When I first heard this "War on Christmas" nonsense, I thought "boy, this is ridiculous." But the more I think about it, the more I think it's real.
Here's how it works...
Step 1. The Religious Right scares the crap out of us. The way they use demonization, and the way they reject science... it's outright creepy. We get very uncomfortable whenever we think of them. Those of us who are Jewish have a particularly powerful reaction: we have a lot of experience with demonization, and when we see even a mild example, we get very freaked out.
Step 2. When we turn on the TV, we see Jerry Falwell standing next to a Crucifix. By pairing a stimulus like the Crucifix (which is positive or neutral depending on your religion) with an extremely frightening negative stimulus (Jerry Falwell), they set up what psychologists call "conditioning by negative reinforcement." We don't understand why, but soon we start to have an unconscious negative reaction to the Crucifix.
Step 3. Big corporations aren't stupid. They know that there are a lot of people out there who have been psychologically conditioned to react negatively to Christian symbols. They don't want to lose even 1% of their business, so they avoid symbols like the Crucifix that trigger negative conditioned responses.
The result is very real. There really are people who are creeped out by Christian symbols. They really do complain loudly when they see them. Retailers really are avoiding the use of such symbols for that reason. Public spaces, like high schools and courthouses, are using the same reasoning: they know that these symbols truly bother people, and they don't want to cause trouble.
I believe that this is the real reason for the recent decline in the number of people identifying as Christians in the last decade. Young people aren't identifying with Christianity any more, because they unconsciously associate Christianity with a lot of behavior that they consider frightening, aggressive, and immoral.
So what to do about it? There are three parties involved:
- The religious right
- The retailers
- The people who are scared of the right
The conservatives would say that it's the people who are creeped out who have to change. They think that we're just overreacting, that we should just get over it, that we have no real reason to be scared. I'm sorry, but the conservatives are wrong. When you say we
deserve to die from AIDS, that's creepy. When you say
teachers are terrorists, that's creepy. When the US government tries to
resume the crusades, that's creepy. Nothing is going to convince me that this sort of talk isn't aggressive and unbalanced and dangerous.
The only way that this problem is going to get solved is when people stop being creeped out by the Crucifix. To accomplish that, you have to stop associating so many negative feelings to the Crucifix. In other words, you have to get the religious right off of TV, and the religious moderates on to the TV. I figure about five years of moderate christianity on TV, with preachers talking about nice, pleasant things like caring for your neighbors, supporting each other, being respectful of people with different views, and the like, and people will start to think "Christianity isn't frightening after all. It was just that nut Falwell, but he's long gone."