The True Christmas Spirit

Christians of a certain bent don't seem to get much comfort, let alone joy, from their faith.  It's not enough for them to believe that unbelievers will be tortured for eternity, which is at least Christlike: they want them to be punished now.  Not only far-right Christians feel this way, either: liberals also fantasize about violence befalling right-wing Christians.  (I linked to several examples from that thread in this post, but I find that some of them have vanished since then, gone to Internet Heaven I guess.)

The image above comes from a thread I saw on Facebook yesterday.  A popular response to those who criticized it was If you don't believe in Christmas, then why don't you work on Christmas instead of taking the day off?  I've heard that one before, and as I said then, I wouldn't mind working on Christmas in the least.  My job, in university food service, required me to work on numerous holidays.  The university closed down for semester break, which included Christmas and New Year's Day, so working or not wasn't an option.

.... Except, I realized, for campus police, maintenance, and other functions that don't observe holidays.  This extends beyond special cases like universities.  The gas station / convenience store across the street from my apartment is open today, for example.  Workers for airlines and other travel industries are at work today, as they are every other day of the year, making it possible for those who aren't working to enjoy their time off in travel.  Radio, TV, and other media are still functional.  (Do Christian radio and TV take Christmas off?  Why not?  I believe they even operate on Sundays.)  Police, firefighters, and the like are at least on call.  Society slows down for Christmas, but it never stops altogether, and most of the people who keep it working are surely Christians.  So the Christmas warriors' snarky question is based on the false assumption that believing in Christmas gives everyone a day off, and we infidels are hitchhiking on the benefits Christians legitimately enjoy.

The term "essential worker" comes to mind, and from what I remember, there must be considerable overlap between those people who throw tantrums over "Happy Holidays" and those who misunderstood what "essential workers" were during the height of the COVID pandemic.  They expected others to risk serious illness in order to serve them, and to do so quickly and efficiently.  Nor should they have to wear masks in crowded stores -- that was communism.  I especially recall a local woman who threw a tantrum on Facebook because her curbside pickup at Walmart was delayed a few minutes due to staff shortages.  She demanded to know why people didn't want to work.  That they might fear for their own health, or for the health of their families at home, didn't even occur to this person, or to many others.

Although empathy for others is at least implicit in the teachings of Jesus, many Christians manage to ignore it.  They demand empathy for themselves, though.  And some, like the guy who posted the image I swiped for this post, glory in their lack of empathy.  That's fine with me.  There are reasons why Christian churches are bleeding members, and the War on Christmas probably isn't the most important.  But it helps.

The Dog Ate My Research

Someone I went to high school with posted this meme on Facebook in mid-October, getting War on Christmas season off to an early start.  I meant to write about it then, but of course I procrastinated.  Better late than never, though:

This salvo combines the usual self-pitying whining about embattled Christianity with a version of a legend about "The Twelve Days of Christmas."  Snopes discussed another version that has circulated since the 1990s, which claimed that the song encoded these details of Christian faith for persecuted Catholics in Anglican England.  The Snopes writer quotes a Roman Catholic priest who promulgated the story:

“I’ve got all kinds of people writing me demanding references for my work,” he said. “I wish I could give them what they want, but all of my notes were ruined when our church had a plumbing leak and the basement flooded.” Meanwhile, he said, his copy of the original article is on “a computer floppy disk that is so old that nobody has a machine that can read it, anymore.”

Snopes links to a Catholic Information Network web page on which Stockert explained where he got his information, but alas, the secularists seem to have gotten to it, because now all it says in support of the interpretation is:

P.S. It has come to our attention that this tale is made up of both fact and fiction. Hopefully it will be accepted in the spirit it was written. As an encouragement to people to keep their faith alive, when it is easy, and when any outward expressions of their faith could mean their life. Today there are still people living under similar conditions, may this tale give them courage, and determination to use any creative means at their disposal to keep their faith alive.

