Julie Sanchez has an excellent article up titled The True Spirit of Xmas: How 4/5 of the country became an oppressed minority over at Reason Magazine’s website that is well worth a read.
It’s a Christmas tradition as venerable as mistletoe and caroling: As the days grow shorter, conservative activists claiming to speak for American Christendom raise their voices, not for a rousing round of “Good King Wenceslaus,” but to complain that the roughly 75 to 80 percent of Americans who profess allegiance to some denomination or another of Christianity constitute a cruelly oppressed minority.
The kvetching is especially loud this year, with a spate of stories chronicling the outrage over a particularly insidious form of anti-Christian bigotry: the Satanic phrase “happy holidays.”
National Review‘s John Derbyshire reports bristling at these two seemingly innocuous words with the sort of fascinated intensity he normally reserves for buggery. There’s even a
Committee to Save Merry Christmas, urging a boycott of stores that spit on Christians by deploying such bigoted phrases as “happy holidays” or “season’s greetings.” And in case you thought those phrases were, in our increasingly pluralistic society, just nice ways of creating a festive atmosphere without seeming to exclude the folks celebrating, you know, those other holidays happening around this time, CNN’s Lou Dobbs shakes his jowls to remind you that those phrases have “excluded everyone who is celebrating Christmas” (which is apparently neither happy nor a holiday). The Christian Law Association has released a vague list of horror stories under the rhetorical headline: ”Has Christmas Become Illegal in America?”
The article touches on a number of news items we’ve talked about here at SEB over the past months and puts the lie to the favored claim of the religious right that Christianity and its followers are being marginalized or persecuted. A claim we’re going to hear more and more after the outcome of the most recent presidential election. A lot of the True Believers™ have been emboldened by their success at the polls and are convinced now more than ever that there is a receptive audience for their claims of victimization. It’s already a tired mantra on their part and it’s only going to get worse before it gets better. The worst thing we can do is to let those claims go unchallenged as can be seen in some of the comments in some of the more active threads here at SEB.
Great roundup, Les! I noticed a large spike in ‘Whither Christmas’ stories on both the extremist and the mainstream media- most notably CBS news, which appears to be showing its true colors post-election.
I’ve been tracking some of these stories on one of my Live Journal communities, and some of us see this whole “Christmas” boondoggle as the Dominionists (the extreme religious right) being sore winners and making a fuss over nothing. “Happy Holidays” and “Seasons Greetings” have been around forever- but the apparent ‘permission’ to Christianize the country has given fuel to these people, and lit the anti-generic holiday season fires.
Personally, I don’t care one way or another. I don’t celebrate Christmas- either religiously or secularly, and I think that the whole season has become like kudzu at the end of the year- spreading its greedy green tentacles further and further into autumn. The starting of ‘all Christmas all the time’ radio stations before Halloween was the last straw for me. Next year, I might see if I can sell “Bah Humbug” lights for those amongst us who have had enough.
Sunfell