This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I feel like there's some tension here.
Is Christmas a particularly Christian holiday, so that attacks on the prominence of Christmas are attacks on Christianity? Or is Christmas so secularized as to have not much association with Christianity, and so non-Christians should have no objection to celebrating it?
I feel like this comment is trying to have it both ways. Whenever Christianity is under attack its a distinctly Christian affair so that attacks on Christmas are attacks on Christianity. Whenever Christmas is being celebrated, though, it's merely a secular holiday with no particular religious associations that no one should feel uncomfortable celebrating! This might be rhetorically convenient for Christians but seems like there's some tension here too me.
There is definitely tension. The Santa Claus version of Christmas with the reindeer and the elves and the North Pole is the new, secular, version of the festival. And even that is being improved upon with Mrs. Santa Claus, black Santa Claus, you name it (I think I'm still waiting for mainstream gay Santa, why no Mr. and Mr. Claus yet? No "I Saw Daddy Kissing Santa Claus"?*). The popular notion of Christmas is increasingly separate from the original Christian feast day. And yet they are still tangled together at the roots.
It's when those secular symbols get objected to, and insistence that you have to have the 'randomly chosen symbol from other faith or tradition' displayed alongside them or instead of them, that the murkiness sets in. Is Christmas a religious feast or a secular festival? Both? If we emphasise the secular festival, have we done away with the sectarian religious element?
If you're objecting to Santa because he's still Christian, then secular Christmas is not standing on its own, and claiming that this particular holiday is not uniquely Christian and so should be packed in with a grab-bag of "Happy Holidays" doesn't work. You can only have "Happy Holidays" if the festival being celebrated is, in effect, Yule (and long divorced from its original roots, and I don't count Wiccan/Pagan Yule as traditional) so it can be packaged alongside Kwanzaa and Hanukkah and any other scraped-together 'at the same date' festival from other traditions.
*Looks like the Norwegian postal service got there in 2021!
More options
Context Copy link
It helps when the attackers clarify that they are, in fact, targeting Christians with their statements. For example, see this excerpt from the Canadian Human Rights Commission:
(Any non religious attacks on Christmas are so utterly banal that they've slipped my mind. Something something commercialization? Something something bad family dynamics? Snow is cold?)
When's the last time that you saw a Christmas movie that included mass? How about the last time you've seen a government agency or an official (not a politician) celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Saviour? Heck, I can't remember the last time I've heard a "Bethlehem and Jesus" style song on the radio instead of a "Presents and Reindeer" one.
The religious connotations haven't been entirely removed, but it's not far off.
Really? Joy to the World, Mary did you Know, Oh Come all ye Faithful, etc. are all pretty commonly played on the radio in late December where I am. What they don't play is actual religious hymns, but did you really expect them to?
I'll start counting from now on, and (if I remember) I'll post the results in a month. Currently, I'm at 3 secular, 0 religious Christmas songs.
EDIT: 24-0
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
A point that rankles my American other half, year after year, is that the "Christmas Music" played publicly here in Ireland is a completely different canon to what she grew up with back home. And, unusually, there is just a total failure of Americanisation in the domain of Christmas music - her canon seems ancient (many tunes from the 1950s versus a tilt towards the 1980s here, because of different population pyramids - we don't have a bulge of 60-70 year olds monopolising all the cultural memory space) and painfully schmaltzy to most Irish ears, including my own.
For example, the universally-acknowledged GOAT of Christmas music in Ireland is The Pogues' Fairytale of New York, a thoroughly secular 1980s ballad that consistently rankles schoolmarmish woke types not because of overt Christofascism, but because the word "faggot", in the pejorative sense, is a key lyric. This song gives rise to the only occassion in modern Ireland where a person can drunkenly chant the word "faggot" at a stuffy office (Christmas) party and recieve no censure.
Overtly religious stuff is also played publicly (a fine example is Mary's Boy Child by Boney M, a jaunty German-calypso tune) because it's a religious holiday. The modal Irish person under 35 sounds like a Q-Anon believer when discussing Catholicism (it's a giant conspiracy run by paedos to amass wealth & get a go of children), yet will still tolerate religious music at Christmas because, come on. I don't know how American culture has managed to get away from this. Maybe it really is semitic sour grapes from the pullers of American cultural levers.