"The spirit in which it was written" was that it's okay to make stuff up in order to keep Christian faith alive, which is a traditional Christian spirit.  It's odd that a religion which touts itself as based in history should have such a cavalier attitude toward historical accuracy, but there you go.  Stockert's peevish attitude toward people "demanding references for my work" is common among people who get caught in fabrication, and not only about religion.

While looking for more information about this myth, I found an excerpt on Google Books that shed a little more light on it.  According to But Do You Recall? 25 Days of Christmas Carols and the Stories Behind Them, written and apparently self-published in 2018 by Brian Scott, the idea that "The Twelve Days of Christmas" was a catechism teaching tool "first appeared in 1979 in an article by Hugh D. McKellar entitled 'How to Decode the Twelve Days of Christmas.'"  Scott says that McKellar, "a Canadian music teacher and hymnologist," cited no documentary sources, claiming that "he had interviewed elderly Canadians with roots in northern England, and they provided him with the information" (pages 116-117).  Scott doesn't say where McKellar's 1979 article appeared, but a Wikipedia article on the carol cites a 1994 article by McKellar from a Texas-based journal called The Hymn.  In that article McKellar admits:

In any case, really evocative symbols do not allow of definitive explication, exhausting all possibilities. I can at most report what this song's symbols have suggested to me in the course of four decades, hoping thereby to start you on your own quest [page 31].

In other words, McKellar invented the correspondences he says the song contains, and his article is merely a springboard for the reader to invent his or her own.  Whether Stockert saw McKellar's article, I don't know.  The timing of his own mythopoesis is about right.

But it doesn't matter, because as Snopes and other critics have pointed out, the pillars of Christian faith McKellar and Stockert read into "The Twelve Days of Christmas" are not specifically Catholic but generically Christian.  There's nothing here that would have needed to be secret in Protestant Catholic-persecuting England.  And if, as the Catholic Information Network claims, the aim is to remind believers that there are Christians suffering for their sect today, and encourage them to keep their faith alive, why not tell them true stories -- there can hardly be a shortage -- instead of false ones?

Here is what this evocative story suggests to me: many people love to find mysteries and secret messages in unlikely places, not necessarily because they are valid or mean anything but because it's exciting to think that one has uncovered secrets that one wasn't supposed to know.  Of course religious believers do this, and the practice turns up in Judaism and Christianity.  The book of Daniel, for example, includes numerous coded puzzles which the writer invented so that he could decode them for the believer.  In the New Testament both Jesus and Paul are depicted revealing secrets, hidden from eons past, to their followers.  And so on.

But what I'm talking about here isn't limited to religious texts.  As I've written before, fans of popular music also enjoy decoding songs they love, or inventing secrets, such as the supposed death of Paul McCartney and his replacement by a double. Having or creating secrets is power; decoding them is also power.  Finding hidden religious meanings in a secular counting song not only gives one the pleasure of knowing what was hidden, it also makes the world seem intelligible.  What are all these random gifts in this song? Gather round, children, and I'll let you in on a very old secret...

This brings me to questions about the meaning and function of mythology, which have been raised by a number of books I've read in the past year or so.  Now that I've finally written this post, I can move on to those questions.

A Lake Wobegon War on Christmas

Before I forget, someone commented today on Facebook, under a meme mocking the War on Christmas, that she "actually shut Prairie Home Companion off yesterday, because the very first words from the host were, 'It's Christmas, we say Merry Christmas here.' As if 1) Christmas is the origin of these traditions, and 2) none of their listeners would be celebrating the holidays Christmas took its traditions from."

I've long disliked Garrison Keillor (see about halfway through that post), so I was pleased to add another reason for disliking him to my list.  But then I got nervous.  Don't believe everything you see on the Internet, right?  And even without an intention to deceive, people mishear what they hear.  Luckily, thanks to the Internet, it is easy nowadays to check these things.  The show she was referring to is available online, and dang if she wasn't right.  They weren't quite the very first words out of Keillor's mouth, but they came early in his opening monologue, and she didn't take them out of context either.  Perhaps one could argue that he was being ironic, as part of his fake-folksy persona, but I don't think so; listen for yourself and decide.

