Chri$tma$

Adam Cohen makes short work of Faux News’ campaign for Christmas.

This year’s Christmas “defenders” are not just tolerating commercialization – they’re insisting on it. They are also rewriting Christmas history on another key point: non-Christians’ objection to having the holiday forced on them.

The campaign’s leaders insist this is a new phenomenon – a “liberal plot,” in Mr. Gibson’s words. But as early as 1906, the Committee on Elementary Schools in New York City urged that Christmas hymns be banned from the classroom, after a boycott by more than 20,000 Jewish students. In 1946, the Rabbinical Assembly of America declared that calling on Jewish children to sing Christmas carols was “an infringement on their rights as Americans.”

The Christmas that Mr. O’Reilly and his allies are promoting – one closely aligned with retailers, with a smack-down attitude toward nonobservers – fits with their campaign to make America more like a theocracy, with Christian displays on public property and Christian prayer in public schools.

Quite. I tack between thinking that the Gibson and O’Reilly-led campaign for Christmas is the end of conservatism’s moment, the lie so absurd that not even the most virulent liberal haters could buy into, and worrying that even this might not be too far, and that too many people are willing to believe that there is some over-arching secular humanist conspiracy to destroy Christmas. The answer is probably somewhere in between. In any case, the Gibson/O’Reilly crusade demonstrates beyond doubt how little the doctrines and debates of Christianity actually animate the “Christian” Right. In the end, it’s really all about the persecution complex. That, and the cash.