"The phoney war on Christmas"

[Dr. Barry Worthington]

A recent feature article in the Guardian that might strike a chord
across the Atlantic (we have these fools too)......

"The phoney war on Christmas"

"Luton council, we are told, has banned people from celebrating
Christmas. Birmingham has renamed the season Winterval. A Reading man
has been told to take his decorations down. There's only one problem
with the 'PC campaign' against Christmas - it's pure nonsense. By
Oliver Burkeman"

Friday December 8, 2006
The Guardian

"Around this time of year, as the nights draw in and carol-singers don
their hats and scarves, David Franks can count on receiving several
enraged telephone calls and letters demanding to know why he has banned
the people of Luton from celebrating Christmas. The exact circumstances
in which the Liberal Democrat leader of Luton borough council came to
outlaw centuries of Christian tradition are unclear, not least to David
Franks, but the central facts are always the same. He and his fellow
councillors have forcibly replaced Christmas with a "Harry
Potter-themed" event called Luminos, to avoid offending minorities.

The Luton controversy recurs annually, but this year something in the
tone of it has changed. According to Christian leaders, vigorously
backed by rightwing newspapers, Franks is no longer a fringe figure,
but one crusader in a fully fledged national war against Christmas.
"The crazy gang who constitute the local council at Luton," as the
commentator AN Wilson called them in the Daily Mail last weekend, now
have sympathisers across the country: at the council that erased all
mention of Christmas from its Christmas cards, in the town that banned
a generous millionaire from erecting his annual charity lights display,
and in the Scottish hospital that refused to distribute a Christmas CD
because it mentioned Jesus, to name just three. Almost 75% of British
employers, according to a survey released this week, have banned
Christmas decorations for fear of offending other faiths, and don't
realise they have a legal obligation to celebrate Diwali and Eid,
whether they like it or not.

"The dead hand of political correctness is throttling the life out of
the festive spirit," thundered the Sun, announcing, like the Mail, a
front-page campaign to defend Christmas. (In Birmingham, the paper
noted despairingly, "Christmas has been rebranded as Winterval.")
Spurred on by the former Archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey, and by
the Christian Muslim Forum, which has launched a national battle
against the de-Christianising of Christmas, local leaders of three
faiths wrote to Franks in Luton this week. They warned darkly of the
"anger within religious communities" that might erupt if he did not
"refrain from renaming the Christmas festival using another
(non-religious) name".

All of which might be reasonable, were it not for a few awkward facts.
Luton does not have a festival called Luminos. It does not use any
alternative name for Christmas. When it did, once, five years ago, hold
something called Luminos one weekend in late November, the event didn't
even replace the council's own Christmas celebrations, let alone forbid
anyone else from doing anything. Similarly, Christmas is not called
Winterval in Birmingham. The Royal Edinburgh Hospital for Sick Children
never banned a Christmas CD for mentioning Jesus. And Chester council's
"un-Christian" Christmas card says - as cards have done for decades -
"Season's Greetings".

"We're not going to have a war, we're going to have the appearance of a
war," says the cynical spin doctor in David Mamet's screenplay for the
1997 movie Wag The Dog, about an imaginary conflict created to whip up
support for an ailing president. But he might equally have been talking
about the 2006 war on Christmas - a war that tells us much about the
growing politicisation and sense of entitlement among religious groups
in Britain, but which turns out to have been almost entirely invented.

The Campaign Against Political Correctness, headquartered in Kennington
in south London, bases its pitch to potential members on the argument
that Britain is approaching boiling-point in the backlash against
misguided attempts to avoid offending minorities. (Its website features
several heroes of the anti-PC movement, including Jim Davidson,
"22-year-old rapper Plan B", and Sir Cliff Richard, who says that "this
whole PC thing bugs me like mad", as well as Bruce Forsyth, who is
praised for not bowing to pressure, from unspecified sources, to avoid
using the word "nitty-gritty" on air.) "The difference now is that
people are angry about it," says Philip Davies, the Conservative MP for
Shipley, who is the campaign's parliamentary spokesman and a loud
critic of the War on Christmas. "People used to laugh about it, but
that's changed ... they're angry with white, middle-class liberal
do-gooders with some kind of guilt complex and too much time on their
hands."