Christmas, Whose Christmas?

So my news feed the past few days has been full of people who are throwing tantrums over the tantrums thrown by a few fundamentalist Christians over Starbuck's seasonal cups, and someone is like "Have people lost it all completely?" Talking about the fundamentalists, mind you, not the people who are upset about them.  What I don't get is the notion that religion is supposed to be all peace 'n' love 'n' shit. A look at religious history indicates otherwise.

It also looks like all the liberals I know have become really obsessed with this nonsense, posting every silly thing they can find about Starbucks and the reaction to their cups. It's not just a few fundamentalists who are getting overwrought. I'm no fan of Jesus -- I don't like hellfire-and-brimstone preachers and other religious nuts -- but he did say something about plucking the log out of your own eye before you fuss about the speck in your brother's eye. And I see many faux-Buddha quotations, often from the same people, about how you have to find your own peace within yourself rather than getting it from other people; yet they're having hissyfits about the War on Christmas team's hissyfits over Starbucks cups. Um, practice what you preach?

The person whose post inspired these notes answered that it was time to fight absurdity with absurdity.  I don't see any absurdity in his high dudgeon, but it's his mind.  He's one of the self-styled Buddhists I referred to, by the way, but fighting absurdity with absurdity isn't a teaching of the Buddha (or of Jesus) as far as I know.  This is, however:

"He insulted me, hit me, beat me, robbed me" — for those who brood on this, hostility isn't stilled. "He insulted me, hit me, beat me, robbed me" — for those who don't brood on this, hostility is stilled. 

The Dhammapada, verses 3-5.  And you know, the Christians who were pissed off by Starbucks' Christmas cups didn't actually insult, or hit, or beat, or rob my Buddhist friend, or any of the other liberals.  Nor have they hurt Starbucks.  Whatever my liberal friends are fuming about, it's not because they or anyone else has been hurt.  They're just outraged that someone somewhere is expressing beliefs and attitudes they find unacceptable -- just like the War on Christmas crowd.  They can't stop brooding on it, so their hostility isn't stilled.  Is this true spirituality?  Are these hissyfits what I'm missing by being an atheist?  (Though of course, some atheists are also doubtless having hissyfits over the disrespecting of Starbucks.)  I don't see that I'm missing anything.

It Starts Earlier Every Year!

It's not even Halloween yet, and this meme turned up on my news feed tonight.  My first reaction was to comment "What do you mean 'we,' paleface?"  The friend who posted it replied:

Do we really need to be politically correct all the time. Christmas has always been called Christmas, to remind you of Christ birth (Christ-mas). Now people want to say, "Happy holidays". You could say that of every holiday! I want to be politically correct with relationship of women in "men's" fields. Firefighter, and such but fisherman, policeman, and some others have not changed.

I replied:

That's what I was going to ask you, because this meme is Political Correctness run amok.

"Christmas" has not disappeared, nor is it threatened by "Happy Holidays." If there's an American church that refers to December 25 as "Holiday" and never calls it "Christmas," I'd be interested in knowing about it.

"Happy Holidays" has nothing to do with "political correctness." It's about good manners, and living in the real world, and the real America, where not everybody is a Christian. Since there are several holidays at the end of December -- Christmas, Kwanzaa, Hanukkah, the Winter Solstice, New Year's Eve -- "Happy Holidays" raises the odds that the person addressed will be celebrating at least one of them. If not, they'll probably at least be getting a holiday or two from work. Christmas wasn't always an important Christian holiday, and for many Christians it still isn't. For Orthodox Christians, Epiphany (January 6) is at least as important.

I'm not offended when someone wishes me a "Merry Christmas" (or at least I didn't used to be, which I'll explain a little later). Nor are most non-Christians offended. We take the kind thought behind the wish, and accept it. But it's also a kind thought when someone wishes us "Happy Holidays" and doesn't assume that we're Christians. It caught on for this reason, but also for good business reasons: I'm not offended when a cashier wishes me "Merry Christmas," but I'm pleased when they wish me "Happy Holidays." I know it isn't their decision, but their employer's, who doesn't want to alienate customers and wants to make money from everybody.

