The “War” on Christmas? It’s the Diversity, Stupid!

I actually pay very little attention to the paranoid rants of celebrities like Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh or James Dobson’s Focus on the Family.  Enough of their more inflammatory comments bubble up to me through the news sources I actually trust for me to understand what they are: demagogues who stand in a century-long tradition of insecure losers, bigots and weirdos who made a good living stoking popular suspicion or hatred of ethnic, religious and political minorities. Before Fox’s professional bully Bill O’Reilly railed on TV about the threat posed by atheists and Communists (not to mention Jews and “money changers” on Wall Street) there was Henry Ford, or Father Coughlin, the Roman Catholic priest who single handedly invented hate radio. Before Focus on the Family grabbed the spotlight by scare mongering about godless liberals who wanted to eviscerate Christmas, there was the John Birch Society and Senator Joe McCarthy in the 1950s grabbing headlines by railing about Reds and “godless UN” supporters who wanted to do the same thing.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I swung by the EOT blog this morning to find yet another salvo in the one sided “War on Christmas.” Where do I start? First my bona fides: I was born and raised Catholic, married a Jewish woman then later converted to Judaism in my late 20s. I now head up a lovely and entirely Jewish family in a diverse but overwhelmingly Christian town outside of Boston.  I don’t think this gives me extra authority on this “War on Christmas” thing. It does allow me to write from the perspective of someone who spent the first quarter century of his life as part of a religious majority, only to become part of what the War on Christmas folks like to point out is a tiny religious minority in this country — albeit one with an unbroken, 3,000 year old religious tradition that has produced an astoundingly disproportionate number of the world’s great writers, artists, musicians, scientists and religious and political philosophers, including 180 Nobel Prize winners and one Jesus of Nazareth. But I digress.

Next, let’s talk about the practical reality of holiday wishes. Here’s how it works: if you’re a Christian and you’re greeting a friend or family member or acquaintance who is also Christian, then you say “Merry Christmas!” and they respond in kind. Similarly, I greet the folks down at my Temple with a hearty “Happy Hanukkah!” or “Chag Sameach” (Hebrew for…wait for it… “Happy Holiday!”) In contexts where you don’t know what tradition people are coming from, you modulate. Happy Hanukkah is a safe bet at Shul, but I’d hardly greet the ladies at Starbucks that way, because I have no way of knowing whether they celebrate my holiday or not. Just rolling along and assuming they do is boorish. “Happy Holidays,” I’ve noticed, brings a smile to their face every time. We humans are amazingly social beings and modulate ourselves this way thousands of times every day to maintain social harmony. Its really rooted deep down in our natures.

Happy Hanukkah, everyone!

Which brings me to the thesis, which I state without any hesitation or doubt: O’Reilly and Dobson’s “War on Christmas”  is a steaming pile of holiday bulls**t with a Christmas bow on top. Yes, Virginia, there is no War on Santa – organized or otherwise. Nor are religious minorities clamoring to own a piece of American’s holiday cheer real estate.

What religious and ethnic minorities in this country (including the burgeoning category of non-believers) do want is what they’ve always wanted: the freedom to practice their faith (or lack thereof) free from persecution, whether at the hands of the government or of some tyrannical majority. Government sanctioned religious persecution is, after all, one of the things that drove immigrants to these shores in the first place. They included my Irish Catholic ancestors and  my wife’s grandparents on both sides of her family. Her paternal grandfather, a Jewish tailor from Lithuania was smart enough to look around him and realized that the Jim Dobson’s and Bill O’Reilly’s of the day had created a system of laws and cultural practices in which Jews could never get ahead. Period. He came to Boston with nothing in his pocket at the age of 30, saved up his money to bring his bride over from Vilna and then operated his own tailor shop in a small town west of Boston for more than five decades. Mending others clothes, he raised two Ivy-League educated doctors and a registered nurse. I don’t know whether he wished his customers a hearty “Merry Christmas” during the holiday season– I doubt he did. I also doubt the good townspeople would  have been arrogant enough to demand it of him. Those were different times.

I say this because, in the end, what I read behind in O’Reilly and Dobson is a  thinly veiled argument for intolerance – religious, social and cultural. We live in a “democratic society and culture”  the argument goes, and in democracies the majority rules.  ”Equal time” for non Christian practice is, therefore, inherently “undemocratic.” This is the kind of cereal box civics lesson that O’Reilly and crew favor and, even on the face of it, its bogus. Even if this conversation were about the law, we live in a country in which laws are rooted in our civil Constitution — a document that goes out of its way to not talk about religion and guarantees equal rights to every citizen, whether they’re members of the majority or a minority. Those rights  trump the will of the majority and there are countless examples from our own history where the basic rights of a tiny minority are enforced to the great consternation of the majority. Can you say “Little Rock Nine?” I can.

But whether you say “Merry Christmas” or “Happy Holidays” isn’t about law, its about social customs – even if O’Reilly and others would like to see cultural conformity legislated in some way. (They would.) I think what folks in the “War on Christmas” camp may be reacting to is a broad consensus that has developed in the last couple decades that the U.S. is  a diverse place and that’s not a bad thing.  In fact, our diversity as a nation is something worth celebrating, not lamenting. Its a source of our strength as a nation. The problem is, celebrating diversity means not sweeping difference under the rug, as may have happened in the past. It also means treating people who are different than you as equals, not inferiors. This is America as a tapestry rather than America as a  ”melting pot,” and not everyone likes a tapestries. Not everyone likes the idea that being American isn’t synonymous with being, looking, acting and believing just like them.

Fortunately, America is better than this.  Just as an example: when I and my wife were growing up, we were required to sing Christmas carols in school each year. Being Christian at the time, I didn’t think twice about having to sing praises to the baby Jesus in public school. Needless to say, it was a different experience for my wife, who was raised Jewish.

These days , our kids sing lovely holiday songs in school, just ones that aren’t overtly religious. In electives like my daughter’s town wide chorus, melodies from various traditions are just part of the cannon. I attended a holiday performance two weeks ago that my daughter performed in that included Christmas carols, secular holiday songs, the Hanukkah classic Sevivon and African folk melodies. Everyone enjoyed it.

Now some might argue that all this is bad – evidence of political correctness watering down what’s truly “American.”  The subtext to that kind of argument, of course, is that these traditions aren’t equal to each other — that the tradition with the most adherents, numerically, is the superior tradition. Sevivon, by this logic, isn’t a gorgeous song that’s just as worthy of performance as any Christmas carol– its the beneficiary of a kind of cultural affirmative action. “Sorry, Sevivon, you’re just here ’cause you’re Jewish.” But my town didn’t cop out by including a Hanukkah song. What it did was grow:  broadening its definition of itself to include amazing songs that happen to be from  non-Christian traditions. The concert that resulted was enhanced, not diminished by its diversity, just like our society is.

Frankly, I take comfort that  its easier today for my daughters and other minorities to look around them and see difference embraced in both popular culture and the engines of state — whether that’s Barack Obama’s brown face behind the Presidential Podium, or the new Rebecca Rubin American Girl doll, or gay and lesbian couples marrying and living openly and happily in the places where my children live and go to school. My girls are more free to practice their faith openly and be who they are — who G_d made them to be — without recriminations or discrimination than at almost any other time in our country’s history. Now that’s a holiday blessing.

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Tags: American Girl Doll, Bill O'Reilly, Focus on the Family, Fox News, Hanukkah, James Dobson, John Birch Society, Rebecca Rubin, War on Christmas