Kevin Drum has a post up at the Washington Monthly about the new meme going around to the effect that saying "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas" is some sort of anti-Christian conspiracy. I wrote about it a few days ago with Pat Buchanan's inane blustering about it. He quotes a religious rightie from North Carolina saying that Christians are undergoing "apartheid" just like the blacks did in South Africa, and Drum says:
Apartheid in reverse! Hell, why not just compare the plight of besieged, persecuted Christians in America to the Holocaust and be done with it?But that's not what bugs me. I guess I'm used to the bizarre persecution complex of the American Christian right. No, what I want to know is this: how do they spread these memes so damn fast? I mean, liberals are just barely starting to get a smidgen of attention for the proposition that Social Security isn't really in serious trouble -- a meme that has the advantage of actually being true -- while the "Happy Holidays" vs. "Merry Christmas" meme has exploded onto front pages around the country (and the world!) in a matter of days.
The obvious answer is that this new meme spread so fast because it piggybacks with a very old meme, the myth of Christian persecution. This has been drilled into the heads of believers in this country for a couple decades now, but that meme itself piggybacks on the basic Christian meme of persecution. In the gospels themselves, Christians are told to expect persecution, so this is one of the bedrock ideas of their faith. And if no real persecution is to be found, they can invent some rather easily.
The other part of it is financial, I think. The real hucksters of the religious right, the TV evangelists and political fundraisers, make their money by scaring their followers with tales of persecution and then posing as their savior (ironically). Pat Robertson wrote the playbook on this one and he's been up to it for years. When his legal group, the ACLJ, won a victory in the Lamb's Chapel case, I watched Jay Sekulow go on the 700 Club and blather on about how this was a great victory against the evil forces of the ACLU and other pagans, and Pat was going on and on about how his organization was standing up for God against the heathen civil libertarians, so you should send them money to keep up the fight. What they didn't bother to tell their followers was that the ACLU was actually on their side in that case and had filed a brief supporting them. So much for honesty. And sometimes Robertson gets into mid-blather about Christian persecuation and appears to lose his mind entirely. Like this statement made in an interview in 1993:
Just like what Nazi Germany did to the Jews, so liberal America is now doing to the evangelical Christians. It's no different. It is the same thing. It is happening all over again. It is the Democratic Congress, the liberal-based media and the homosexuals who want to destroy the Christians. Wholesale abuse and discrimination and the worst bigotry directed toward any group in America today. More terrible than anything suffered by any minority in history.
Uh, yeah Pat. They'll be throwing ya'll into ovens any day now. So you see, this meme is not new at all, it's been around for a long time. And it persists not because it's true but because it's a useful myth for bilking the masses for cash.
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And now GW Bush is in on it!
At today's news conference he opened it by saying "Happy Holidays!"
GWB is persecuting Christians!
LOL Keith. The pagans got to our Godly President!
Jesus (if the historical single personage actually existed) preached to an oppressed people in an occupied country, and for the first two and a half centuries his followers truly were persecuted. I grew up with it and I think it just helps people feel closer to their savior to feel that they too are persecuted. With everything else you have to buy into, why the hell not!
Merry Happy Ed!
What kind of logic says that you are the moral majority, that you are responsible for the HUGE MANDATE (?)now being enjoyed by Bush, and that the majority of Americans agree with your religious views, AND be the persecuted minority AT THE SAME TIME.
Do they, in their heart of hearts, believe that the gays, jews, unionists, intellectuals, and liberals have that much power? Do they care? Or is this really just about silencing every shred of dissent, every wisp of reason, every blip on the radar screen of critical thought that might create a ripple on the placid waters of their dogma?
What is so freaking scary about variety?
If not saying "Merry Christmas" is apartheid, imagine if someone, say, argued that Dec. 25th has no basis for being Jesus' birthday. Or questioning the historical basis for the character at all.
What kind of logic says that you are the moral majority, that you are responsible for the HUGE MANDATE (?)now being enjoyed by Bush, and that the majority of Americans agree with your religious views, AND be the persecuted minority AT THE SAME TIME.
That's an excellent point.
Contentment is the enemy of religion, or of any ideology, for that matter. If one is content, they may look upon other matters, placing their faith on the back burner. No religious or ideological leader wants that. A steady stream of fear amongst the faithful ensures a similar stream of emotional and - most importantly - monetary support.
Defending one's beliefs against a real or imagined "hostile world" is one of the surest methods of defining those beliefs. Attacking those who attempt to "de-Christianize" the holiday season, for example, helps reinforce their own Christian beliefs.
Throw in the above two paragraphs, and you got yourself the recipe for crusades, jihads, and whining about liberals/libertarians running the world and ruining it for God's children.
I don't know which philosophers I've inadvertently ripped off, or even if I'm right, but at four in the morning, it makes sense to me.
Reverend, you bring to mind a quote from a coffee table book titled "Entre Nous", about the long long border between Canada and the U.S. As near as I can remember..."There is little difference between Americans and Canadians. The only sure way to tell the difference is to point that out to a Canadian". As you say, until I experience what I am not, I cannot experience what I am.
The myth of Christian persecution is not just a couple of centuries old, but goes back to the very beginning of Christianity, when it was largely true, from the Crucifixion until the Battle of the Milvian Bridge in 310 CE. Since then, on balance, Christians have been more oppressing than oppressed. But even growing up in a mainstream, moderate, Protestant denomination (now the Evangelical Lutheran Church in American) in a whitebread, overwhelmingly Christian state (Minnesota) ca. 30 years ago, I heard an awful lot of sermons about how hard it was to be a real Christian. Mostly not about oppression, but about the predominance of materialistic values.
One might suggest that any religion that bases large parts of its doctrine on its God (or one of them) being savagely executed is fundamentally predisposed to a persecution complex that goes well beyond anything rationally justifiable.
Oh, and Merry Christmas! God bless us, everyone!