On the other hand, I have sometimes thanked clerks and cashiers for saying "Happy Holidays" to me, and asked them to pass my thanks on to their bosses, because it takes a little bit of courage nowadays to say "Happy Holidays" now that the choice has been turned into a battle in the Culture Wars. The bloated and inflamed assholes who invented the War on Christmas have tried to make it a political issue whether to say one or the other. When someone wishes me "Merry Christmas," I usually can't tell whether they genuinely mean well or are puffed up with thinking about how they're better than people who say "Happy Holidays," so I give them the benefit of the doubt. It would be as stupid of me to throw a tantrum over "Merry Christmas" as it is when Bill O'Reilly's shock troops have a hissyfit over "Happy Holidays." But when someone makes it explicit that they are saying "Merry Christmas" as part of the right-wing Republican Christian fundamentalist jihad against everyone who isn't a right-wing Republican Christian fundamentalist, of course I give them a hard time. So go ahead, post memes like this if you like -- it's a free country -- but think for a minute about the message you're sending about yourself. And thanks for getting the War on Christmas Season off to an early start!

P.S. It's kind of funny that despite the BS -- and it is BS -- about the importance of making it clear that Christmas is about Christ, this meme uses a picture of Santa Claus, not of Jesus. Whose birthday is it again?

Soon to come: the first sighting of the traditional "Obama Bans Christmas Trees from the White House" myth.  It just wouldn't feel like Christmas without it!

The War on Christmas -- I Can See the Light at the End of the Tunnel

Speaking of people who Just Don't Get It, Mary Elizabeth Williams, a Christian writer for Salon.com, recently wrote an attack on atheists who attack religious faith, in particular those who put up a billboard attacking Christmas:

And as a practicing, questioning Christian, I'm in strong agreement with the belief that church and state should firmly be separated, and with the concept of civil rights for all Americans, regardless of their points of view. Because shoving your beliefs on other people is just plain rude. Do you see where I’m going with this? Whether one unshakably believes in a perfectly swaddled little baby Jesus who arrives precisely on Dec. 25 surrounded by cute donkeys and starstruck shepherds is hardly the point. It's that snotty, oh-just-face-it-you-idiots attitude, that utter certainty, that's just as belligerent coming from an atheist as it from an evangelical.

"Because shoving your beliefs on other people is just plain rude" -- am I alone in seeing the delicious, totally clueless irony in that statement? If this billboard constitutes "shoving your beliefs on other people", then all the pro-"faith" billboards and churches with roadside marquees and Gideon Bibles in motel rooms and Christmas carols on the radio and all the Christian paraphrenalia that permeates our culture is "shoving your beliefs on other people." To say nothing of all the religious advocates, ranging from the Roman Catholic Church to Jim Wallis and Michael Lerner, who are hollering for more god-talk in the public arena, as if it weren't already saturated with it. By any measure, these atheist billboards amount to less than a drop in the bucket by comparison.

And "belligerent"? The whole tone of Williams's post is belligerent, though no doubt she'd say she was provoked. Fair enough, but to allow oneself to be provoked into belligerence goes against two thousand years of Christian theory, though in fairness it conforms perfectly with two thousand years of Christian practice, starting with the frequently intemperate rhetoric of Jesus himself. I guess it's okay for Christians to be righteously belligerent, but not for nonbelievers. Christendom was built on the belief that it's not only legitimate but a moral duty to attack the beliefs of others; Williams should try investigating early Christian history.

For that matter, American Atheists are aware that they're being belligerent, and quite properly unapologetic about it.

Silverman: Here's That War on Christmas You Ordered The Times reports that "Mr. Silverman said the billboard served two purposes. The first was to get the many people who do not actually believe in God but practice religious rituals to 'come out,' in his words ... The billboard also stands up to what Mr. Silverman described as a reactionary assault on atheists driven mainly by the religious right. 'Every year, atheists get blamed for having a war on Christmas, even if we don't do anything,' he said. 'This year, we decided to give the religious right a taste of what war on Christmas looks like.'"