Judging by the Sun's Christmas defence campaign (headline: "Kick 'em in
the baubles!"), they are particularly angry in the village of Sonning,
near Reading, where "a court banned a millionaire from putting up his
annual charity light display outside his home". As with so many aspects
of the PC war on Christmas, trying to find the truth about Sonning's
frustrated philanthropist feels like chasing a shadow across a misty
field: the factual basis for the controversy continually evades your
grasp, then evaporates entirely.

The facts are as follows: in recent years, Vic Moszczynski's "annual
charity light display" involved 20,000 lights, covering his home, and
supplemented with large illuminated snowmen and amplifiers emitting
Christmas songs into the street. (The term "housebling" started
appearing on the web in 2004 to describe just such gaudy displays.)
Wokingham district council eventually won an injunction against him,
citing neighbour complaints, traffic snarl-ups, increased levels of
crime, and a £7,400 bill for policing Moszczynski's neighbourhood. Not
that he has actually been banned from putting up a display: it was
still there this year, a little more restrained but still prominent,
and featuring a snow machine. Indeed, so ineffectively was Moszczynski
banned from celebrating the festive season that he was the guest of
honour at a shopping precinct in Reading town centre last month - to
switch on the Christmas lights.

Of course, to dismantle the myth of a full-scale War on Christmas, it
isn't necessary to prove that no low-level council functionary has ever
once misguidedly tried to avoid offence by eliminating references to
religion. That's what seems to have happened in Lambeth last year, when
the council's monthly newsletter, Lambeth Life, referred to some
Christmas light displays as "winter lights" - the council swiftly
accepted it was an error - and also in High Wycombe, where a member of
the library staff refused to display an A4 poster for a carol service
in 2003 because of a rule excluding religious or political posters from
a noticeboard. (The High Wycombe Carol Service Poster Incident is now
regularly wheeled out as an example of how diabolically militant the
anti-Christmas forces have become.) More frequently, though, there's
even less truth to the allegations than that. The Christmas CD
allegedly banned at the Royal Edinburgh Hospital for Sick Children, for
example, was not only not banned - it was actually made available at a
hospital carol service that had mysteriously evaded the health
authority's attempts to stamp out Christmas. (The examples are
never-ending: when the Daily Express screamed "Now Christ Is Banned" on
its front page last winter, it was in response to news that the letters
"BC" had been removed from some exhibits at the Cheddar Gorge Museum,
in line with modern curatorial practice.)

"There's something very complicated going on here," says Terry
Sanderson, president of the National Secular Society. "It has to do
with the contest between Christianity and Islam: Christians are
becoming very alarmed about the progress they see Islam making in this
country, and they fear their own festivals will be overwhelmed. I was
doing a phone-in the other day, and everybody who rang in was saying,
'They're banning Christmas!' So I said: 'Who? Where? Who's standing
outside a church saying you can't go in? Who's coming and knocking on
your door at 6am and asking if there's a nativity set in your house?'
It's quite dangerous, I think, to incite this kind of resentment
against a perceived enemy."

This year, though, the defenders of Christmas aren't only invoking the
fear that nebulous Muslim forces might be about to obliterate Britain's
traditional religion. Simultaneously, they have also aligned themselves
with Muslim groups, arguing that the real enemy is secularisation. It's
a position well-crafted for the historical moment, and for the
currently fashionable notion of Britain as comprised of groups defined
above all by their faith (even though barely 10% of us regularly attend
any kind of religious service). "Any repetition of public bodies or
local authorities renaming Christmas, so as not to offend other faith
communities, will tend, as in the past, to backfire on the Muslim
community in particular," the Christian Muslim Forum warned in a letter
to councils last month.

Perhaps the most notorious of the anti-Christmas rebrandings is
Winterval, in Birmingham, and when you telephone the Birmingham city
council press office to ask about it, you are met first of all with a
silence that might seasonably be described as frosty. "We get this
every year," a press officer sighs, eventually. "It just depends how
many rogue journalists you get in any given year. We tell them it's
bollocks, but it doesn't seem to make much difference."

