The War Against CHRISTmass

The following article - though specific in regards to the US - is
probably paralleled by similar attempts in the EU. For educational
purposes:

"War Against Christmas 2005 Competition [II]: Yes, Virginia (And
Michelle Goldberg), There Is A War Against Christmas
By Tom Piatak

[Last year by Tom Piatak: War Against Christmas 2004 Competition [IX]:
An Orwellian Christmas]

The War Against Christmas, first noticed (to my knowledge) by Peter
Brimelow, and long documented by VDARE.COM, is getting noticed by more
and more people each year. FOX News' Bill O'Reilly has devoted
considerable attention to the issue, and his website now contains a
useful summary of retailers' willingness to actually name the holiday
to which they owe so much. Even more mainstream news outlets are taking
notice: on December 1, 2005, the Christian Science Monitor ran a piece
by Beth Joyner Waldron noting that "After nearly two decades of
watching community Christmas parades slowly evolve into Holiday
parades, school Christmas vacation into winter break, and town hall
crèches into snowmen, Christmas observers are revolting."

But the surest sign that the War Against Christmas has arrived as a
national issue is that it has produced its first book, The War On
Christmas, by Bill O'Reilly's colleague on FOX news, John Gibson.
Further confirmation of the importance of the issue is that Gibson's
book is not being ignored, but attacked, including in the New York
Times.

First the book: It's valuable and timely. Gibson offers a lucid,
reportorial account of the War Against Christmas, detailing successful
attempts to ban Santa Claus, Christmas trees, instrumental Christmas
carols, the word "Christmas," and even the colors red and green in a
variety of schools and other public places, in such unlikely locations
of anti-Christmas hostility as Covington, Georgia, Mustang, Oklahoma,
and Baldwin City, Kansas.

Gibson's eye for detail has produced a number of revealing quotes.
Again and again, those seeking to erase Christmas from the public
square offer "diversity" and its variants as their justification. But,
in practice, "diversity" and "inclusion" mean uniformity and exclusion,
as Christian symbols are removed from public spaces.

As the bureaucrat behind the ban on Christmas trees on municipal
property in Eugene, Oregon told Gibson:

"So we started a very large effort of diversity. As a part of that I
started to have some discussions about holidays. And a subgroup of
people started to discuss holiday decorations and . . . came to me
eventually and said, 'There's a number of people in the
organization who really do not like, they are upset with, holiday
decorations that are of Christian origin.'"

As another Eugene bureaucrat told Gibson: "Some of these folks . . .
just found the whole Christmas holiday season an offensive assault on
them."

As Gibson's book also makes clear, we are allowing the misfits who
feel that "the whole Christmas holiday season" is "an offensive assault
on them" to get their way far too often. The message that Christianity
is offensive is being picked up by students attending schools where
references to Christmas are either sanitized or stripped. A parent in
Maplewood, New Jersey-where even instrumental Christmas music is
verboten-told Gibson that her son didn't want to include any
Christmas symbols even on a poster that was actually supposed to
illustrate the area's religious diversity because "I don't want to
offend anyone."

As the mother told Gibson, "That's the climate in this town. We're
told that all the time."

Because of the thoroughgoing secularization of the schools, believers
in Christmas often find themselves fighting a rearguard action to
preserve a Christmas tree or other symbol that would have been
considered secular until recently.

This is lamentable, but understandable. As Gibson notes, quoting
religious scholar Charles Haynes, once the tree is gone "[Christians]
have nothing left" and the segregation of Christmas into a purely
private ghetto will be complete.

Gibson also has a sharp eye for irony. Baldwin City, Kansas banned
Santa Claus in its schools largely because one school board member
complained. But that same school board member had also attacked the
superintendent for stopping the reading of a story involving rape to
sixth graders, complaining "One or two parents should not be allowed to
dictate what the rest of the school can read." But, time and again, we
placate one or two malcontents by eliminating all references to
Christmas.

Gibson's book does not offer a detailed history of the War Against
Christmas or a close examination of all the arguments surrounding the
War Against Christmas, nor does it attempt to place the War Against
Christmas in the broader cultural context of the continuing assault on
Western culture and its traditions. And there is still a need for books
that do these things. But Gibson, while placing too much emphasis on
the legal aspects of the War Against Christmas, sees through many of
the misconceptions about the War Against Christmas and generally comes
to the right conclusions.

Gibson knows that the First Amendment is not the driving force behind
the War Against Christmas, which afflicts both private entities outside
the scope of the First Amendment and other countries that have no
separation of church and state. Gibson also recognizes that this is a
war against Christianity, not religious expression generally, noting
that "Expressions of Judaism and Islam and Hinduism are regarded as
inoffensive and merely cultural." Gibson also observes that when "a
Jewish organization like the Anti-Defamation League . . . object[s] to
a Jewish religious practice that is carried out under public auspices .
.. . the objection is lodged only to maintain the rhetorical standing to
object to Christian practices." The target of the War Against Christmas
is Christianity, and the Western culture Christianity created, not
religion generally.

Gibson also provides a useful numerical framework for understanding the
War Against Christmas. As Gibson notes, in 2002, 84% of Americans
claimed to be Christians, as opposed to 1.3% who professed Judaism,
with less than 1.0% professing Islam. But last year, 96% of Americans
told pollsters they celebrated Christmas.

As these polls show, the number of Americans disaffected by Christmas
is minute. More significantly, a lack of belief in Christ is no
obstacle to enjoying Christmas, as shown by the millions of
non-Christians who tell pollsters that they celebrate the holiday
commemorating the birth of Christ. Only those unable to tolerate the
Christian origins of the holiday will not find something to enjoy in
the multifaceted celebration of Christmas that has developed in
America.

