Christmas War Update and Other "Sacred News"

I heard it said the other day that Time magazine's bestselling issues of the year are usually those featuring diets and those featuring religion. Jesus is a supremely effective marketing tool, especially after Thanksgiving.

'Tis the season to be angry and sanctimonious! Bill O'Reilly is in his annual "Christmas Under Siege" mode, which is at once supremely entertaining and utterly disturbing. Of course, his devotion to Christmas includes a big push for people to buy "Factor gear" from his website at the end of each program. His fellow FoxNews cohort John Gibson even has a new book on the Christmas culture wars. But as Stephen Nissenbaum has shown, the "battle for Christmas" is a time-honored tradition.

Christmas controversies are all but entirely manufactured by journalists looking for a hook to engage readers and viewers, as well as interest groups looking for money and publicity (chief among them Jerry Falwell, a worldly empire unto himself). But the underlying tension between those who are religious and those who are not are thrust into the cacophony of messages that deluge anyone who avails themselves of the popular media.

Indeed, the Christmas War is a microcosm of the larger "culture war," which itself is a creation of the authoritarian Right -- which increasingly fails to recognize the importance a private sphere of thought and action, relatively immune from statist caprices, in the preservation of individual liberty and limited, constitutional government.

One of the best books I read this year was Susan Jacoby's Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism. In a nutshell, it detailed the persistent struggle in this country between those who would seek to make this country more explicitly "Christian" (as they see it) in all aspects of life -- including government -- and those who recognize the importance of a non-religious public sphere. Even though the Founders were men of varying degrees of Christian faith, they saw to it that the Constitution made no express reference to God, much less Jesus Christ.

America is a Christian nation insofar as most of its citizens are Christians, though in a much more quiet and unassuming fashion than most of those who forward themselves as Christians extraordinaire. These persons include politicians, some of whom aggressively flaunt their purported religious bona fides and court so-called religious leaders for their blessing.

Whenever government seeks to imbue itself with the ostensibly divine, I consider it to be a desperate exercise in the profane in search of the sacred. How I wish that more persons of faith would speak out against the grotesque politicization of religion.

To demonstrate just how manic things have become, even President Bush is receiving flack. Merry Christmas was absent from this year's White House Christmas card, which is printed and distributed at the expense of the Republican National Committee. It did have a quote from Psalms, though. (I received a copy.) Next year, look for a Nativity scene and quote from Revelations.

In other religious news, a Kansas University professor was attacked -- apparently for his work criticizing creationism and intelligent design. I'm sure that there are many Old Testament verses that can be invoked to defend the assailants in court, if those God-fearing thugs are ever found.

On a much lighter note, Christian youth in Germany have hit pay dirt with a calendar depicting erotic scenes from the Bible -- including Delilah cutting Samson's hair. Who knew that barbering could be so hot? Here is their website (with a clumsily translated English version as well).

Unfortunately, the first printing has already sold out. And they are not mailing it to the United States. Which Christian youth group in this country will step up to the plate, I wonder?