NYT: This Season's War Cry: Commercialize Christmas, or Else

By ADAM COHEN

Religious conservatives have a cause this holiday season: the commercialization of Christmas. They're for it.

The American Family Association is leading a boycott of Target for not using the words "Merry Christmas" in its advertising. (Target denies it has an anti-Merry-Christmas policy.) The Catholic League boycotted Wal-Mart in part over the way its Web site treated searches for "Christmas." Bill O'Reilly, the Fox anchor who last year started a "Christmas Under Siege" campaign, has a chart on his Web site of stores that use the phrase "Happy Holidays," along with a poll that asks, "Will you shop at stores that do not say 'Merry Christmas'?"

This campaign - which is being hyped on Fox and conservative talk radio - is an odd one. Christmas remains ubiquitous, and with its celebrators in control of the White House, Congress, the Supreme Court and every state supreme court and legislature, it hardly lacks for powerful supporters. 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."

What is less obvious, though, is that Christmas's self-proclaimed defenders are rewriting the holiday's history. They claim that the "traditional" American Christmas is under attack by what John Gibson, another Fox anchor, calls "professional atheists" and "Christian haters." But America has a complicated history with Christmas, going back to the Puritans, who despised it. What the boycotters are doing is not defending America's Christmas traditions, but creating a new version of the holiday that fits a political agenda.

(snip)

The Christmas that Mr. O'Reilly and his allies are promoting - one closely aligned with retailers, with a smack-down attitude toward nonobservers - fits with their campaign to make America more like a theocracy, with Christian displays on public property and Christian prayer in public schools.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/04/opinion/04sun3.html?hp

to these RWers, apparently means to be rude, obnoxious, and treat everybody else as if they're 'not religious enough' or not as good as you if they don't display their religion in the same way. Was that the meaning of the story of Jesus, to have slogans to bray at department stores?

A real person motivated by their religion should be insulted.

"This campaign - which is being hyped on Fox and conservative talk radio - is an odd one."

And a fairly OLD one; Evangelical boycotts are nothing new. Nor is their never-ending search for new things to become oh-so-righteously indignant about.

"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.'"

Since when did Evangelicals start caring about people of a browner shade?

Gratifyingly, it does seem that Christians with more moderate (sane?) sensibilities are finally beginning to tire of the Pat Robertsons of the world speaking for them. (Pat Robertson has achieved the impossible: he makes Jerry Falwell look like a reasonable man.) While not a Christian myself, Christianity does have many admirable, attractive features. Now if only the likes of the 700 Club and the Ole Time (see: The Middle Ages) Gospel Hour would actually follow its central tenets.

Robert

P.S. Speaking of righteous indignation, I cannot help but be reminded of the outraged cries of tyrannical oppression made by many slave-owning Southerners before the Civil War. Think this analogy unfair? Go checkout which side the Southern Baptists supported with such fervor during the days of the Freedom Rides and the march on Selma.