It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas. There's snow on the ground, people are entombing themselves in layers of clothing, and everyone's favorite holiday specials are starting to appear all over the television map. The surest sign of the season, though, is that conservatives have worked themselves into a red-faced frenzy, defending Christmas against a massive liberal conspiracy aimed at undermining American traditions and destroying Christianity once and for all.
Or so they claim. Conservative Fox News pundit Bill O'Reilly calls the abolishment of Christmas a part of the "secular progressive agenda" and author and pundit John Gibson recently released a book entitled "The War on Christmas: How the Liberal Plot to Ban the Sacred Christian Holiday is Worse than you Thought." Conservative interest groups like Fidelis and the Committee for Justice have even begun running Internet and radio advertisements which claim that Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito will defend Christmas against scheming leftists.
Do liberals really hate Christmas? In order to accept the right's sob story as valid, one must rewrite American history and the very philosophy on which the United States was founded. Conservative Christmas crusaders claim that the liberal movement is actively trying to destroy America's religious and cultural foundations in order to implement its agenda. They are correct in saying that liberal groups oppose official sponsorship of religiously-themed Christmas events and images, such as public school Christmas pageants or town-square nativity scenes. But evidence for the claim that liberal opposition to Christmas strikes at the core of American tradition can be found only within the active conservative imagination.
Biblical scholars generally agree that Jesus was born not at the end of December, but rather during a warmer season when shepherds would have been more likely to be grazing flocks. The date of the modern-day celebration of the birth of Jesus is thus not religious at all. Following the adoption of Christianity by the Romans, Pope Julius I chose the date Dec. 25 so that Christmas would coincide with the ancient festival of Saturnalia. His goal was to make the holiday as popular as possible. Clearly then, the cultural celebration of a winter holiday preceded and was appropriated by the religious component.
For the very reason that Christmas remained more a cultural festival than a religious observance, it was largely rejected in colonial America and especially in the post-revolutionary period. Puritans did not celebrate the holiday at all, and it was banned in Massachusetts from 1659 to 1681. After the American Revolution, Christmas, which was associated with English traditions, was not widely celebrated. Throughout the middle of the 19th century Christian denominations which are now considered mainstream, such as Presbyterians, Methodists and Baptists, did not hold services on Christmas because they did not recognize it as a religious holiday.
While the emphasis on the religious aspect of Christmas over the cultural aspect is a relatively new phenomenon, opposition to publicly sanctioned religious celebrations of Christmas is not. Throughout the 20th century, educators and advocates of religious minorities acted to block overtly religious celebrations of Christmas from entering the public sphere.
Instead of acknowledging the long secular history of the holiday season, conservatives have invented a history which paints Christians as a group under attack by a newly powerful liberal movement to secularize society. In addition to a creative interpretation of world and American history, the rage generated by conservatives at the thought of Christianity rejected from the public sphere requires that America's founding principles be stood on their heads. The first European Americans emigrated to free themselves of the yoke of state-sponsored religion and the tyranny of the majority. The Constitutional framers recognized that minorities were vulnerable in democracy, and they constructed institutional safeguards in response. Now, though, cultural conservatives insist that the right of the majority to have its views sanctioned by the government trumps the principles of official religious neutrality and minority protection.
Though the war in defense of Christmas is a completely delusional campaign in defense of nonexistent traditions, it should not be surprising that it has arisen within the contemporary political and cultural climate. Republicans have spent the past 15 years fulfilling Barry Goldwater's dream of politics as culture war. They were monumentally successful in the 1994 congressional elections because they presented themselves as a rebellious minority reining in a majority run roughshod over traditional America. Conservatives have worn the mantle of persecuted minority ever since, even though they now control not only corporate America but every branch of government and much of the media. Screaming that Christmas is under attack is simply a continuation of this charade.
