts escalated to the point it is today, where the removal of snowflakes from a Starbucks coffee cup is enough to send some backward baseball cap-wearing, perpetually-agitated, loud-mouthed, douche-beard-sporting beta male on social media into a frenzy that infests a million American conservatives like filarial worms.
This is where we are. The current incarnation of the “War on Christmas” is a toxic, exhausting narrative presented as the ultimate battle of good vs. evil, secularists vs. Christians, Jesus vs. Santa. It’s the battle cry of alarmists who paint themselves as “oppressed” for purposes of oppressing. The “War on Christmas” is a battlefront in political correctness, a fire whose flames are stroked by those who think political correctness is socially detrimental.
At the end of the day, the reality of the “War on Christmas” is that there is no war on Christmas. On the whole, atheists, secular humanists, and others not socially or spiritually designated as “Christian” do not care about whether or not someone wishes them “happy holidays,” “Merry Christmas,” “Joyous Kwanzaa,” or even “Happy ChristmaHanuKwanzaakah.” All that matters is the true meaning of Christmas: family, festivities, and fulfillment.
That’s not to say, however, that the arguments lobbied against conservative Christians are not without merit. While it’s absolutely valid to state that some secularists take their narrative too far, it is also valid to point out that there is a time and a place for religion. That even goes for this time of year. The United States is Constitutionally a secular nation, after all. While the spiritual sentiment of Christmas rests in the birth of Jesus Christ — if you choose to believe that Christ was born on December 25 and that he actually existed — Christmas is, for all intents and purposes, a commercial holiday. The entire calendar from the fourth Friday of November through December 25 is dominated by the acquisition of “stuff.” Our celebration of Christmas, in which almost everyone is guilty of partaking, is the total antithesis of Jesus Christ’s example of Christianity as stated in the Book of Luke. In that regard, even the staunchest of Christians are very un-Christlike this time of year. It’s fairly hypocritical, but that’s the consumer culture in which we live. Everyone who tries to place one foot in Heavenly pastures while placing another in gold-filled vaults needs to come to terms with that.
The most important aspect of the so-called “War on Christmas” is its history and its history paints it as a doomsayer ideological movement that has accomplished nothing but social polarization and cross-cultural animosity. This is why the “War on Christmas” needs to stop. There are far too many schismatic issues in the world for something as ludicrous and inconsequential as “happy holidays” to continue contributing further division to an already divided nation. Seriously, how realistic is the outrage directed at the sacking of a public nativity scene compared to the widening income gap, institutionalized racism, and electoral quid pro quo pandemic throughout the United States?
Comparatively, it’s as realistic as the world having a collective epiphany that “Jingle All the Way” is the best movie Arnold Schwarzenegger ever made.
Featured image by Comandante Agi, available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic license.
