First, let me second Ross in thanking Andrew for the invite to play shopping-mall Santa surrogates to his blogospheric St. Nick. We’ll try not to leave footprints on the sofa.
Since The Christmas Wars—like most solstice festivals—are ultimately about cyclical renewal and resurrection, I have no real qualms about just reiterating what I said last year around this time: The overarching “War on Christmas” is a bogus narrative cobbled together from a smattering of half-true anecdotes because there are a few activists for whom it’s convenient that people more broadly share the “siege mentality” Ross talks about.
There’s an old Michael O’Donoghue column in which he suggests that (courtesy of Judy Garland) there’s a nefarious principle loose in American culture: “The person in the most pain wins.” The religious right seems to have learned that lesson well enough from the left; if you want to mobilize a relatively moderate population, it helps to convince them they’re under attack. So, hark, the herald pundits sing the advent of a nefarious secularist assault on people of faith, like clockwork, starting about a month before Christmas each year. (Though like storefront Christmas displays whose debut creeps closer to Halloween each year, it may be starting progressively earlier.) You’ll notice the same framing contest in battles over gay rights: Gay couples need to be painted as “flaunting” their sexuality, or being “in our face,” or otherwise acting as aggressors.
Let me suggest as a final point, though, that there may be a connection between “the real de-Christianization of Christmas” via “the frenetic pace of modern life, and the crassifying tendencies of commerce,” which bothers Ross, and an insistence on a faith-saturated public sphere. It is utterly mysterious to me when people of faith exult that some sectarian symbol—a Ten Commandments momument or an invocation of “one nation under God” in a schoolchild’s morning fealty oath—survives judicial scrutiny as mere “ceremonial deism.” Isn’t that precisely an acknowledgement that, by a kind of inverted transubstantiation, those symbols have been stripped of their meaning? The problem with pushing to embed your favored symbols in the mass culture is that you cede control of them to the mass culture—which I rather doubt is what the activists would want, on reflection. Forgive them; they know not what they do.
—posted by Julian
The Dish 