More on Christmas Under Siege

Well...it appears that Charles Krauthammer and I aren't the only ones talking about whether or not there's enough Christ in Christmas.

Frank Rich has a very good column over at the NY Times about this. As I said in my earlier post, I thought this reactionary movement to "restore" Christmas had become a holiday tradition, but apparantly it's been stepped up since the Christian conservative "victory" in the Presidential election.

Yet if you watch the news and listen to certain politicians, especially since Election Day, you'll hear an ever-growing drumbeat that Christianity is under siege in America. Like Mr. Gibson, the international movie star who portrayed himself as a powerless martyr to a shadowy anti- Christian conspiracy in the run-up to the release of "The Passion," his fellow travelers on the right detect a sinister plot — of secularists, "secular Jews" and "elites" — out to destroy the religion followed by more than four out of every five Americans.

Dana Stevens over at Slate also has something to say in her TV MemeWatch column:

The new gauntlet-throwing catch phrase from the right is "Merry Christmas" (can't you just see Eastwood saying it from behind the barrel of a gun?). Apparently, uttered in the right context—like on Fox News—those four syllables no longer convey simply holiday cheer, but a red-state/blue-state, my-god-is-better-than-yours challenge...

And in this article at the Dallas News, some parents in an Oklahoma City suburb cut their own noses off to spite their face:

Dismayed that a Nativity, or depiction of Christ's birth in a manger, was ordered cut by the superintendent, some voters in this growing, southwest Oklahoma City suburb retaliated by helping block passage of the bonds. Those bonds included money for a new elementary school that would ease crowding.

Sigh. What to say? The conservative Christmas cops, emboldened by the 22% of voters who may or may not have voted on some sort of issue of morality, are now running around like the Wahabbi morality police of Saudi fame looking for every possible instance in which they can be victimized by liberal, secularist, atheistic fanatics who want to replace Christ with a Kwanzaa display. But I think Rich sums up the larger purpose best:

What is this about? How can those in this country's overwhelming religious majority maintain that they are victims in a fiery battle with forces of darkness? It is certainly not about actual victimization. Christmas is as pervasive as it has ever been in America, where it wasn't even declared a federal holiday until after the Civil War. What's really going on here is yet another example of a post-Election-Day winner-takes-all power grab by the "moral values" brigade. As Mr. Gibson shrewdly contrived his own crucifixion all the way to the bank, trumping up nonexistent threats to his movie to hype it, so the creation of imagined enemies and exaggerated threats to Christianity by "moral values" mongers of the right has its own secular purpose. The idea is to intimidate and marginalize anyone who objects to their efforts to impose the most conservative of Christian dogma on public policy. If you're against their views, you don't have a differing opinion — you're anti-Christian (even if you are a Christian).

That explanation makes sense to me. Unlike the unwitting and naive residents of Mustang, Oklahoma, many of the pundits and commentators know exactly what they're doing. They know that if they can push this image of Christian victimization, then hardly anyone will be able to object when they demand that the school play tell the story of Jesus, or that the school mural include images of angels hanging over the manger, for fear that they'll be forced to explain why they hate Christianity. Again, it's a nasty and underhanded ploy to get by deception(in casting themselves as victims)what would otherwise be against the law.

And this may sound inflammatory to some, but this situation isn't without historical parallel. The Nazis employed the same tactic quite effectively against the Jews, casting them a threats to the German state and German "purity" despite the fact that Germans were an overwhelming majority who held the liberty of the Jews in the palm of their hands, as a precursor to imposing even more severe restrictions on Jews then already existed, and eventually the Holocaust. Obviously that's not going to happen here; none of us have to worry about a Christian theocracy rounding up secularists anytime soon. But it's the same idea, and the same tactics. It was despicable and underhanded then, and it's despicable and underhanded now.