New York Stories...

At the beginning of December I travelled to New York. Starting with this post this series will take a look at some of the issues that are making the news in the US and 'the city that never sleeps' at the moment.

Putting the 'Christ' back in Christmas?

The tree, skating rink, lights and decorations in the Rockefeller Centre Plaza in Mid-Town Manhattan (above) are enough to get even the most hardened ‘Ebenezer Scrooge’ to get merry, sing carols, frolic in the snow, drink copiously, and come on to some unfortunate colleague at the office party. The place looks spectacular and it beats the hell out of the paltry attempts of Dublin Corporation to inject some festive spirit into the rainy Irish capital. You would have thought such things as fairy lights, tinsel, stars and angels weren’t the stuff of controversy. You’d be wrong.

Seemingly innocent festively decorated trees are currently enraging the Christian right of America. Apparently some more politically correct (if pedantically so) Americans have been referring to these trees as ’holiday trees’ rather than the more traditional term ’Christmas tree’ - presumably so as not to alienate America’s religious minorities. While this political correctness is quite ridiculous - I mean a Christmas tree is a tree with pretty lights and has no religious significance - what is even more preposterous is the rabid reaction of the Christian right to this nomenclature of decorative trees, which, I reiterate, have no religious significance whatsoever.

In a campaign that aims to ‘put the Christ back in Christmas’ various elements of the Christian right have, according to the New York Times, already forced the Governor of Georgia (the deep South - where else…?) to retract a reference to the State’s ’holiday tree’, and are boycotting any businesses that don’t mention Christmas in their advertising.

Such pettiness astounds me. I find it very difficult to understand what motivates these people to care about such a triviality. It reminds me of the time when the conservative former US attorney-general John Ashcroft had the bare breasts of a statue in the Department of justice expensively covered up because they offended his Christian sensitivities. These people are very easily offended. When you think of all the other actually important issues that Christians should be concerned with - the aleviation of poverty, the fostering of world peace etc., it’s absurd that this campaign is being conducted with such fervour by some in the Christian right. Imagine what could be done if equal energy was put into trying to solve worthwhile problems.

Perhaps all of this furore could be viewed as a worthy endeavour to combat the rampant consumerism that Christmas has come to represent. However this is clearly not the case when some of the most conservative Christians in America - the evangelical variety - aren’t even holding services in their ‘mega-churches’ on Christmas day because it would be inconvenient for their congregations. Nevermind that this year Christmas falls on a Sunday - supposedly the most ‘holy’ day of the week to Christians. Such hypocrisy undermines any arguments over terminology in advertising or the names of purely decorative trees and simply shows the Christian right for what they are, silly, small-minded and just plain weird; and that’s before you take into account evangelical preachers on TV, their views on evolution, and Presidents that think God is speaking to them…

It seems that for some of these wound-up, over-zealous, Christian Fundamentalists, Happy Holidays these are not.