The Far Right's War on Christmas

It is Christmas Eve - not that it feels like it with today's 80 degree weather - and in the lead up to today and Christmas Day tomorrow we have heard much bloviating (and money begs) from the "godly folk" about liberals' and "secular humanists"war against Christmas.  These same folks will fill the pews either night or in the morning, consumed with self-congratulatory false piety while bearing hatred toward others.  Most will never have a thought about "peace on earth and good will to men" unless they coincidentally sing the phrase in a Christmas carol.  Meanwhile, many of us will opt to not join crowds in packed churches, yet we may likely give far more thought to the spirit of Christmas than the "godly folk" who seemingly are best defined by who they hate - which is virtually everyone who differs from they themselves in any way.  The parable of the Good Samaritan is a lost concept on them.  Two columns in today's Washington Post look at the members of the far right Christian crowd and their sycophants in the Republican Party who have done the most to make a mockery of Christmas and the Gospel message.  Here are excerpts from the first:

They were refugees, fleeing for their lives from one Middle Eastern country to the next. As Matthew tells the tale, Joseph, fearing that the government had marked his newborn son for death, gathered up his wife and child and stole away by night across the Judean border into Egypt. And just in time . . . . a king named Herod, who’d heard some kid would one day become a rival king — proceeded to slaughter every remaining child in Bethlehem under the age of 2. 

[I]t’s clear that the authors of the New Testament intended to recount (for the believers) or compose (for the nons) a story that echoed the Old Testament’s concern for strangers, foreigners and refugees (“The stranger among you shall be as one born among you,” says Leviticus, “and you shall love him as yourself”), that foreshadowed Jesus’ teachings to care for castaways and the least among us. . . 

Who’s really waging a war against Christmas in 2015? Secular multiculturalists who, stealthily and nefariously, have somehow rendered Starbucks’s coffee cups a tad less festive? Or the self-proclaimed culture warriors on behalf of traditional values, who demand we leave refugees — even small children, as New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) has made pitilessly clear — at the mercy of the latter-day Herods? Who condemn entire religions? Who fear and loathe strangers?

It’s been a banner year for fear and loathing, xenophobia and racism. What has made the year genuinely ominous is the emergence of fictions presented (often, but hardly exclusively, by Donald Trump) as facts that legitimize a sense of both grievance and hatred . . . 

Fed by talk radio, Fox News and paranoid websites, millions of our compatriots dwell in a parallel universe of alternative realities. My colleague Dana Milbank has noted that the fashion among conservatives is to dismiss hard facts that clash with their alternative realities as “politically correct.” 

Such right-wing fictions have always hovered on the fringes of the body politic, but what has enabled them to go more mainstream is the sense of displacement — from their previous position as a majority race, a thriving class, a dominant religion — that is now widespread among the white working class Trumpites and the evangelical Christians flocking to Ted Cruz’s banner. The mission of right-wing media and pols has been to exaggerate some of that displacement (the threat to white America), play down other parts of it (the evisceration of blue-collar living standards by corporate America) and lay the blame for it all on minorities, foreigners, liberals, feminists, gays — you know the list.  

Enmities, and most certainly not love, have become the core of the right’s appeal and message this year, not just in the United States but also across Europe. . . . They are most surely at odds with the spirit of Christmas. Walls on the border, religious tests for admission, despising the poor — good thing Joseph and Mary didn’t have to encounter our modern-day defenders of the right as they scrambled from one country to another, desperate to save their son’s life.

The second column picks up this theme.  Here are highlights:

This will not be the first or the last Christmas when the world mocks the day’s promise and when religion finds itself a source of violence, hatred and, among many not inclined toward either, a dangerous mutual incomprehension.

Killing in the name of God is not a new thing in history, and nothing does more to discredit faith.

[A]s Jonathan Sacks, the former chief rabbi in Britain , argues in his remarkable book “Not in God’s Name: Confronting Religious Violence,” believers must face the painful facts.  “Too often in the history of religion,” Sacks writes, “people have killed in the name of the God of life, waged war in the name of the God of peace, hated in the name of the God of love and practiced cruelty in the name of the God of compassion.” 

[R]eligion “is at its best when it relies on the strength of argument and example. It is at its worst when it seeks to impose truth by force.” And the strength of example must mean that those who preach religious peace and toleration should practice them. This is why the rank prejudice being shown against Muslims, usually for political reasons, is so destructive . . . .

[T]here is an important lesson in the Christmas story that, God willing, will be heard from many pulpits. “As we mull over the debate about refugees, let us remember the doors that were closed in the face of Mary and Joseph in Bethlehem,” O’Malley said. “We must ask our leaders to be vigilant and protect our citizens, but at the same time we cannot turn our back on so many innocent people who are hungry, homeless, and without a country.”

