Christian Conservatives Rail against the “War on Christmas”

Christian fundamentalists in the United States are fighting for their right to display Christmas symbols publicly. The say their liberal opponents have declared a jihad against Christianity.

It’s the same story every year in the United States: Some leftist liberal who holds public office does or says something construed as anti-Christmas, and the Christian right traditionally reacts by invoking the specter of the anti-Christ. This year, Lincoln Chafee, governor of Rhode Island, got that annual ritual underway.

Lincoln Chafee is a rare bird — a liberal Republican, namely — and that means that he now and then has to prove to his liberal friends that he’s serious about his convictions. That’s why he calls the 16-foot, beautifully decorated spruce tree in the Capitol building a “holiday tree” rather than a Christmas tree.

True, that doesn’t have the same ring to it that “year’s-end-fixed-wing-figure” has (we recall that’s what the angel of Christmas was supposed to be called in the old East German Democratic Republic, but whether that was the official bureaucratic term for it or something satirists made up is still unclear), but it was enough for the right-wing broadcaster Fox News to claim liberals had declared war on Christmas.

According to right-wing Christian theology, leftists and intellectuals are the culprits behind this war: Plain folk are turned off by the elites who would prefer to put a secular education dictatorship in place.

Their goal is to separate America from its Christian roots and hollow the nation out in the name of multiculturalism. Its real goal might actually be to soften the country up for a radical Islamic takeover. First Christmas is forbidden — who knows what comes next?

In order to understand the background of this polemic, one must first explain that the 1st Amendment to the U.S. Constitution forbids the founding of any state religion.

The state isn’t permitted to disadvantage any one religion, and even more importantly, it isn’t permitted to favor any one religion over another — not even the Christian religion. So, no crucifixes in court or in classrooms and no religious symbols whatsoever in public places.

The United States is to be known as a nation where any and all religions are welcome. Jews — who tend to vote predominantly left-liberal — have a specially keen interest in making sure the 1st Amendment is scrupulously observed. As soon as America begins taking its status as a “Christian nation” seriously, Jews revert back to what they had been in Europe: a marginalized and, at best, scarcely tolerated minority.

So it’s by no means paranoid if the words of the Christian right about a “war on Christmas” are perceived to have anti-Semitic undertones.

The cultural joke here is that a bitter war was once actually fought over Christmas. And the ones who fought it weren’t multiculturalists or fanatical Muslims, nor were they intellectual New York Jews. They were Christians.

More to the point, it was those Christians who were the spiritual ancestors of today’s Christian fundamentalist right. English and American Puritans alike absolutely hated the Christmas holiday. They considered it “papist” — that is to say, a heathen pleasure.

Finally, neither the Old nor New Testaments mention such a festival. December 24 was a day of fasting. Sinful revelries were strictly forbidden. Once the English Parliament had been taken over by radical Protestant elements, armies of Puritans rode around the countryside confiscating Christmas roasts in every city and town.

The average Englishman didn’t particularly appreciate losing his feast, and the Duchy of Kent revolted against the Puritans’ Christmas wet blanket. There’s little doubt that time-traveling puritans would be absolutely outraged by today’s American Christmas holiday festival.

After Thanksgiving, always the fourth Thursday in November, magnificently insane lighting decorations are unrolled across every street and square in the land, and for the next four weeks, the country is engulfed by an unrestrained spending spree.

Papists, who are permitted to do pretty much as they like in America, decorate their front yards with inflatable religious figures that are illuminated from within. First prize among Catholics is usually won by the vermillion neon creations Italian families put up.

The American Christmas compromise looks like this: In public places, symbols of the holiday are fine, but they shouldn’t be overly religious. That is to say, no nativity scenes, and no baby Jesus in the manger. In place of that: Santa Claus and his reindeer and elves in 1,001 kitschy variations.

The Christmas songs blaring from the loudspeakers were written mainly by Jews: From “White Christmas” by Irving Berlin to “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” by Johnny Marks and on to “Let it Snow” by Sammy Cahn. Philip Roth noted in his novel “Operation Shylock” that America managed to remove the traditional anti-Semitic sting from the Christmas holiday by way of flooding it with pure kitsch.

So Lincoln Chafee, that nice, liberal Republican who runs Rhode Island, should be allowed to call his magnificent state tree a Christmas tree. And on the other side, the American Christian right shouldn’t get overly upset when they receive holiday cards politely wishing them “Compliments of the Season” instead of “Merry Christmas.”