I'd only object that these billboards are hardly even a taste of "what war on Christmas looks like." But baby steps, baby steps.

From the same source, we get some reports of concern trolling:

I Can See This Backfiring, writes Kathryn Jean Lopez at National Review. "Ironically, in his desire to out Christians who are just going through seasonal retail motions, [Silverman's] billboard may serve to remind believing Christians of the real reason for the season."

I'm sure Ms. Lopez would just hate to see anything like that happen. Oh, and What About Teh Children?

Does It Have to Be So Confrontational? wonders Fox anchor Megyn Kelly. In a mostly amiable interview with Silverman, Kelly asks, "Why impose your belief on a big billboard when the little kids drive by? It's in a place that gets a ton of visibility." Silverman replies, "We're allowed to express our views, just like all the churches are allowed to express their views on billboards."

I wouldn't expect any less from Fox News, the network that fought in court for its right to lie to you, but isn't it surprising that so many people have trouble grasping what freedom of expression (to say nothing of freedom of religion) means? Well, no, I guess not.

On the other hand, "reason" doesn't have much to do with any of this. How do you "celebrate Reason," and what's reasonable about that? For that matter, why not put up billboards debunking the myth of Santa Claus? (That might get American Atheists in trouble with the business community, a more fearsome opponent than the community of faith.) I also remember seeing one atheist blogger denouncing the erection of billboards touting belief, but that was before these atheist groups started doing the same thing, so I guess it was different, and anyway that was ancient times; we have to look to the future!

My objection to the fetishization of Reason by so many atheists and self-declared skeptics is that they are generally unaware of how much unreason and mythology they themselves subscribe to, and don't do actual reasoning very well. Take this interesting paragraph from a mostly pretty good rebuttal to a Christian from the Toronto National Post:

It’s not atheists who use ancient books to lecture and sometimes legislate people on how to live. It’s not atheists who fight over a divided Jerusalem nor who taught my French Canadian mother-in-law that the more miserable a life she lived the more she would be rewarded in death. It’s not atheists who can rally a crowd to stone a woman for being a rape victim. And while non believers likely try to pass critical thinking on to their children they don’t send them to weekly lectures about atheism and tell them they are bad if they don’t learn to parrot their parents’ beliefs.

Oh, really? Atheists are a varied lot, but some of us do use ancient books (Plato and others) to lecture and sometimes legislate people on how to live. As for fighting over a divided Jerusalem, let us not forget that the Zionists who built the modern state of Israel, in full knowledge that they were displacing the people who already lived there, were mostly fiercely secular and often Socialist Jews; blaming the Palestinian resistance to their dispossession on religion is fundamentally dishonest. Given the history of scientific racism, it's also disingenuous to blame social injustice solely on religion: scientific rationalists have been all too happy to take up the task of keeping the lowly in their place, if not for God then for Natural Selection and the good of the Race. Women and homosexuals have not always found Science to be our friend, nor Religion always to be our enemy. (Not surprising, since neither Science nor Religion has any inherent moral content.)
As for "pass[ing] critical thinking on to their children," you have to know how to do it before you can pass it on to anyone else. And most atheists are not, as far as I can tell, any better at critical thinking than most religious believers; I sometimes think they're worse, since so many assume that not believing in gods automatically makes you rational, and that's the kind of belief that makes people stupid. Waving "reason" around as a buzzword is not importantly different from waving "faith" around. Better than celebrating reason is trying to practice it well, and that's a lot harder to do.

The Spirit of the Season

Today I had some business to transact at my bank, which gave me occasion to deal with a teller. She was wearing a printed card above the nametag on her uniform shirt that said, "Happy Holidays." I thought about it while I was making the deposit, and made a decision: I told her that I appreciated the bank's decision to make it "Happy Holidays" rather than "Merry Christmas," since I knew there was pressure on some businesses to get rid of "Happy Holidays," and I wanted to let them know I approved of their choice. She looked a bit nonplussed -- probably no one had said anything about it to her before -- but thanked me.

