The War on Christmas

As millions of Americans gather with family and friends this week to celebrate the birth of Jesus and the mystery of the Incarnation, political conservatives hope you'll remember one important message:

Liberals are waging a War on Christmas!

Obviously, if your political and economic fortunes depend on preventing working folks from acting to better their own lives, you need to come up with plenty of things to keep them distracted. You can make elections about sex 'n guns; you can set poor whites against poor blacks and vice versa; and you can invent foreign threats from almost random Third World countries. But I guess every now and then you have to throw out some totally bizarre, freak-show fantasies--you know, just to mix things up.

Our friends at Fox News have been talking up a "War on Christmas," as part of a larger assault against Christianity itself, since at least 2004. Bill O'Reilly boldly casts himself as champion of the people, fighting to save the holiday against "the far left," "the loony left," "the Kool-Aid secular progressive ACLU America-haters." In 2004, O'Reilly began a recurring segment on his show called "Christmas Under Siege." In 2005, one of the other Fox crazies, John Gibson, published a book called, The War on Christmas: How the Liberal Plot to Ban the Sacred Christian Holiday Is Worse Than You Thought.

The evidence offered that "liberals" are waging war against our favorite holiday usually falls into one of two categories: 1) Employees at retail stores saying "Happy holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas," or 2) A small town somewhere deciding not to allow a religious display at a public building. That's the "war." 

I guess by now we are used to the manufactured, never-ending culture war, where big-money talking heads on TV dress up as everymen to take on a mostly mythical "liberal elite." Sometimes we should just laugh it off. But if we are really interested in "defending" Christianity against concerted attacks, let's focus on real stories of religious persecution instead of made-up ones. Let's change our dog-eat-dog culture, where we mask plain old greed as "success." Let's love our neighbors as ourselves, even when that involves resources and money. It's radical, but so is following Christ.