Why This War On Christmas? (Part I)
Look out! It is Christmas Season again, and the war is back on. The anti-Christmas contingents have come out from under their rocks and porches, hell bent on annihilating Christmas.
We find the “usual suspects”: Those FOR CHRISTMAS versus those AGAINST CHRISTMAS. Each is fighting for dominance. For those who love Christmas, the fight is to preserve and protect all aspects of the season. Anti-Christmas forces want all manifestations of Christmas removed from schools, public and private institutions, and buildings, displays, broadcasting media, and, you name it.
Most, but not all, pro-Christmas forces are Christians, and they quite naturally envision Christmas as the property of Christianity. Their numbers are so great that what other pro-Christmas forces have to say too often goes unheard. Because of the numbers and their annual polemics, most people concede that Christmas belongs solely to the Christians. I do not concede that point, however.
Anti-Christmas forces appear to be diverse, but they unite about one central moral evil (which we will discuss later in this article). The noisiest religious members of this force are Muslims--almost all other religions have found ways to share the spirit of the season. The rest of anti-Christmas forces belong to a large group huddled under the umbrella of “political correctness” and “multiculturalism.” A few claim that they are supporters of the Constitution of the United States; and, to be correct, there is a smaller subgroup of this subgroup legitimately seeking to uphold the legitimate Constitutional separation of religion and state. However, most of the anti-Christmas crowd use legal lingo as a subterfuge to disguise their real intent.
Very many people sense that there is something very wrong in this war on Christmas. What is wrong seems to belong to a much bigger war against American values, and possibly even against America itself. Christians protest the most, and they are right. However, the issue befuddles most people because it exists as a typical, contemporary, and opaque intellectual “package deal” of issues nested out of sight within issues, like a set of Russian nesting dolls. American education has very effectively disarmed Americans intellectually to the point that they are unable to tease out the issues. The resulting confusion and fog obscure an underlying colossal evil. This evil is actually what people sense, and this evil makes the war on Christmas far bigger than a war on Christianity, or even religion itself. It is at least as big as America and the West.
Let us locate and identify this evil. To do so, we must first separate the layers of “combatants” and what they are fight for and against.
We begin with the hardcore Christian faction, which sees Christmas solely as the celebration of Jesus’ birthday, as a solely Christian opportunity not for personal joy unless it is directed toward gratitude that Jesus was born. They decry the glitz, glitter, and “materialism,” because these take away from selfless spirituality and communion with God.
A much larger and more moderate Christian subgroup makes room both for Christ and Caesar, so to speak, to enable all of them to enjoy most things about Christmas. Those in this large group range from the actively religious all the way to the passively religious.
The last group consists of those who belong to other religions such as Judaism and Hinduism and atheists. All enjoy Christmas for non-Christian reasons.
The anti-Christmas crowd’s most obvious subgroup consists of people who participate in Christmas but are totally caught up conforming to “political correctness” and “multiculturalism.” Some may be religious to some extent; some are secular. All are trendy. They are a herd, one which follows the mores-of-the-moment, and “political correctness” and “multiculturalism” are the mores prevailing in our culture.
“Political correctness” and “multiculturalism” mean to this first subset that they must contort themselves severely and constantly to avoid offending a “someone” who “might possibly be offended” by “anything” suggesting religion in Christmas decorations, songs, and rituals. They never see their own absurdity. In fact, they feel like morally superior angels carrying out this “brother-love.” They remove Christmas from schools, from textual materials, and from being mentioned in classes and groups. They take away decorated trees because such trees are almost always called “Christmas trees.” These people mimic those loyal Germans who went about carrying out the practices of Nazism in ordinary life in Nazi Germany. These Germans and these politically correct trendies are just “doing their duty.” It is frightening to see the awful similarity.
These trendies think along the line of “Suppose some Muslim sees or hears or reads anything related to Christmas, which is, after all, indubitably Christianity, and interprets this as an offense to Islam?” Talk about compartmentalizing thinking! They worry about not offending Muslims but fail themselves to be offended by jihad and by an entire religion which wants to enslave or murder them. They fail as well to recognize that Muslims make no effort to “respect” Christians, Jews, or anyone else who is not Muslim. These trendies are the “useful idiots” of the really evil crowd.
Underneath the trendies lurk the nihilists, conveniently obscured by all of the concern with political correctness and multiculturalism. These are the people who pushed political correctness onto the cultural stage and made it popular—a fact that few people recognize. Why did they create political correctness and multiculturalism? To understand fully, you must read David Horowitz’s new book Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left. And, if you want to understand the root issues and the fundamental causes, read Leonard Peikoff’s book Ominous Parallels. Both are reviewed on 6th Column Against Jihad. It is this nihilism that is the great evil lurking behind the skirts of the war on Christmas.
Not everyone who hates something is a nihilist, and it is important to recognize that fact. Yes, there are people who hate Christmas, and there are people who hate Christians. These are haters of specific values and valuers. Most of these just hate enough aspects of the Christmas season to merit the epithet of “Grinches,” these days.
Value-hating, left uncorrected, spreads. Eventually it devolves into nihilism. What separates nihilists from routine haters and Grinches is that they hate the concepts of values and the virtue of valuing. That, after all, is the literal meaning of nihilism. Particularly, nihilists hate the good for being good, and they tear down values wherever they may be found.
Nihilism is what unites the American Left and the jihadists these days. Both hate America and want to destroy it. By hating America, they hate anything of value within it and all things that can be construed to represent America. They attack Christmas relentlessly because Christmas is THE “value and valuing season.” Nothing else like it occurs at any time the rest of an entire year.