Eboo Patel, an American whose argument in his book “Acts of Faith” parallels the lessons from Rabbi Sacks and Cardinal O’Malley.  “To see the other side, to defend another people, not despite your tradition but because of it, is the heart of pluralism,” Patel writes. “We have to save each other. It’s the only way to save ourselves.” 

As noted, the husband and I will not be attending church services to mark Christmas.  But I like to believe that our support of various charities and our efforts to see justice and equality meted out equally to all is in keeping with the essence of the Gospel message.  To celebrate Christmas and Easter while patting one's self on the back even as the larger Gospel message is utterly ignored is the height of hypocrisy.  Indeed, it is akin to the behavior of the Pharisees who Christ reportedly roundly condemned.  Yet we see this hypocrisy and hatred towards others displayed daily by right wing "family values" organizations and Republicans prostituting themselves to the Christofascist. 

 

It’s Conservatives Who Want Christ Out of Christmas

Every year we hear the far right whining about the supposed "War on Christmas" as Christofascists seek to obliterate any respect or consideration of the millions of non-Christian Americans.  It is, as always the case with Christofascists, all about them and to Hell with everyone else.  Besides this selfish nastiness, these same "godly folk" push a political agenda that is the antithesis of the Gospel message that is best known for hate, intolerance and a desire to cast the poor and unfortunate onto the trash heap.  A column in The Daily Beast makes the case that it is the Christofascists who are really waging the war on Christmas.  Here are excerpts:

The War on Christmas is on! This epic battle pits the forces on the right who demand that we say “Merry Christmas” to everyone regardless of their faith—or lack thereof—against those who prefer to say “Happy Holidays.”

How fierce has this so-called “war” become? Well, Sarah Palin is travelling across the country alerting people that “angry atheists” want to “abort Christ from Christmas.” Palin is like a modern day Paul Revere—you know, the guy Palin told us warned the British in 1775 that the British were about to attack the colonists.

Bill O’Reilly, the “Father Christmas” of the War on Christmas, recently clamored that there are dastardly people who want to, “banish any mention of Jesus in the public square.”

But here’s the glaring hypocrisy of the right: they want to keep “Christ in Christmas,” but they don’t want to keep Christ’s teachings in the policies they advocate. It’s as if there are two Jesus Christs.  There’s the one in the Bible who advocates helping people in need, especially the poor. And then there’s the Jesus that conservatives worship, whose philosophy is to callously slash programs that help the less fortunate, from food stamps to health insurance to unemployment benefits.

I’m not a religious scholar, but it doesn’t take a Ph.D. in religious studies to comprehend the basic teachings of Jesus. The New Testament is filled with passages where Jesus implores his followers to care for the poor.
[T]he same people who demand that we keep Christ in Christmas also support cutting programs advance Jesus’s philosophy. We saw that in September when House Republicans voted to slash $40 billion from the food stamps program. If this had become law, it would’ve result in nearly four million Americans being deprived of these desperately needed benefits. So much for the, “I was hungry and you gave me food.”

Despite Jesus words, “I was sick and you took care of me,” conservatives have waged a war to destroy Obamacare which would provide health insurance to millions of Americans who can’t afford coverage. In fact, 20 States with Republican governors and Republican-controlled legislatures have refused to expand Medicaid under Obamacare, making it more challenging if not impossible for the impoverished residents of these States to afford health insurance coverage.

And what would Jesus do about the 1.3 million Americans whose unemployment benefits will end just a few days after Christmas? Well, conservatives apparently believe Jesus would say “no” to any extension. Indeed, Rep. Kevin Cramer recently cited this passage from the Bible as a reason to slash benefits for the poor: “If anyone is not willing to work, let him not eat.”

And not only is supporting these social programs consistent with Jesus’ philosophy, they are good public policy.

We rarely hear about the poor in our nation unless they are being demonized by the right as “lazy” or abusing the system. America’s needy are invisible to most of us- including the 16 million children in this country who live in poverty.

Yet the focus of the right’s outrage is when a public school chooses to sing non-religious Christmas songs and opts for more secular ones. Or when a huge nativity scene can’t be constructed on government property. Why isn’t their outrage directed at those who support policies that cause suffering to our most needy fellow Americans? These are the actions that truly contradict Jesus’s teachings.

Those leading the fight to keep Christ in Christmas need to answer this simple question. What do you think Jesus would care about more: feeding the hungry and caring for the sick or requiring that all Americans say “Merry Christmas” instead of “Happy Holidays”? The answer is clear to anyone who has ever read the Bible.

Well said.  The hypocrisy of the godly folk is truly mind numbing and I suspect Christ - if he existed - would be horrified by what is done by his most vocal supposed followers.  The Pharisees were wonderful people compared to today's "godly Christians."

