Christians Have a Persecution Complex

Like megachurches, homeschooling, and Tim Tebow, “Merry Christmas” has become a religio-cultural Rorschach test.  If you prefer that department stores greet you with a “Merry Christmas,” or at least wish they didn’t feel compelled to adopt the anodyne “Happy Holidays,” chances are good you’re a conservative Christian of some stripe.  If, on the other hand, you prefer to talk about how ridiculous it is that anyone should care how a department store greets them, or if you prefer to mock that concern and say that people who feel that concern should (a) get a life or (b) stop trying to impose their religion or (c) remember the true meaning of persecution, then chances are that you belong to that coalition of groups that tend to feel scorn for conservative Christians — which is to say atheists, progressive Christians, and other liberal religious groups such as New Agers, Neo-Pagans or “Nones”.

There were a couple examples of the latter at Patheos over the past month.  James McGrath, a progressive Christian academic who blogs at Exploring Our Matrix (often a very funny blog), thought he’d flip the script by posting on “Christmas: The Christian ‘War on Solstice‘”.  McGrath explains that he devoted a recent Sunday School class discussing “one of the great Christmas miracles: the fact that long ago Christians managed to ‘hijack’ the already-existing solstice festival, and turn it into a Christian celebration so thoroughly and so effectively that, more than a millennium and a half later, cultural Christians can complain about the ‘hijacking’ or ‘secularization’ of Christmas without any sense of irony.”  (Apparently, the co-opting of a religious celebration by a very different set of Christians over 1500 years ago means that American Christians cannot show concern about the co-opting of their religious celebration today.)  Since the Bible neither provides the date of Jesus’ birth nor enjoins the commemoration of it, and (McGrath says) Christmas is the result of taking a pagan holiday and transforming it into a Christian one…