[This article concludes tomorrow on this site.]
We find the “usual suspects”: Those FOR CHRISTMAS versus those AGAINST CHRISTMAS. Each is fighting for dominance. For those who love Christmas, the fight is to preserve and protect all aspects of the season. Anti-Christmas forces want all manifestations of Christmas removed from schools, public and private institutions, and buildings, displays, broadcasting media, and, you name it.
Most, but not all, pro-Christmas forces are Christians, and they quite naturally envision Christmas as the property of Christianity. Their numbers are so great that what other pro-Christmas forces have to say too often goes unheard. Because of the numbers and their annual polemics, most people concede that Christmas belongs solely to the Christians. I do not concede that point, however.
Anti-Christmas forces appear to be diverse, but they unite about one central moral evil (which we will discuss later in this article). The noisiest religious members of this force are Muslims--almost all other religions have found ways to share the spirit of the season. The rest of anti-Christmas forces belong to a large group huddled under the umbrella of “political correctness” and “multiculturalism.” A few claim that they are supporters of the Constitution of the United States; and, to be correct, there is a smaller subgroup of this subgroup legitimately seeking to uphold the legitimate Constitutional separation of religion and state. However, most of the anti-Christmas crowd use legal lingo as a subterfuge to disguise their real intent.
Very many people sense that there is something very wrong in this war on Christmas. What is wrong seems to belong to a much bigger war against American values, and possibly even against America itself. Christians protest the most, and they are right. However, the issue befuddles most people because it exists as a typical, contemporary, and opaque intellectual “package deal” of issues nested out of sight within issues, like a set of Russian nesting dolls. American education has very effectively disarmed Americans intellectually to the point that they are unable to tease out the issues. The resulting confusion and fog obscure an underlying colossal evil. This evil is actually what people sense, and this evil makes the war on Christmas far bigger than a war on Christianity, or even religion itself. It is at least as big as America and the West.
Let us locate and identify this evil. To do so, we must first separate the layers of “combatants” and what they are fight for and against.
We begin with the hardcore Christian faction, which sees Christmas solely as the celebration of Jesus’ birthday, as a solely Christian opportunity not for personal joy unless it is directed toward gratitude that Jesus was born. They decry the glitz, glitter, and “materialism,” because these take away from selfless spirituality and communion with God.
A much larger and more moderate Christian subgroup makes room both for Christ and Caesar, so to speak, to enable all of them to enjoy most things about Christmas. Those in this large group range from the actively religious all the way to the passively religious.
The last group consists of those who belong to other religions such as Judaism and Hinduism and atheists. All enjoy Christmas for non-Christian reasons.
The anti-Christmas crowd’s most obvious subgroup consists of people who participate in Christmas but are totally caught up conforming to “political correctness” and “multiculturalism.” Some may be religious to some extent; some are secular. All are trendy. They are a herd, one which follows the mores-of-the-moment, and “political correctness” and “multiculturalism” are the mores prevailing in our culture.
“Political correctness” and “multiculturalism” mean to this first subset that they must contort themselves severely and constantly to avoid offending a “someone” who “might possibly be offended” by “anything” suggesting religion in Christmas decorations, songs, and rituals. They never see their own absurdity. In fact, they feel like morally superior angels carrying out this “brother-love.” They remove Christmas from schools, from textual materials, and from being mentioned in classes and groups. They take away decorated trees because such trees are almost always called “Christmas trees.” These people mimic those loyal Germans who went about carrying out the practices of Nazism in ordinary life in Nazi Germany. These Germans and these politically correct trendies are just “doing their duty.” It is frightening to see the awful similarity.
These trendies think along the line of “Suppose some Muslim sees or hears or reads anything related to Christmas, which is, after all, indubitably Christianity, and interprets this as an offense to Islam?” Talk about compartmentalizing thinking! They worry about not offending Muslims but fail themselves to be offended by jihad and by an entire religion which wants to enslave or murder them. They fail as well to recognize that Muslims make no effort to “respect” Christians, Jews, or anyone else who is not Muslim. These trendies are the “useful idiots” of the really evil crowd.
Underneath the trendies lurk the nihilists, conveniently obscured by all of the concern with political correctness and multiculturalism. These are the people who pushed political correctness onto the cultural stage and made it popular—a fact that few people recognize. Why did they create political correctness and multiculturalism? To understand fully, you must read David Horowitz’s new book Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left. And, if you want to understand the root issues and the fundamental causes, read Leonard Peikoff’s book Ominous Parallels. Both are reviewed on 6th Column Against Jihad. It is this nihilism that is the great evil lurking behind the skirts of the war on Christmas.
Not everyone who hates something is a nihilist, and it is important to recognize that fact. Yes, there are people who hate Christmas, and there are people who hate Christians. These are haters of specific values and valuers. Most of these just hate enough aspects of the Christmas season to merit the epithet of “Grinches,” these days.
Value-hating, left uncorrected, spreads. Eventually it devolves into nihilism. What separates nihilists from routine haters and Grinches is that they hate the concepts of values and the virtue of valuing. That, after all, is the literal meaning of nihilism. Particularly, nihilists hate the good for being good, and they tear down values wherever they may be found.
Nihilism is what unites the American Left and the jihadists these days. Both hate America and want to destroy it. By hating America, they hate anything of value within it and all things that can be construed to represent America. They attack Christmas relentlessly because Christmas is THE “value and valuing season.” Nothing else like it occurs at any time the rest of an entire year.
[This article concludes tomorrow on this site.]
posted by George Mason @ 12/22/2004 07:02:00 AM
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