The New York Times
December 25, 2005
Op-Ed Columnist
By FRANK RICH
THE good news today is that the great 2005 war on Christmas, the conflagration that launched a thousand op-ed pieces and nearly as many battles on Fox News, is now officially over. And yes, Virginia - Christmas won!
Secularists, Jews, mainline Protestants and all the other grinches failed utterly to take Kriss Kringle down. Except at those megachurches that canceled services today rather than impede their flocks' giving and gorging, Christmas is alive and well everywhere in America. Last night NBC even rolled the dice and broadcast "It's a Wonderful Life" in prime time. With courage reminiscent of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's defiance of Stalin, the network steadfastly refused to redub the final scene's cries of "Merry Christmas!" with the godless "Happy holidays!"
As Michelle Goldberg wrote last month in her definitive debunking for Salon, there was in fact no war on Christmas, but rather "a burgeoning myth of a war on Christmas." Most of the grievances cited by Christmas's whiniest protectors - red and green banned from residents' wardrobes in Michigan, "Silent Night" censored in Wisconsin - were either anomalous idiocies or suburban legends. The calls for boycotts against chain stores with heathen holiday trees lost their zing when it turned out that even George and Laura Bush's Christmas card had called for a happy "holiday season."
But like every other chapter of irrational hysteria in America's cultural history, from the burning of "witches" in colonial Salem to the panic induced by Orson Welles's radio broadcast of the fictional "War of the Worlds" on the eve of World War II, the fake war on Christmas was not without its hidden meanings. Or not so hidden. If you worked at Fox News, wouldn't you want to change the subject from the war in Iraq to a war in which victory is a slam-dunk?
Rabble-rousing paranoia about a supposed assault on Christmas also has a strong anti-Semitic and far-right pedigree. In Salon, Ms. Goldberg noted that fulmination about supposed Jewish opposition to Christmas dates to Henry Ford's infamous "The International Jew" of 1921. That chord is sounded in the very first anecdote in the book by the Fox News anchor John Gibson, "The War on Christmas: How the Liberal Plot to Ban the Sacred Christian Holiday Is Worse Than You Thought": a devastated father discovers that his 4-year-old son has brought home preschool artwork showing a Hanukkah menorah and Kwanzaa candles, rather than a Christmas tree. But Mr. Gibson goes on to add ecumenically that "not just Jewish people" are out to kill Christmas. As he elucidated on Christian radio, all non-Christians are "following the wrong religion," though he reassures us that they will be tolerated "as long as they're civil and behave."
Even so, much of this manufactured war was more banal than malicious. Like Christmas itself, an anti-Christmas scare is an ideal means for moving merchandise. The first Fox News segment warning darkly of a war on Christmas occurred on Oct. 20 - coincidentally the very day that Mr. Gibson's book hit the nation's bookstores. Many of the five dozen ensuing Fox segments contained lavish plugs for the book or for the Christmas baubles hawked by Bill O'Reilly on his Web site - no yuletide loofahs, alas. (His wares were initially listed as "holiday" gifts until a Web exposé forced a frantic rebranding.) Even Fox News's obligatory show Jew - Jackie Mason, ostensibly representing an organization called Jews Against Anti-Christian Defamation - seized the mercantile opportunity, using the "war on Christmas" to plug a stand-up booking on Long Island.
But to fully parse the war-on-Christmas myth, it helps to examine it in the larger context of what "The Daily Show" would call This Year in God. Though religion has always been a fulcrum of culture wars in America, its debased role in that debate has fallen to new lows of lunacy since Election Day 2004. That's when a single vague exit poll found that 22 percent of Americans considered undefined "moral values" in casting their ballots. Ever since, politicians of both parties, Fox News anchors and any other huckster eager to sell goods, an agenda or an image have increased the decibel level of their pandering to "people of faith."
