I've seen a few pundits dismissing the Christmas vs. Holiday fight as a manufactured issue. Their reasoning seems to be that this is all just Bubba bait -- a way to stir up Red Staters by making them feel threatened. A bit like Libs with Alito -- there's no serious threat to Roe vs. Wade if one looks at the court balance, but it's good for fundraising.
I don't think it's Bubba bait. Instead, I think the frog has simply woken up in mid-boil and decided to jump. Creeping secularism has been eroding even the most mild free expression of religion in the public square for some time now. The only way to stop this gradual process is to call it for what it is and then push back. Christians have as much right as anyone to help define what sort of culture we're to have. More so, in that they constitute a huge majority of the population.
I'm glad to see us putting financial and social pressure on corporations that want to secularize the public square. Socially liberal companies have a right to pursue whatever agenda they want. We have an equal right to spank them for it. That's democracy in action, baby.
Posted by Discoshaman at décembre 8, 2005 12:26 AM | TrackBack
I'm ambivalent, though with a yen for Christmases unfettered by PC and a serious resentment for obvious blanking-out of Christian elements in our culture (as if they were the true obscenities, things to be done only offstage, never in public).
At the same time, I'm leery of attempts to re-Christianize the public square when the public clearly is not sufficiently Christian to do it. That is, attempting to extend the Gospel to unbelievers through "secular use"-tested public displays of cultural, civic-religion "Christianity" is just plain silly at best, wrongheaded and destructive of true Gospel teaching at (and it's all too common) worst.
But I tend to think these sorts of things are beyond my reach, so I stick with monitoring my attitudes and those of the groups I'm associated with. Let the dead bury their dead.
Cheers,
PGE