GET READY for the “war on Christmas,” season four. It’s already started in New Hyde Park, New York, a Long Island town where, in August 2007, some parents angrily denounced the school district’s proposal to change the name of the annual Christmas Concert to Winter Concert.
Allegations of a war on Christmas date back to Henry Ford’s anti-Semitic rants of the 1920’s and to a 1959 John Birch Society pamphlet. The latest battle started in 2004. After Christian conservatives helped re-elect George Bush and a Republican-controlled Congress, right-wing groups and journalists started to denounce the fact that Macy’s and other retailers were wishing customers “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas.” Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly ran a regular segment called “Christmas Under Siege,” trumpeting the newly formed Committee to Save Merry Christmas. Fox’s Sean Hannity and others also got in on the action. Because disputes over Christmas pageants at public schools and government-sponsored crèche scenes are a perennial affair, I wondered whether this was the same silliness as in any other year, only I was noticing it more, or whether it was actually worse than usual. The consensus among friends and colleagues was decidedly the latter.
In 2005, another Fox News pundit, John Gibson, published The War on Christmas: How the Liberal Plot to Ban the Sacred Christian Holiday Is Worse Than You Thought. Gibson decried “the annual parade of Christmas outrages,” including the renaming of Christmas parades as holiday parades and the banning of Christian-themed gifts from student gift exchanges at school holiday parties. He insisted that those waging a war on Christmas are “a cabal of secularists, so-called humanists, trial lawyers, cultural relativists, and liberal, guilt-wracked Christians—not just Jewish people,” but then went on to blame non-Christians in general. Also in 2005, the city of Boston officially renamed the giant spruce tree erected on the Boston Common a “holiday tree.” After Jerry Falwell and the Alliance Defense Fund threatened to sue, Mayor Thomas Menino assured residents he would continue to call the tree a Christmas tree.
O’Reilly repeatedly hyped these stories, joining the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights in calling for a boycott of stores that wished shoppers “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas.” Pat Buchanan denounced the shift to more inclusive greetings as “hate crimes against Christianity.” O’Reilly claimed that non-Christians would be “crazy” to be offended by “Merry Christmas,” while insisting that “Season’s Greetings” and “Happy Holidays” are “for a fact” offensive to Christians.
This “war on Christmas,” Gibson charged, is really a “war on Christianity.” This theme emerged more explicitly in 2006. Vision America’s Rick Scarborough convened a conference titled “War on Christians and the Values Voters in 2006,” where speakers denounced “moral relativism,” “hedonism” and “Christophobia.” Not surprisingly, several speakers denounced the “gay agenda.” Peter LaBarbera called gay people “disgusting” and urged the closing of “homosexual establishments.” Brian Camenker falsely claimed that Massachusetts gay activists were pushing a bill to decriminalize bestiality. Persecution was a major theme. The Hudson Institute’s Michael Horowitz told his audience: “you guys have become the Jews of the 21st century.” Navy Lt. Gordon Klingenschmitt, a chaplain who was disciplined for proselytizing, compared himself to an Afghan Christian who was nearly executed for his faith. Meanwhile, three-quarters of evangelicals believe they are a minority under siege.
The “war on Christmas” is part of a broader Christian right sense of victimization and persecution. This worldview was on prominent display at the Family Research Council’s 2006 “Values Voters Summit,” which I attended.* Speakers portrayed Christians as persecuted by homosexual activists, the ACLU, the government, and the media. Alan Sears of the Alliance Defense Fund warned that “the homosexual agenda and religious freedom are on a collision course. … The only way they can win is to silence the churches. Pastors are waking up and realizing that their ability to preach the Gospel is on the line.” Sears’ group distributed pins at the summit that read “Merry Christmas. Believe it. Say it.”
The “war on Christmas” also fits into Christian right eschatology. Rick Scarborough told the Values Voters Summit that “we’re living in the last days,” and “God is looking for a remnant.” Christian right leaders are mostly premillennial evangelical Protestants, who believe that the Book of Revelations prophesies the end of the world, at which time Christ will return and rule for 1,000 years. They interpret radical social and cultural changes (such as same-sex marriage and the de-centering of Christmas), as well as wars and natural disasters, as evidence.
In a culture that’s ninety percent Christian and in which the Christmas shopping season begins around Halloween, Christmas is certainly not threatened by the use of inclusive language such as “Happy Holidays.” But more than language is at stake here; the Right’s crusade strikes at the heart of the principle of church-state separation—with important implications for the GLBT community. Anti-gay activism is part of a broader right-wing politics of resentment, fear, and domination. The absurd mythology that they are the oppressed minority shows up in their opposition to affirmative action, their claim that same-sex marriage undermines “traditional” marriage, and their claim that Christmas is under assault.
The alleged “war on Christmas” is divisive and dangerous, and certainly not in the spirit of “peace on earth, good will toward men.” The U.S. was founded by and continues to be populated by people fleeing religious persecution. The founders were clear about the need to construct a wall of separation between church and state, with no established church, as in England. Secularism and pluralism are as American as hasty pudding—as is the greeting, “Happy Holidays.”
* For a full report on the summit, see Cahill and Burack, “Internal enemy: Gays as the Domestic al-Qaeda,” Oct. 2006, at www.thetaskforce.org.
Sean Cahill is policy director at Gay Men’s Health Crisis. This essay is adapted from a piece he wrote while directing the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Policy Institute.
