The (Seemingly) Eternal War on Christmas

Is it really "War on Christmas" again?  It seems to come earlier every year.  I am forced to ask because of Donald trump's recent comments* on the struggle for Christmas present, which is stoking the flames of the renewed "War on Christmas."

You know, Christmas, that time of year when we see Christmas trees everywhere, Santas in the malls and ever-deepening price cuts at retail stores?  The problem is apparently that the word "Christmas" is anathema to schools, in town squares, and to those same retailers.  Christmas pageants are now "winter" celebrations.  Christmas trees are now "holiday" trees.  The baby Jesus, the wise men, and the manger have been relegated to the Island of Misfit Holiday Symbols.

For Americans, though, this is nothing new.  We inherit a long history of subverting the celebration of Christmas.  Shaping the holiday to a particular end is nothing new.

Think about it.  Those most Christian of America's settlers, the Puritans, actually outlawed Christmas celebrations between 1659 and 1681.  Revelers caught celebrating the holiday were hit with a fine of 5 shillings.  In many places, December 25 was business as usual.

Of course there were Christmas services.  This was Puritan New England; there were always services.  It's simply that Christmas was viewed with extreme suspicion by religious and civic authorities.  As the historian Stephen Nissenbaum put it in his wonderful 1996 book, The Battle for Christmas, authorities in New England saw the holiday season as one of "rowdy public display, of excessive eating and drinking, the mockery of established authority, aggressive begging...and even the invasion of wealthy homes."

Not to mention the occasional public sex, apparently a real thing in England.

Yuletide was a time of upending the social order, which served as a sort of safety valve for the frustrations of those at the lower end of that order.  Wassailing, in terms of heavy drinking and drunken brawls and light vandalism, allowed the lower classes to let off steam and, presumably, helped keep them in line for the rest of the year.

The original war on Christmas, then, was a war against public rowdiness.  It changed course in the early nineteenth century when upper-class merchants, realizing Christmas wasn't going away, tried a new tactic.  Writers such as Washington Irving and Clement C. Moore (presumably) began reshaping the holiday by transforming the character of Saint Nicholas from an austere fourth-century bishop known for miracles and secret gift-giving into a jolly old elf with a belly laugh and a white beard.

He came to bring presents to the children and, implicitly, to deliver the message of a Christmas celebrated, quietly, with lots and lots of store-bought gifts, among the family in the confines of the home.

It's probably not a coincidence that this came about as industrialization was beginning to make consumer goods more readily available to more people.  Advertising, catalogs, and department stores would emerge in the decades to follow, and the now-familiar image of Santa Claus would be used to entice shoppers.  By the 1870s, it seems fair to say that Christmas had been transformed into an orgy, not of drinking and feasting, but of consumption.  The second American "War on Christmas" succeeded in changing Christmas for good.

So it goes.  Christmas is changed by each successive generation to serve the particular needs of that generation.  And the previous generation always rails against it.

In an America populated almost entirely by Christians, it was easy for all the terminology and symbolism used in the public square to be Christian. But the Christmas we celebrate outside of churches is not a Christian holiday; it is an American one.  As a quintessentially American holiday, it changes with the country.  To include the many non-Christians in this country, we have changed the way we speak of it, leading to the perhaps more anodyne terms used by government agencies and retailers.  Still the marketing of Christmas is so effective that this non-believer will be found wishing a "Merry Christmas" to all.

Retailers, who have been accused of caving into rampant secularism, know this.  No one is holding a gun to Target's collective head to force the company to strike the word Christmas from it's ads.  They do it because inclusiveness is profitable.  Nor is this effort part of some larger "War on Religion," an attempt to transform America into an atheistic nation.  Christmas has always been protean in nature, and this is how we adapt it to the present moment.

Perhaps this very flexibility in possible meanings is why the Puritans were so suspicious of the holiday in the first place.  Nothing in the Bible supports December 25 as the date of Jesus' birth, unlike, say, material supporting the date of Easter, a holiday which has historically been more important.  That date in December happens to coincide with other celebrations of the winter solstice and the longer days it brought.  Christmas itself was, then, in its own way an attempt to sell Christianity to the Roman people.

Today people worldwide, many not Christians, celebrate it American-style.  Some, though caught up in the consumer aspects of the holiday, almost certainly imbibe the religious message of peace on Earth and good will toward men.

Not a bad message, that.  As a vehicle for it, Christmas may be the greatest ad campaign in history.

*See comment below.