An ersatz war on Christmas fits all too snugly into a year that began with the religious right's (unsuccessful) efforts to destroy the box office and Oscar prospects of Clint Eastwood's "Million Dollar Baby" and "save" Terri Schiavo and that ended with a federal judge banishing intelligent design from high school biology classes. In his sweeping 139-page opinion, that judge, John Jones III, put his finger on the hypocrisy of many of those most ostentatiously defending faith from its alleged assailants in America. Referring to the fundamentalists on the Dover, Pa., school board, he wrote that it was "ironic" that those who "so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the intelligent design policy." That passage fits much of the dishonesty and cynicism perpetrated in the name of religion in America over the past 12 months.
This was the year that two C.E.O.'s charged with wholesale corporate fraud, Bernard Ebbers of WorldCom and Richard Scrushy of HealthSouth, both made a show of public prayer to ward off legal culpability. In Mr. Scrushy's case, the strategy worked. Faced with the prospect of life in prison and the forfeiture of $279 million, he quit his suburban Birmingham, Ala., church to join a largely blue-collar African-American congregation more in keeping with his potential jury pool, secured his own ordination as a nondenominational minister, and bought local TV time for a prayer show featuring himself, his third wife and various members of the clergy. The jury acquitted him on all 36 felony counts.
"God is good," he proclaimed after his victory news conference. To which one can only add: amen.
A no less unctuous spectacle was provided this year by Bill Frist, the Senate's majority leader and self-infatuated doctor-in-residence. Mr. Frist played God on national television by giving a quack diagnosis of Ms. Schiavo's condition based on a videotape, and then endorsed a so-called Justice Sunday megachurch rally demonizing "activist" judges - including, no doubt, any who may yet pass on the legality of his brilliantly timed stock sales. Though the senator's farcical behavior is worthy of Molière, he is hardly unique among his peers with presidential aspirations. Chastened by a perceived "moral values" deficit that might haunt her in 2008, Hillary Clinton now wears her history as "a praying person" on her sleeve. In June John Kerry told a gathering that he "went back and read the New Testament the other day" - which presumably will prevent him from erroneously citing Job as his favorite New Testament text, as Howard Dean did in 2004.
Liberals have a lot to learn about the God racket, however. The right is masterly at exploiting religion and religious (or quasi-religious) leaders for its own fun and profit. Just look at how a few phone calls from Karl Rove flimflammed Dr. James Dobson of Focus on the Family into serving as a useful idiot in support of the Harriet Miers nomination long after most other conservative leaders had bailed out.
THE more we learned about the scandals enveloping Tom DeLay and his favorite lobbyist, Jack Abramoff, this year, the more we learned of how Mr. Abramoff, the founder of a now defunct Washington yeshiva and two defunct kosher restaurants, manipulated a trinity of Billy Sundays to do his bidding: the Christian Coalition's former executive director, Ralph Reed, the Traditional Values Coalition's Rev. Louis Sheldon (dubbed "Lucky Louie" by Mr. Abramoff) and Dr. Dobson. Though all three are vocal opponents of gambling, they were each recruited for stealth campaigns for the lobbyist's casino and lottery clients. The campaigns were disguised as "anti-gambling" crusades (often because they were in opposition to casinos competing with Abramoff clients), and these pious gentlemen, Lucky Louie included, have denied any knowledge that they were trafficking in the wages of sin. If they're actually telling the truth, they are even bigger dupes than Mr. Abramoff took them for.
To those who fear the worst from a born-again president whose base is typified by these holy rollers and the Christmas demagogues of Fox News, a fundamentalist theocracy seems as imminent in America as it does in the "democracy" we've been building in Iraq. Only last week did Ted Haggard, an evangelical preacher much favored by the White House, fan those fears by insisting to a Jewish television interviewer, Barbara Walters, that anyone who worshiped a different God from Jesus Christ would "unfortunately" be consigned to hell.
But it's also possible that 2005 may turn out to be the year the God card was so wildly overplayed in politics and commerce alike that it began to lose its clout with Americans who are overdosing on the strict speech and belief codes of Christian political correctness. That the judge who ruled so decisively in Pennsylvania's revival of the Scopes trial is a Republican appointed by President Bush is almost enough to make the bah-humbug crowd believe in Santa Claus.
* Copyright 2005The New York Times Company
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