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The True Spirit of Xmas
How 4/5 of the country became an oppressed minority

It's a Christmas tradition as venerable as mistletoe and caroling: As the days grow shorter, conservative activists claiming to speak for American Christendom raise their voices, not for a rousing round of "Good King Wenceslaus," but to complain that the roughly 75 to 80 percent of Americans who profess allegiance to some denomination or another of Christianity constitute a cruelly oppressed minority. ...

... While unusually visible this year, the panic over a War on Christmas is part of a more general persecution complex shared by some conservative Christians, which seems at least as strange as the minority-party style rage evidenced at this summer's Republican National Convention by people who now control every branch of government. While Catholic League honcho William Donohue targeted an old favorite when he complained on MSNBC that "Hollywood is controlled by secular Jews who hate Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular," the favored villain these days appears to be secularism itself—particularly odd in the context of the Christmas issue, since most of those other "happy holidays" are also religious....

...In order to pull off the sort of grab at victim status conservatives used to deride as a tactic of the left, self-appointed defenders of the faith draw from a cornucopia of bogus anecdotes about oppression. A conservative cause celebre was born when Reuters ran a story under the headline "Declaration of Independence Banned at Calif School" about a teacher forbidden to use that document in classes on the grounds that it mentioned God. It sounds outrageous...and would be, if it were remotely true. It is, of course, not true: The Declaration appears in the school's standard textbooks and hangs on classroom walls. The school's principal, rather, insisted on pre-approving the handouts of a single teacher who had long generated complaints from parents because he was using his American History lessons as a pretext from indoctrination—a teacher who, as one student put it, "talks about Jesus 100 times a day." Judging by this Easter assignment and various other handouts, including fabricated quotations from Founding Fathers on the topic of religion, the concern was well motivated. ...

...Sometimes, of course, there's a straightforward and cynical explanation of persecution mania. During initial coverage of the murder of Matthew Shepard, widely regarded as an anti-gay hate crime, Today anchor Katie Couric asked a guest to comment on the hypothesis, advanced by some gay activists, that the anti-gay rhetoric of groups like Focus on the Family and the Christian Coalition may have helped to create an atmosphere in which such attacks were more likely. In the wake of recent reporting questioning whether homophobia was the real motive for the murder, Focus on the Family president Don Hodel demanded an apology, seeing Couric's question as evidence of her "anti-Christian agenda." The point of this rhetorical sleight-of-hand is transparent enough: Complaining that your group and your actions have been attacked wins less sympathy and fewer allies than declaring that our shared identity is under assault....

... So are we really seeing an unprecedented wave of hostility toward either Christmas or Christianity? Or is it, rather, that the waning of the cultural hegemony to which some Christians have come to feel entitled is perceived as an attack? Many of the most loudly trumpeted complaints in this vein are, after all, complaints about the absence of special treatment: no special spot for the Ten Commandments in the courthouse rotunda; no pride of place for Christmas among those happy winter holidays; no exceptions for the Christian charity.

Since "special rights" has been a term of aspersion among conservatives for decades, would-be theocrats have at least the decency to be too ashamed to demand them explicitly. Instead, they've learned the power of the victim narrative, of framing the debate to cast themselves as underdogs. Rather than attempting to entrench their values, demagogues purport to be playing defense against a plot to "purge religion from the public square," trading on the same ambiguity in the word "public" that has eased the acceptance of ever more regulation of privately owned establishments that are open to the public, and allowed for the metastasis of the term "public health," which now apparently covers not just infectious disease control or mosquito abatement, but smoking and obesity. Since the battle is a reactive one against the undifferentiated forces of anti-Christian bigotry, such nice distinctions as that between a business that fails to cater to its customers and an arm of the state adhering to strict neutrality can be dispensed with. More importantly, moderate Christians with no desire to impose their faith on others might be convinced to support a re-Christianization of public life on the premise that they'd only be defending themselves against marauding secularists.

The stratagem is so perverse as to be almost admirable: Take a holiday associated with sentiments like peace and goodwill, mix in some well-intentioned attempts to acknowledge it in an inclusive way suited to a pluralistic society, and then use the combination to generate fear, divisiveness, and high ratings. But whether we're impressed or appalled by that cynical ploy, whether we're gearing up for Christmas dinner or just a post-Ramadan pig-out, we can all breathe a little easier knowing that the anti-Christmas "jihad" is no more real (sorry kids) than Santa Claus. Happy holidays.