Since I read this article about the pressure on retailers by some Christian groups, notably the American Family Association, to "recognize" Christmas, I've been pondering what ought to be done about it. I suppose one reason the pressure groups have had success, even if they may be exaggerating it, is that not many people really are anti-Christmas or want to "censor" Christmas. I don't object, or mind, when someone says "Merry Christmas" to me, whether they be stray individuals or employees in a business. As the Advertising Age reporter wrote,

This year's [National Retail Federation]/BigResearch survey found that 91 percent of consumers plan to celebrate Christmas, compared with 5% for Hanukkah and 2% for Kwanzaa.

"Retailers dipped their toe into the Christmas waters again last year, and there wasn't much push back. There wasn't a huge outcry from groups offended that retailers were saying Merry Christmas," said Ms. Davis. "We see the word Christmas being used much more this year than three or four years ago. The pendulum seems to have swung back."

I don't think there should be a "push back" at retailers who stress Christmas in their promotions or customer service scripts; for non-Christians to organize such a thing would be to sink to the AFA's level. But as I did today, I will try to praise businesses that use the generic "Holidays" label (even if they also mention Christmas -- Christmas is one of the holidays involved, after all). And I've been toying with the idea of a mild response to individuals who wish me a Merry Christmas. Not to workers in stores and such, who I presume are saying what they've been instructed to say, but individuals. Something like this, maybe:

OTHER PERSON: Merry Christmas!

ME: Oh, thank you for the thought, but I'm not a Christian.

This is bound to make people defensive, so I want to be as pleasant about it as possible, but many Christians evidently need to be reminded that they are not the only people in the world. That's why "Happy Holidays" came into use, if only for a while. If it's "politically correct," as the AFA spokesman calls it derisively (Christian love in action!), it's also good manners. What I have in mind is not so much a pushback as a "We shall not be moved."

Of Course You Realize This Means War!

I'd been wondering vaguely when the first salvo would be fired, and then I came across this photoblog post. The War on Christmas Season is once again upon us! (And we haven't even had Thanksgiving yet.) There's also a link to this subliterate piece by a writer for Advertising Age, on how "Happy Holidays" has been relegated to the dustbin of history, comrades.

According to its caption, the photo above depicts

Michael Godsey, front, and his wife Deanna, portray Joseph and Mary with the baby Jesus, in front of Christian activists during a live Christmas nativity scene procession outside the Supreme Court on Capitol Hill in Washington DC, Nov. 22, 2010. Faith Action, a Christian organization, staged the demonstration to illustrate that such displays are protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution. Eight adult actors in biblical costume, two camels and one donkey took part in the scene.

I could have sworn the person carrying the baby Jesus in the procession was another man, and the term "adult actors" (no doubt fresh from a teabagging scene) took me aback for a moment too. The blog post, by one Robert Hood, who styles himself "a news photographer", is no better:

Religious displays on public property have been argued over for decades. The establishment clause of the First Amendment to the US Constitution states that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” However, it also says Congress can’t impede the free exercise of religion, nor can it infringe on the freedom of speech. So, understandably there is considerable confusion around this issue.

And this post does nothing to dispel the confusion. In fact, it seems intended to increase it:

What do you think? Should Christmas be a federal holiday? Should religious displays be allowed on public property? If allowed, should we make distinctions between religions? If Christians can set up a Jesus manger on public property, can a coven perform Wiccan rituals on the steps of city hall? Am I favoring a religion if I participate in a Christmas giving tree, or am I helping a family during what would otherwise be a terribly painful morning on December 25th?

