The Myth of the War on Christmas

The War on Christmas is a myth. The whole problem that conservatives have with saying “Happy Holidays!” is that they don’t realize that it’s no different from saying “Season’s Greetings!” or that some people just want to welcome the festive spirit of winter holidays in general. So how did we get here? Why do conservatives get outraged at greetings like “Happy Holidays!” when it’s a normal practice? Where did the idea of a war on Christmas come from in the first place?

To start, enter Bill O’Reilly. He is a former Fox News host who once ran a conservative talk show known as The O’Reilly Factor. On that talk show, O’Reilly did a segment here (Sorry! I couldn’t find the original broadcast, so you’ll just have to check out the written version of the segment) where he essentially complained that a Christmas parade in Denver chose not to have religious floats in its parade, and then he framed the absence of religious symbolism in the parade specifically as well as in Christmas displays in general as an attack on Judeo-Christian values. In short, the core idea behind a war being waged against Christmas is a fear-mongering narrative that claims secular humanists aim to forbid Christians from practicing Christianity just because secular humanists don’t feel that Christianity is important in the same way that Christians do. It is a classic case of having a persecution complex.

“What is a persecution complex?” you may ask. It’s basically a delusion where one believes oneself to be under attack when no one is actually trying to take away their rights in any way. Downplaying the visibility of Christianity isn’t the same thing as banning people from practicing it, so conflating the two together as the same thing would be having a persecution complex because no one is actually being penalized merely for celebrating a Christian holiday.

A real case of persecution being perpetrated against Christians would be the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and Syria proclaiming an Islamic caliphate and imposing an actual ban against any expression of Christianity by rolling out tanks and foot soldiers on the ground to enforce the rule of their authoritarian regime, so claiming that secular humanists are guilty of persecuting Christians in the same way that radical Islamists are guilty of persecuting Christians is an insult to Christians who are actual victims of persecution.

Feel free to leave a comment underneath this blog entry, and have a very merry Christmas!