As we enter into the season of overheated and half-baked claims about the desacrilization of the Jewish and Christian holiday season, led by Bill "War on Christmas" O'Reilly -- it is worth offering one small bit of perspective.
The war on Christmas is said to be perpetrated by "secularists," of various sorts -- people who are in other contexts (and amidst many other rediculous and unsupported accusations) said to be driving people of faith from the public square.
Scapegoating of the secular is part of a transcendent politics of the Religious Right, and a variant of that old time McCarthism -- baiting everyone with whom they disagree as advocating a 'godless' agenda. From McCarthite screeds against "godless communism" to contemporary Coulterisms about "godless liberalism" there is a tradition of American conservatism that is as despicable as it is antithetical to the spirit of Christmas and to religious pluralism in our constitutional democracy.
There has been a lot of secular-baiting in recent years -- by the leaders of the Religious Right, but also by ostensbly liberal Democrats like Rabbi Michael Lerner and Rev. Jim Wallis (as I detailed in an essay in The Public Eye magazine last summer.)
This essay concluded:
So much is revealed by how people use the term secular. Understanding how it is used by the Right helps us to better contend with the way that it is used as a wedge to divide the left against itself; especially between religious and nonreligious progressives. Mindless anti-secular sloganeering makes nonreligious progressives roll their eyes in astonishment at the vacuousness of the argument, the lack of intellectual integrity, and the sheer political ham-handedness of those who write and speak in such a fashion.
But most importantly, when left of center religious and political leaders engage in secular baiting, they are strengthening the religious right-framed argument against the best American ethos and the Constitutional doctrine of separation of church and state.
(See also much discussion of this theme back in 2006).
There will be many efforts to divide religions and non-religious progressives, and one of the wedges will be smears against secularism. I mention all this as I see Bill O'Reilly warming up for his annual vainglorious rants about the war on Christmas -- and a sleazy piece by Dan Henninger of the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, which seeks to blame the financial crisis on You Know Who:
And so we come back to the disappearance of "Merry Christmas."
It has been my view that the steady secularizing and insistent effort at dereligioning America has been dangerous. That danger flashed red in the fall into subprime personal behavior by borrowers and bankers, who after all are just people. Northerners and atheists who vilify Southern evangelicals are throwing out nurturers of useful virtue with the bathwater of obnoxious political opinions.
It is in this sense, that I want to remind everyone that religious progressives, overwhelmingly support the right of individual conscience and separation of church and state, and do not engage in secular baiting and consider the entire exercize to be beneath contempt. They are the natural allies in protecting the rights of non-religious Americans. It is important that we not let ourselves be divided against one another.