I wouldn't object to Christmas being a federal holiday if so many conservative Christians hadn't had hissyfits over the creation of federal holidays like Martin Luther King Jr.'s Birthday. Suppose there were a move to make some Muslim holiday (or, to use Hood's example, a Wiccan holiday) into a federal holiday; does anyone think that reactionary Christians would accept it as being on a par with Christmas? Believers should be, and as far as I know, are allowed to make "religious displays on public property" on their own initiative, and of course a coven should be allowed to perform Wiccan rituals on the steps of City Hall. If Hood participates in a Christmas giving tree, if he wants to 'favor a religion', that's his business as a private citizen -- why does he pretend it has anything to do with the First Amendment? I don't suppose there'd be any problem with, say, the workers at a Bureau of Motor Vehicles Office deciding to organize a giving tree. If the government at any level organizes charity, though, that is socialism according to the Christian frothers -- unless, apparently, it's done in the context of Christmas to undermine the wall of separation between religion and government.

Of course a procession like Faith Action's is protected by the First Amendment. But that has nothing to do with "religious displays" initiated and funded by the government. Would-be theocrats are always trying to get their cult of choice supported by the state, whether by getting it to set up Nativity displays for Christmas, official days of thanksgiving (though not of fasting -- that's so yesteryear), official prayers in school, and God all over government media ("In God We Trust" on money, which is fine if you put your trust in Mammon, "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance, and so on). I'm not offended by these acts in themselves. What bothers me is that they are intended to get the camel's nose into the tent, by creating legal precedents for an official establishment of religion, which can then be built on and extended.

Why would a church want to set up a creche on "public property" anyway? The only thing I can think of is that they want to make it look like our government -- which under the Constitution is godless, and for very good reason -- has an official religion. Considering the hysteria ginned up by essentially the same people over the building of a Muslim community center, including a prayer room, on private property in New York City, and over the building of mosques, also on private property, around the country, it's pretty clear what these people want to do: they want official Christian supremacy in the United States. They already have freedom of religion, but they want to be able to impose their religion on others, and make us pay for its expression on the public dime.

There are ambiguities in the law, and room for disagreement about how to resolve them. But the Christian theocrats prefer to throw out red herrings, and as Hood's post shows, there are plenty of people who will take them for serious discussion.

All Your Faith Are Belong to Us

I took another look at the blog post that led me to write about the War on Christmas, because a word from it had been echoing in my mind all day. That word was "inclusive," which I had trouble believing was really in there because it's such a Politically Correct word to those Canutes who want to return to the 1950s if not the 1890s. But there it was:

There has been a movement in the past decade or so to make Christmas all-inclusive, to call it "holiday" and to expunge any reference to Christmas. Well, Christmas has always been inclusive -- never exclusive. Changing the name to "holiday" does not change the inclusivity of Christmas. It belongs to everyone, but it is still Christmas. How on earth did we allow Christmas to become politically incorrect?

Jo is flat wrong here: Christmas is not "inclusive." Saying "Merry Christmas," for her, is intended to slather Christmas all over the celebrations of non-Christians. (As Stephen Colbert said, there are infinite paths to accepting Jesus Christ as your personal savior.) In one respect that's nothing new, since so much of Christmas as we USAns and Canadians observe it is non-Christian: the Yule, the tree, the holly, the mistletoe -- even the prominent role of Santa Claus / Saint Nicholas / Father Christmas has nothing to do with the Mediterranean dying-and-rising god whose birth is commemorated on December 25. But all this is at best syncretism, not inclusiveness: at worst it's forced conversion and assimilation. Christianity absorbed a good deal of local religious forms as it spread all over the world, and often it is difficult to say for sure who absorbed whom: was Rome Christianized, or was Christianity Romanized? The Korean Christians I know, for example, have kept the form of a Confucian funeral and reverence for the dead, baptizing them as it were. This is fine as far as it goes, and it's not unique to Christianity by any means.