Why Leo Frank Still Matters

One hundred years ago, on the night of August 16, a group of about twenty-five men stormed the Georgia State Penitentiary at Milledgeville and carried away thirty-one year-old Leo Frank.  By the next morning, Frank dangled from a tree outside Marietta, almost 200 miles away.  Among those who carried out the killing were a former governor of Georgia and a superior court judge, as well as tradesmen selected for their ability to help in the jailbreak.

Frank, who was Jewish, had come to Atlanta in 1908 to work in his uncle’s pencil factory.  In 1913, he was convicted and sentenced to death for the murder of 13 year-old Mary Phagan, an employee of his, in a trial with crude sexual and anti-Semitic overtones, a verdict most who have studied the case consider a miscarriage of justice. 

His case became a cause célèbre of sorts, with editorials nationwide, even in other Southern states, condemning the conviction.  After unsuccessful appeals to overturn the conviction that reached the Supreme Court, his sentence was commuted to life in prison a day before his scheduled execution.  It was anger over this commutation that led to his lynching.

Opinion on Frank showed the fractures emerging in Georgia, and in Atlanta, fractures between labor and management, between elites and non-elites, between urban and rural.  It showed the lengths to which some--people whom the historian Nancy MacLean calls “reactionary populists,” groups in which anti-elitist populism runs hand-in-glove with the desire to preserve racial and religious domination—were willing to go in order to protect their prerogatives.

   

These reactionary populists were people who felt left behind by changes sweeping the South.  They were factory workers who felt exploited by bosses, they were farmers whose prestige had eroded, they were men who felt they had lost control over their women working in the factories.  Since the law seemed to have failed them, they struck out through extralegal means, encouraged in their wrath by the editorials of future Senator Thomas Watson.  The lynching was the ultimate expression of their frustrations, and an attempt to show they still had power.

Their cry, and the echoes of the Frank case, still be heard.

Leo Frank had been president of Atlanta’s chapter of B’nai B’rith, the society founded in 1843 and dedicated to the protection of the Jewish people and their legacy.  Following Frank’s conviction, National B’nai B’rith formed the Anti-Defamation League, which to this day champions the cause of human rights.  Adolf Kraus, one of the founders of the ADL, specifically cited the Frank case as a reason for its formation.  That’s one of the traces.

Another could be seen in November of 1915, when a small group, likely including at least one of the Knights of Mary Phagan, joined Walter Simmons in the burning of a cross on Stone Mountain, inaugurating the second Ku Klux Klan.  They were, perhaps, emboldened by the successful lynching.  Their sentiment had almost certainly been whipped up by Watson who had suggested in the lynching’s wake that “another Ku Klux Klan may be organized to restore HOME RULE!”

The legacy of both the ADL and the Klan stretch through the twentieth century, with the former advocating the cause of human rights while the latter worked to deny them to large segments of the populace.

And now we find ourselves at a similar moment, with a new set of reactionary populists.  They find their world upended by a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, religiously pluralistic society. Many are appalled that a black man is President.  They feel the country turning into something they don’t recognize.  Further, they feel betrayed by members of the political and economic elite they feel have enabled this turn of events.

We see the same old twinned responses in the calls for the removal of Confederate symbols and in the vitriolic resistance to their removal in the wake of the Charleston church shootings, itself perhaps a Leo Frank moment for the 21^st century, an act of racist vigilantism that stirs the best and the worst in us.

What was the recent demonstration at Stone Mountain, with its brazenly armed protesters carrying the flag that for so many symbolizes oppression, to site awash in the symbolism of racial subjugation with its huge images of Confederate heroes and its KKK connection, if not an outpouring of reactionary populism? 

What else is the Tea Party?  The outpouring of support for Donald Trump?

We’ve seen this movie before.  It was Birth of a Nation, the D.W. Griffith film that in 1915 provided much of the symbolism used by the reborn Klan. 

You’d think we’d have learned something in the intervening century.  Perhaps we should consider a new script.

"Virtual" tribalism and the "real" thing

A couple of articles that popped up on my Twitter feed have me thinking about some conclusions I drew in an earlier installment of my occasional "On Rights" postings.  Mostly these pieces, concentrating on the effects of the Internet on religion, have me thinking about what I earlier argued was one of the hallmarks of civilized living in the modern era- the gradual replacement by tribal mores with more cosmopolitan ones.  Religion is, as I have suggested, and as others have argued, irrespective of any truth claims, a powerful scheme of organization that we as humans have adapted.  Its values, however, tend to be reflective of its tribal underpinnings, and advancing parochial (no pun intended) concerns.