Looking At the Real History of December 25th and Christmas

It is December and while the holiday season can offer time with family, friends and hopes for a better tomorrow, as is the norm, we also see the ugly efforts of the Christian Right to demonize retailers and others who fail to force all of their customers to engage in the Christmas story.  These "godly Christians" basically flip the middle finger to non-Christian Americans - and label as a foe those who "censor" Christmas.  Three years ago I did a post that looked at the phenomenon and as the onslaught of the far right once again ensues, it is forth while remembering the real history of how today's Christmas story - myth if you will - came to be.  It is very different from what one hears coming from America's pulpits.  As Bob Felton at Civil Commotion noted in 2009, not only are such "campaigns" to stop the "war on Christmas" insulting to non-Christian Americans, but they also ignore the historical fact that the present day date of Christmas was hijacked from pagan festivals, in particular celebrations to the middle eastern derived god, Mithras. Here are a few of Bob's comments:

* ‘Recognition’ includes exclusivity from retailers when greeting shoppers; those who say ’season’s greetings’ to the nation’s Jews, Hindus, Muslims, Bahai, agnostics, atheists, Wiccans … they are foes.

* The comical irony, of course, is the grotesque and garish dishonesty of it. Christianity stole the solstice from the Romans, who observed Saturnalia, who stole it from the Greeks, who stole it from the Egyptians, who stole it (probably) from Asia. The winter solstice has been the occasion for observances for at least 5000-years and, always, literally and metaphorically, the shortest day of the year has signified a sort of bottom and the promise of coming better times.

Not only was the date of December 25th commandeered from the pagan celebrations by Pope Julius I in the year 350, but the Mithras cult had other interesting parallels to the relatively new Christian faith (as did aspects of the cult of the Egyptian goddess, Isis). Here are some highlights from History 101:

* However there is another theory - regarding the worship of Mithras, an Indo-Aryan deity (the Mitra of Vedic religion, the Mithra of the Persian Avesta) associated with the heavens and light. His cult entered the Roman Empire in the first century BC and during the formative decades of the Christian movement was a formidable rival to the latter, with temples from Syria to Britain. Given his solar associations, it made sense to believe that he had been born on the darkest day of the year, the winter solstice. That falls this year on December 21 but the Romans celebrated the birth feast of Mithras on December 25, ordered to do so by Emperor Aurelian in 274 AD. Christian texts from 325 note that the birthday of Jesus had come to be observed on that same day, and the Roman Catholic Church has in modern times acknowledged that the December 25 Christmas quite likely derived from Mithraic practice.

* Mithras, the story went, had been born of a virgin. Virgin-birth stories were a denarius a dozen in the ancient world, so this similarity to the gospel story isn't surprising. But Mithras was also born in very humble circumstances in a cave, and upon his miraculous birth found himself in immediate proximity to the bovine. In his case, not mellow manger beasts but a wild bull. In the Persian version of the myth, this bull had been the first creation of Ahura Mazda, another, greater god of light. (Ahura Mazda, in the history of Persian religion, gradually becomes conceptualized as something like the Judeo-Christian God. But his worship in the Zoroastrian tradition probably predates the Jewish conception of Yahweh as universal deity. Quite likely the Zoroastrian conception of God influenced the Jewish one.)

* Mithras serving Ahura Mazda subdued the bull, confining it in the cave, and later slaughteed it. The blood of the slaughtered bull then generated vegetation and all life. This myth surely has something to do with cattle-worship among ancient Aryan peoples, which of course survives to this day in India. In Rome the Mithras cult involved such rituals as drenching the Mithras devotee in bull-blood, and having believers in secret ceremonies consume in the form of bread and wine the flesh and blood of the fabled slaughtered bull. A communion ceremony, if you will. Mithras died and was entombed, but rose from the dead. In some accounts, he does so on the third day.

Yet another source has this about Mithras:

 

Mithra was a Persian savior. Worship of Mithra became common throughout the Roman Empire, particularly among the Roman civil service and military. Mithraism was a competitor of Christianity until the 4th century. Their god was believed to have been born on DEC-25, circa 500 BCE. His birth was witnessed by shepherds and by gift-carrying Magi. This was celebrated as the “Dies Natalis Solic Invite,” The “Birthday of the Unconquered Sun.” Some followers believed that he was born of a virgin. During his life, he performed many miracles, cured many illnesses, and cast out devils. He celebrated a Last Supper with his 12 disciples. He ascended to heaven at the time of the spring equinox, about March 21. 

 

I believe that individuals are free to believe whatever they want about the Christmas holidays.  That does not mean that everyone else must be forced into submission.  The historic truth is that few Christians (or others) nowadays know of Mithras, but today much of the world unwittingly celebrates his birth.  The irony of the history challenged, egocentric morons of the Christian Right and professional Christian set is that they foolishly rely on an allegedly inerrant Bible that can be proven to be anything but inerrant. Moreover, they are in effect promoting a pagan holiday to which the early Roman Catholic Church added a veneer to further its own aggrandizement. It would be humorous but for the damage these Christofascists do to others in the process of their self-centered love affair with themselves.