Indeed, one of the people highlighted by Gibson, who wanted to restore
the "winter break" in Covington, Georgia to its former name of
"Christmas break," was not a regular churchgoer and was motivated by
his belief that Christmas "was something that was, in a way, uniquely
American" and was "recognized to one extent or another by people of
different faiths, people of no faith."

Gibson's book has certainly struck a nerve. Michelle Goldberg wrote a
piece at Salon.com [How the secular humanist grinch didn't steal
Christmas] comparing Gibson's book to John Birch Society tracts and
Henry Ford's musings in "The International Jew." According to
Goldberg,

"There is no War on Christmas. What there is, rather, is a burgeoning
myth of a War on Christmas, assembled out of old reactionary tropes,
urban legends, exaggerated anecdotes and increasing organized hostility
to the American Civil Liberties Union. It's a myth that can be
self-fulfilling, as school board members and local politicians believe
the false conservative claim that they can't celebrate Christmas
without getting sued by the ACLU and thus jettison beloved traditions."


In Goldberg's world, nativity scenes have disappeared across America
not because the ACLU or anyone else wanted them to go, but because
conservatives, by going on about the ACLU, have scared local officials
into removing them. Unsurprisingly, Goldberg doesn't offer any facts
to support her novel view of reality.

Goldberg's aversion to facts is understandable, because an
examination of the facts simply confirms what everyone but Goldberg
knows-that the public celebration of Christmas is being diminished to
the point that even the word "Christmas" is considered controversial.
For example, Goldberg attacks the American Family Association's
boycott of Target "because of the chain's purported refusal to use
the phrase 'Merry Christmas' in its advertising." But
Snopes.com-hardly a political site-investigated Target, and found
that although store employees were allowed to say "Merry Christmas" at
their discretion, the store, like other retailers, assiduously avoided
the word Christmas, going so far as to refer to "traditional holiday
stockings" and "traditional holiday ornaments."

Goldberg dismisses the whole "War Against Christmas" as an exercise in
conspiracy-mongering, without offering any explanation for how a
holiday celebrated by 96% of all Americans is now so toxic that
retailers are afraid to call Christmas ornaments and Christmas
stockings by their names.

The explanation, of course, is that those upset by Christmas have
complained and their complaints have been carried by the media and
incorporated into school curricula. And Americans eager to appear
"tolerant" or simply to avoid controversy have responded by censoring
expressions of Christmas.

Ironically, another critic of Gibson, Adam Cohen, undercuts
Goldberg's attempt to paint Gibson as a conspiracy nut. Cohen,
writing in the December 4, 2005 New York Times, criticizes Gibson for
trying "to make America more like a theocracy." But Cohen also notes
that there have long been complaints about the public celebration of
Christmas, including a walkout of 20,000 Jewish students from the New
York City public schools in 1906 to protest the singing of Christmas
carols. [This Season's War Cry: Commercialize Christmas, or Else, By
Adam Cohen December 4, 2005]

Such complaints have had their desired effect. As Cohen writes,

"For decades, companies have replaced 'Christmas parties' with
'holiday parties,' schools have adopted 'winter breaks' instead
of 'Christmas breaks,' and TV stations and stores have used phrases
like 'Happy Holidays' and 'Seasons Greetings' out of respect
for the nation's religious diversity."

Yes, Virginia (and Michelle), there is a War Against Christmas.

Cohen, of course, approves of all this. And he doesn't approve of
those who object, writing that

"There is also something perverse, when Christians are being jailed for
discussing the Bible in Saudi Arabia and slaughtered in Sudan, about
spending so much energy on stores that sell 'holiday trees.'"

Somehow, one doubts that Cohen would have criticized the Jewish
students who walked out of the New York schools in 1906 on the grounds
that they should have been worried about Tsarist pogroms instead. In
fact, of course, Christians and others who enjoy Christmas are
perfectly justified in objecting to the effort to censor and suppress
Christmas, without waiting for a situation that resembles the
oppression found in Sudan or Saudi Arabia.

Cohen also criticizes those upset by the disappearance of Christmas
from stores for "not just tolerating [the] commercialization [of
Christmas], they're insisting on it," even invoking "A Charlie Brown
Christmas" to buttress his point.

Cohen is wrong. Wanting retailers to wish customers "Merry Christmas"
isn't insisting on commercialization, but courtesy. Retailers depend
on Christmas for their economic well-being. Asking that they at least
acknowledge the holiday to which they owe their good fortune does not
seem excessive, and treating the word "Christmas" as if it were a
profanity to be avoided in polite conversation is offensive.

Nor did "A Charlie Brown Christmas" ask us to be quiet about Christmas,
in the interests of "religious diversity." In fact, that wonderful
program mentioned no winter holiday except Christmas, featured a
religious Christmas pageant in a public school, had Linus recite St.
Luke's account of the Nativity, and ended with the Peanuts singing
"Hark, The Herald Angels Sing."

But Cohen does have a point, the same one noted by Gibson. So much of
the public celebration of Christmas has already been lost that the
areas currently being contested sometimes do not seem worth the effort.
I would gladly keep quiet about retailers not using the word Christmas,
if my being silent would bring back the sort of school Christmas plays
shown in "A Charlie Brown Christmas."

But, unfortunately, silence will not cause the Christmases we remember
to return, it will merely hasten the day when such Christmases become
unimaginable.

Objecting to the continuing suppression of Christmas is the only way to
bring back the spirited and joyous public celebration of
Christmas-which is why, in their different ways, Michelle Goldberg
and Adam Cohen are so angry with John Gibson. "

Tom Piatak writes from Cleveland, Ohio.
http://www.vdare.com/piatak/051206_christmas.htm

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