The problem arises when religious groups come into contact with each other, especially as they become components of larger political structures.  Each, thinking it has a monopoly on ultimate truth, seeks to set the moral compass for a society.  Inasmuch as any one group succeeds, others will be alienated, so government, at its best, should foster an ethos that embraces the widest possible segment of its constituents.  As one of the primary functions of any social structure is to foster group cohesion through suppressing threats to the group, threats we might loosely refer to as deviancy, it follows that as the components of the social system become more heterogeneous, the scope of what is defined as deviancy is narrowed.

One can see this, for instance, in the evolution of what constitutes acceptable sexual behavior in the United States. The topic is too large to be adequately detailed here, so I hope a thumbnail sketch will suffice:  from a puritanical (in the literal and figurative senses) beginning where the only socially acceptable sexual behavior was between and man and his wife, with everything else considered deviance.  Over the intervening years, sexual mores gradually relaxed until, three hundred years later, homosexual behavior, which in the puritan ethos was a great crime worthy of capital punishment, passes for the most part with barely a shrug.  Generally, it should go without saying, men and women gradually and unevenly became more freely able to engage openly in sexual behavior that in previous generations would have received censure.

That this coincides with the creation of the United States from separate colonies, the new nation's territorial expansion, the great waves of urbanization and immigration, and the tightening web of globalization is no coincidence.  This is not a new phenomenon.  Urbanization is the common thread, and urbanization has been the great cultural driver in human history since the first cities were founded.  In cities, disparate peoples come together and begin exchanging ideas as readily as they exchange genes.  Cities also, however, provided a haven for dissidents and the adventuresome, those who in village life might have run up against social strictures, to find one another and begin forming communities of their own.  Heretics and reformers alike could find an audience and though passions might be stirred, the requirements of city life meant that a basic detente usually held, and when a group was sufficiently radical to shatter that, it was dealt with.

But we have seen, beginning in earnest in the late 1970s with the rise of the Religious Right and its political alliance with the Republican party, the beginning of a counter-liberalization, a rejection of detente.  Reasserting older, more restrictive values, conservative evangelicals have enjoyed a four-decade run where, in various places, they have imposed their social vision.  This coincides with perhaps the two greatest forces of social transformation we have seen yet--the rise of cable television and the Internet.

At first glance, cable television and the Internet seem to offer a number of places for a plurality of voices to be heard.  The possibility that they might, to borrow a phrase from Mao, "let a hundred flowers bloom; let a hundred schools of thought contend" seemed very real.  Yet there was another possibility, one that voices of the new conservative movement appear to have noticed before anyone else.  The proliferation of channels and chatrooms offered a separate space where like-minded people could come together and reinforce their own sense of America's decline and of religious persecution.  In these echo chambers, they were able to attain a sense of pristine purpose without the obligation to entertain counter-narratives.

Modern communications, especially cable and the Internet, allow those who might have been marginalized before, potential heretics and reformers each, to gather and join forces.  They can work towards expanding the promise of America, implicit in the founding documents, in the hopes, perhaps, of forming a "more perfect Union."  But they can also work towards restricting the promise, towards restoring the older order that represents a golden age.

This is what I refer to as the new tribalism.  Virtual relationships offer, it would seem, a greater possibility for people to come together with people who only agree with them.  This holds for people on any side of a given issue, but seems more prevalent on the political right.  Such gathering will serve only to reinforce one's opinions and to help foster an "us against them" mentality.  When you no longer have to interact with real people who might disagree with you, the concord that holds a society together weakens.  Our interactions with real people, who might put the lie to the caricatures we create, force us to confront that real humans believe differently from us, suffer.  With nothing to leaven radical opinions, we become increasingly radicalized, and increasingly unable to talk to each other.  Our new tribe becomes our social universe, the locus of our most meaningful relationships.

The good news is that most of us don't inhabit this world.  The bad news is that the loudest forces of reaction either inhabit this world, or are able to harness its resentments, and the harm they can do is incalculable.  The cure is the same as it's always been--engagement with those who will be engaged, an open ear and a closed mouth and, above all, the realization that those who disagree with us are not our enemies, but rather our fellow citizens and that their concern for the future is as real as ours.  We may not come to agreement, but the real sin is not failure, but not to try.

Note:  I originally posted this a few years ago.  Somehow this was linked by something, to the effect that it was being accessed constantly.  Views of this piece constitute something like 25 percent of my total views, for no apparent reason.  I reverted it to draft and am re-posing it due to interactions online.