There is a real war on Christmas, and
contrary to popular belief, it is not being waged by atheists or
secular groups against Christians, and neither is it being fought by
Christians who seem embarrassingly misinformed about the origins of
their winter holiday. Instead, the real war on Christmas comes
entirely from the command centers of the right-wing media empire,
most visibly including FOX News, and it is little more than a
political tool. Like all agendas of its kind, the war on Christmas is
just another piece in the propagandist puzzle used to keep the
right-wing voting base highly manipulable and highly motivated.
People take their religions very
seriously, of course, and this fact is well-known and easily
manipulated. When a perception of a threat is presented to values
like religious ones, values at the cores of people's belief systems,
there is a strong desire to defend those values. Tools like these are
a political propagandist's dreams. In the case of FOX News's “War
on Christmas,” now that the initial shock has worn down after
several years of repeated onslaught, this cowpile-scented
manufactured controversy has worn itself thin enough to see it for
exactly what it is. It is a successful attempt to keep socially
conservative Christians in the right-wing base on edge. The tool here is the perception of an attempt to undermine all of their core values. The purpose is to keep the Religious Right
motivated to fight with ideological fervor against the "liberals and
atheists" who are painted as trying to ruin Christmas.
Christmas is a perfect target for this
sort of “manufactroversy” too. The Christmas holiday season is
already arguably painfully protracted, as it absolutely dominates the
winter calendar in its gaping stretch from sometime before
Thanksgiving (or even Halloween) all the way through the first weeks
of January. This provides ample opportunity to work the propaganda
repeatedly and make its effects feel dire. Christmas is also
powerfully iconic, by far the most important and sentimental holiday
to a majority of Westerners. Additionally, it possesses obvious and tight
ties to religion, even if Christianity co-opted it to that purpose
from earlier Pagan festivals, so any threat to it is a threat to core
values.
The religious connection is particularly easy to play upon since Christians are
likely to have felt a growing sense that Christmas is under siege. Commercialization of the holiday has been taken so far as to make it hard be able to identify
the Christ in it at all, particularly for the public eye. This effect was amplified by a growing multicultural awareness and sensitivity in recent decades--something the Religious Right has never approved of--particularly since savvy businesses were quick to pay attention to it. It is, after all, in business's best interests to be as inclusive as possible to potential customers. For political opportunists on the far right, then,
it could hardly have seemed a lower and slower pitch across the
center of the plate when organizations like American Atheists and the
Freedom From Religion Foundation started to push for the secular goal
of removing Christian (and all) religious iconography from
state-owned property, primarily including Christian nativity scenes.
This useful nugget was perhaps most
clearly revealed only a few days ago when David Silverman, director
of American Atheists, went on live television with Bill O'Reilly on
his show The O'Reilly Factor.
Among other gaffes and breaches of both etiquette and facts, Bill
O'Reilly highlighted the political propagandist undertones of the War
on Christmas when he referred to Silverman and other atheists as a
“merry band of fascists.” Silverman was rightfully at a loss
against this misuse of the term “fascist,” though he asserted
himself well as a “patriot” seeking to defend the U.S.
Constitution's Establishment Clause. Of course, there is no
meaningful connection between an atheist representing secularism in a
Western democracy and actual fascism.
O'Reilly's
word-choice can be explained, however, by seeing it as a use of some
common tools in propagandizing, ones the right-wing of American
politics has become increasingly well-known for in recent years:
projectionism and othering. I would suggest that Bill O'Reilly accurately
understands the terms “fascist” and “atheist,” though perhaps
he doesn't. In either case, connecting those terms works incredibly effectively with his
audience and the base of the party that makes up their bulk. The goal there is to make
atheists into “others,” people with starkly different fundamental
values, and then project the notion of fascism onto them.
This is not
far-fetched seeing as it is almost beyond controversy at this point
to recognize the corporatist agenda in the current Republican Party
and of its corporate media outlets like FOX. Both agencies, in
appealing to a base that will not benefit from corporatism at all, have
a vested interest in disguising this agenda from them. By
creating atheists as the “others” and then branding them a “merry
band of fascists,” a skilled campaign should be able to deflect
accurate accusations of fascism—and thus corporatism—away from
the real corporatists. They, the atheists,
are the fascists, after all, so how can we, the Christians,
be fascists if they have such radically different values than we do?
In reality, there is no more a war by
secularists to “take the Christ out of Christmas” on
Christians than there is a war by Protestants to “take the Mass out
of Christmas” on Catholics. There is, however, a real war on
Christmas, and the right-wing media outlets are the standard bearers and whips driving the battle. Everyone else is a victim, even those motivated to fight their bogus war for them, since we all lose some of our abilities to
enjoy our most festive and cherished holiday
season of the year. The cheer behind that holiday is being slaughtered before our eyes in order to
mobilize a hard-right political agenda. It's up to us to put the
happy back in the holidays—or if you prefer, the merry in the
Christmas—and we can start by recognizing this manufactured “war”
for what it is and pushing it to the blustering margins of our
culture.
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