Actually "Happy Holidays" is the inclusive phrase, because it includes Christmas with New Year's, the Winter Solstice, Hanukkah, Boxing Day, Kwanzaa, and Epiphany. It does not, as Jo claimed, "expunge any reference to Christmas" any more than it expunges any reference to the other holidays. Indeed, that is the real crime of "Happy Holidays": it treats Christmas as just one more holiday, even if primus inter pares. The same attitude is exhibited by people who object to calling heterosexuality a sexual orientation because to do so implies that homosexuality is equal to heterosexuality. I suspect it's also involved when someone denies that Christianity is a religion, because "religion" is what the heathen believe, while Christianity is a Relationship with God or some such nonsense.

Sometimes, it's true, mere ethnocentric ignorance is involved. A young Pentecostal woman I used to work with asked me one day if I'd be going to church for Easter. I explained that as an atheist, I never go to church. "I thought everybody went to church on Easter," she said with unselfconscious directness, and kept repeating that refrain as I explained that Jews don't go to church for Easter either, since though they believe in the same God they don't believe in Jesus; that Hindus, Muslims, and Buddhists don't worship Jesus, so they don't celebrate Easter either. "But I thought everybody went to church on Easter," she insisted. That, I think, is the kind of inclusiveness that Jo has in mind when she says that Christmas is inclusive.

Her attitude wasn't ill-intentioned, but her kind of ignorance, when combined with the War on Christmas crowd's hostility to anyone who won't agree that they own December 25, isn't benevolent either. One of my Facebook friends -- the same one, in fact, who claimed falsely that President Obama had a "holiday tree" in the White House a month back -- posted this weekend to the effect that "They" want to take "Christ out of Christmas." (You know, Them: the same shadowy figures who ruin your favorite movie by making inferior remakes. But then people who'd do that would do anything.) I know she probably just pasted something she'd found online into her status again. She also had it backwards: folks like her won't be satisfied until they've forced Christ into everybody's Christmas, whether we're Christians or not. If the church of her choice hasn't put enough Christ into its Christmas, she should do something about it or find another church. But outside that haven, she needs to mind her own business. Christ never was in my Christmas, and I won't let him in.

The Christmas Nuts Are Already Falling from the Trees

I was going to write about something else tonight, but then this came up. It shouldn't surprise anyone who remembers the "War on Christmas" hysteria ginned up a few years ago by Fox News and the right-wing blogosphere. And Obama hadn't even been elected yet! That's right, the headquarters of the War on Christmas was the Bush White House, whose Satan-worshiping denizens mandated secular ornaments for their holiday tree.

Tonight I found that a Facebook friend from my high school had issued a challenge to the rest of us FBers:

Let's see how many people on fb aren't ashamed to show their love for God and admit that Jesus is their Savior... We need to get God back in America... If you're not ashamed, copy and paste this in your status...

I responded, of course, by proudly declaring my atheism and my support for our godless Constitution, the First Amendment, and the Wall of Separation between Religion and Government for which they stand.

Then I went to her main page to see the context for her challenge. There I found a link to "the President Obama says that they will have a Holiday Tree this year instead of a Christmas Tree. Do you agree with this? Poll!" My fellow FBer had, of course, responded with a ringing "No!" I'm familiar with this sort of stuff from way back, at least to the days when good honest Christians were spreading the word that the godless atheist, Madalyn Murray O'Hair (a name which sounds suspiciously like O'Bama, doesn't it?), had submitted a petition to the Federal Communications Commission, demanding that all religious broadcasting be banned from the airwaves!!!! And the FCC declares that they need a million postcards, or the Word of God will like totally be banned from radio and television!!!!!!! Think of the children!!!!!!

It was a fabrication, of course, but despite numerous debunkings and corrections the FCC was deluged for decades with postcards urging them not to ban religious broadcasting. They may still be, for all I know. The Obama Holiday Tree is cut from similar cloth. I left a comment on my friend's page, asking her to support the claim she's broadcasting; I wonder if she'll respond. After all, a good Christian who is not ashamed to acknowledge Jesus Christ as her Lord and Savior should keep the commandments, which include not bearing false witness against her neighbor. (Though they do, don't they, over and over and over.) The clip from Blazing Saddles, above, is just a reminder that Mel Brooks is a prophet.

(image credit)