Thanks Bill
by digby
I’m not religious but I’ve always loved Christmas — the food, the lights, the tree, the music, the whole thing. Now the right wing pricks have gone and made it a cause in their goddamned culture war and I can’t enjoy it anymore. One sniff of fruitcake and a picture of Bill O’Reilly enters my mind. I’m instantly nauseated.
Everywhere I go, even here in the very heart of godless secular humanism, the People’s Republic of Santa Monica, there are carolers on the sidewalk (singing songs like “Oh Holy Night” no less) “Merry Christmas” is written on store windows, decorated trees and twinkling lights are all over the place. And all I can think is “what in the hell are these wingnuts going on about? Christmas is everywhere! Are they nuts???” And then the pure, simple, childlike enjoyment I usually feel for the holiday just slips away.
I resent the hell out of these wingnut bastards turning Christmas into a political football. Is nothing sacred to these people?
Update: Oh, and please tell me again how secularists are declaring war on Christmas:
Many American “megachurches”, huge Christian ministries with thousands-strong congregations, have horrified traditionalists by closing on Christmas Day.
Sunday services on Dec 25 are being cancelled because clergy fear attendance will be poor. Worshippers are instead being encouraged to spend the day with their families.
[…]
Willow Creek Community Church in Illinois, one of the six largest US churches with a weekend attendance of nearly 22,000, is among those closing its doors.
“At first glance it does sound contrarian,” the Rev. Gene Appel, its senior pastor, said. “We don’t see it as not having church on Christmas. We see it as decentralising the church on Christmas: hundreds of thousands of experiences going on around Christmas trees.
“The best way to honour Jesus’s birth is for families to have a more personal experience on that day.”
Christmas Sunday services were not the most effective use of staff and volunteers, a spokesman said.
Other megachurches closing on Christmas Day are in Kentucky, Texas, Georgia and Michigan.
“We feel that Christmas is definitely a time that should be spent with family,”said Kris McNeil of Michigan’s Mars Hill Bible Church.
Cindy Willison, a spokesman for the evangelical Southland Christian Church, near Chicago, said at least 500 volunteers were needed, plus staff, to run Sunday services for the estimated 8,000 worshippers. Many volunteers appreciated the chance to spend Christmas with their families.
The closures contrast starkly with Roman Catholic parishes, which see some of their largest congregations at Christmas, and Protestant ministries, such as the Episcopal, Methodist and Lutheran churches, where Sunday services are hardly ever cancelled.
The number of megachurches in America, defined as non-Catholic congregations of at least 2,000 people, has soared from 10 in 1970 to an estimated 800 today.
Many function like corporations, running businesses such as publishing houses.
I didn’t know that the Christmas tree actually functioned as an alter, but I’m not surprised. This is America and that’s where the presents are.
I’m awfully impressed by the piety of the conservative evangelicals who attend these churches and lord their superior religiosity over the mainline churches.
Update II: I missed this Atrios post yesterday making essntially the same point.
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