According to an official statement from the council, Winterval - which
ran in 1997 and 1998, and never since - was a promotional campaign to
drive business into Birmingham's newly regenerated town centre. It
began in early November and finished in January. During the part of
that period traditionally celebrated as Christmas, "there was a banner
saying Merry Christmas across the front of the council house, Christmas
lights, Christmas trees in the main civil squares, regular
carol-singing sessions by school choirs, and the Lord Mayor sent a
Christmas card with a traditional Christmas scene wishing everyone a
Merry Christmas".

None of that, though, was enough to prevent a protest movement at the
time, whose members included the then Bishop of Birmingham, Mark
Santer, as well as two members of UB40. Sensing a never-to-be-repeated
public-relations opportunity, tourism staff at Solihull council invited
Birmingham residents in search of a traditional Christmas to travel
there instead. And the leader of the anti-Winterval campaign, Ken
White, fulfilled a key requirement of all such disputes: the people of
Birmingham, he declared, were the victims of "political correctness
gone mad".

Then, last year, the War on Christmas received a massive boost when it
exploded on to the American political landscape, thanks primarily to
two Fox News anchormen, John Gibson and Bill O'Reilly. Gibson had a
vested interest, having just published a book entitled The War On
Christmas: How The Liberal Plot To Ban The Sacred Christian Holiday Is
Worse Than You Thought. (A note in the interests of full disclosure:
O'Reilly, as I enjoy telling people whenever possible, accused me of
"spout[ing] incredible nonsense" earlier this year after I wrote a
story about a speech in which he invited al-Qaida to attack the liberal
stronghold of San Francisco; previously, he had speculated that the
Guardian "might be edited by Osama bin Laden".)

The American War on Christmas, like the British one, relied on a
grab-bag of tenuous stories that crumbled on closer analysis. O'Reilly
was forced to apologise on air for suggesting that a school district in
Texas had banned red-and-green clothing; it remains possible that it
had banned red-and-green paper plates, though the story is hard to
corroborate. Meanwhile, Gibson railed against the decision to call the
Capitol's Christmas tree a "Holiday tree" - even though, by the time
his book was published, the decision had been reversed.

This week's survey by the employment law firm Peninsula, suggesting
that 74% of British employers have banned Christmas decorations for
fear of offending non-Christians, seems similarly beset with problems.
Even the Christian Muslim Forum accepts that the key question - "Do you
admit to banning Christmas decorations because you are worried about
offending other faiths?" - seems pointedly phrased, and several
follow-up questions seem designed to steer respondents in an
anti-Christmas direction. Even if the fear is real, one might
reasonably attribute it precisely to the newspapers' provocative
campaigns against the alleged War on Christmas. (After all - as
everyone involved in the argument agrees - it's not as if there's any
track record of anybody actually taking legal action because they were
offended.) Finally, the survey asks: "Are you aware of your legal
requirement to celebrate all faiths?" But according to the conciliation
service Acas, there is no such obligation.

The Christian Muslim Forum's letter to councils did not provide any
examples of the purported de-Christianisation of Christmas, and Julian
Bond, the group's director of management and communication, seems
equally reluctant to do so. "There have been incidents," he says. "I
was looking them up on the internet the other day. There was one from a
hospital in Scotland, where they'd received some CDs of Christmas
carols, and some obviously mentioned the baby Jesus, and the hospital
said it wasn't appropriate." But, he concedes, "it does all seem to
have been more prevalent in previous years. It does seem to have
disappeared this year." Does the forum plan to compile a list of
examples of the war being waged on Christmas? "We haven't published
anything like that," Bond says. "It's difficult to get hold of."

He goes on: "You know, we were in Birmingham for a meeting the other
day, and there's a big Merry Christmas banner in the middle of New
Street." So is anybody at all trying to abolish Christmas this year? "I
haven't come across any examples of anyone doing it this year," he
replies. "No".

Dr. Barry Worthington