So, This is Christmas?

FOX talking head John Gibson says that liberals hate Christmas. Is it even worth taking the bait?

By Ben Adler, Campus Progress
Tuesday November 1, 2005

Progressives should lay off Christmas. So says TV news talking head John Gibson in his new book The War on Christmas: How the Liberal Plot to Ban the Sacred Christian Holiday Is Worse Than You Thought, and pragmatic progressives who read his book must reluctantly conclude that he may be right.

Not that his underlying analysis is right, mind you. Gibson works himself up into lather over purely symbolic gestures by school districts across the country. How dare they ask children not to promote their church’s Christmas pageant?! They have some nerve to wish their students “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas!” Harumph.

Each chapter in this thin book details some brouhaha in a small, usually Midwestern, town stemming from a decision handed down by the local government or school board requiring the removal of some Christmas imagery from the public sphere. For example, Indiana State Law School took down a Christmas tree from its lobby in December 2003, because a few students found its sectarian nature offensive. Or, he cites a New Jersey school that banned the playing of instrumental versions of Christmas carols.

Is Gibson, like his fellow traveler Bill O’Reilly, justified in getting so incensed over these minutiae? Of course not. Christians are still free to practice Christmas as they see fit outside of public buildings. There’s abundant evidence that they continue to do so, undeterred by over-zealous progressives. Making religious minorities feel comfortable by removing favoritism towards the dominant religion is a laudable goal—one that, in principle, any faithful adherent to the constitution, progressive or conservative, ought to advocate more, not less, of. Still, while we might wonder why conservatives get so angry about a Christmas tree being taken down, we need to ask ourselves whether it is worth our energy to get angry about it being put up in the first place.

The backlash is almost invariably ferocious. In some ways, the moral of Gibson’s stories is not what he intends it to be. He wants his reader to freak out over the prospect that, in a fit of anti-Christian venom, those crazy liberals may come after the Christmas tree in his daughter’s elementary school. But instead, every story Gibson tells involves a screaming angry backlash in response to these initial “anti-Christmas” overtures that often results in even more overt displays of Christian faith during Christmastime than would have originally been present. Gibson leads with the case of Mustang, OK, where the school superintendent ordered a nativity scene cut from the school Christmas pageant. According to Gibson:

Superintendent Springer got over two thousand emails. The phone switchboard at the school district offices were flooded with protest calls. Springer was ridiculed and pilloried in the media nationwide, as talk radio picked up the story and spent days and days debating whether Karl Springer was Satan himself, or just one of his misbegotten sons….

Protestors even surrounded the school district offices carrying signs that read ‘No Christmas, No Christ, Know Christmas, Know Christ.’

This begs the question: why does Gibson even think this rabble rousing book is necessary? The answer is politics, not the grinch. This sort of symbolic wedge issue keeps the conservative coalition together. While actually banning abortion or gay marriage may come at a cost to conservatives in their upper-class socially moderate wing, these populist cause celebres, (think Terri Schiavo) keep the base riled with a wink and a nod to the conservative elite that when it comes time to pass legislation, saving Christmas takes a back seat to cutting the capital gains tax.

If you’re a progressive, tales of the backlash raise a different question for you: are these protests over Christmas ornaments and greetings in public buildings actually counter-productive to our goal of keeping a firm wall between Church and State if they provoke an even more overtly religious response? And even when they are ultimately successful, are they worth the political cost?

Political reality must sometimes trump principle. The theoretical injustices that school boards and the like tried to rectify by intervening in Christmas celebrations that Gibson details are relatively minor (e.g. religious minorities in Plano, Texas may feel marginalized by the local school board referring to the winter school break as “Christmas break”). The political fallout from them, however, is huge. Bill O’Reilly ran a daily segment last December on “Christmas Under Siege,” and now John Gibson wrote this pompous book. He is currently urging his viewers to contact him with any information regarding an attack on Christmas in their community and the book’s acknowledgments include “Scott Norvel of Fox News, who also runs TongueTied, a Web site that tracks the annual parade of Christmas outrages.” (Surely Mr. Gibson means anti-Christmas outrages, but you get the idea).

It might be easy to laugh off the benefits that accrue to these buffoons, but they are accomplishing something much more nefarious. These books and television programs are stoking the righteous anger of the social conservatives. As detailed by Thomas Frank in the perennial favorite book What’s the Matter with Kansas, these voters could theoretically vote progressive, if they focused on economic rather than cultural issues. But their fear of being “persecuted” as Christians is a powerful emotion that can lead to irrational wrath at secular progressives and the godforsaken American Civil Liberties Union.

That’s a wrath I’m willing to live with and fight against, if the cause is not only good in the abstract but important in the real world. A woman’s right to choose fits that description. So does stem cell research and equal rights for gays. Changing the name of Christmas break to Winter break does not. Progressives cannot afford to give the propagandists of false populism more cannon fodder than they already have. Our political capital is too precious. Sometimes laughter really is the best remedy.

Discuss this article, Gibson’s book, and the role of progressives in the debate on our blog.

 
Illustration: Matt Bors