More options
Context Copy link
In stores and malls, I haven't heard any religious Christmas music since sometime in the 1990s. It's just one billion repetitions of "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas", "Chestnuts Rosting on an Open Fire", and various pop abominations.
My two local malls (Tysons Corner Center and Tysons Galleria) and the stores in them, in fact, have really been skimping on Christmas decorations in the past few years. In the 1980s, the whole place used to get transformed: tinsel and colored lights everywhere, decorated trees in every shop window. Seeing this used to be one of the things I most looked forward to about the Christmas season.
Nowadays, there are just a few anemic strings of white lights hanging from the ceiling (colored lights seem to be permanently out of fashion for some reason) and almost no stores have any decorations put up at all!
I suspect it has something to do with the fact that the area now has a sizable Muslim population (when I go there now, maybe a quarter to a third of the women are wearing headscarves or hijab) who'd rather not see a Christian holiday celebrated, although I doubt anyone would admit publically that that's the reason.
I think this is part of a wider aesthetic shift towards being sleek/minimalistic that has been happening for a long time. I distinctly remember noticing as a kid in the early 2000s that there was a trend with upper-class people more likely to do white lights and lower-class being more likely to do colored lights. I tried to get my folks to put up colored lights instead of white lights, but the compromise ended up being all one color (I chose blue, which led to people asking if we had converted to Judaism).
Colours can be tasteful if they're used with care but generally less is more. Our neighbours use multicoloured lights but it's offset by each bulb being very small. The bigger the display the more the colours will clash. Red and white could be a suitable combination for the season but monochrome white makes an effective Schelling point for a whole neighbourhood to converge on and create a semi-coordinated appearance.
For me blue lights don't say Christmas (or Judaism), they say either "blue LEDs hit the market and everyone began using them in order to look more futuristic... twenty years ago" or "emergency vehicle". The one positive is that it's not as eerie and unearthly as green. Blue is cold and eye-catching and that's why it's such a confusing choice to have a big bright one on the front of so many TVs, but again: "futuristic". Christmas lights should be warm and festive, like a log fire reflected on a brass coal scuttle or candlelight shining through stained-glass. White lights are bland but at least they're reminiscent of frost and snow and fit a wintertime palette.
I've noticed a lot of people don't distinguish between warm and cold white though and end up using the bluish white lights indoors where a warmer tone would be much cosier and more inviting, leaving their sitting room with a similar lighting ambience to a commercial kitchen.
I guess that now LED ropes are getting cheaper soon everything will look like Tron. "Bloop bloop bloop! Merry twelve slash twenty five."
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I've definitely heard "Silent Night" recently. And the vastly overplayed Trans-Siberian Orchestra compilation includes religious songs.
Skimping on Christmas decorations is probably a result of the general decline of in-store shopping.
YMMV - malls in my area are absolutely packed right now. There seems to be a kind of resurgence going on now that the recession is cancelled.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think acknowledging the Christian roots of these holidays and wanting acknowledgements of other religious holidays is distinct from being an attack on Christianity. The obvious reason why holidays like Good Friday and Christmas are holidays acknowledged by the federal government is religious, specifically Christian, influence. This is distinct from other non-religious holidays (like Canada Day or Thanksgiving). The question is whether the elevation of those specific holidays comport with our present values. What's the justification for having a federal holiday for Christian holidays but not Jewish ones? Or Muslim ones? Or any other religion? Having your nation's federal government have specific holidays that correspond to Christian holidays, but no other religion's, certainly feels like religious bigotry to me!
Oppressing the majority and being intolerant to their culture and religion for the sake of accommodating minorities is not a good idea if one wants to combat religious bigotry. It actually what you do if you want to enforce it, and that is why conquering religions did just that on majorities they conquered.
What you suggest is not the end of bigotry but the elevation of it by an oppression of the majority by an alliance of minorities. AKA progressive stack religious edition the anti-Christian version.
In the case of an atheist allying with religious minorities against the majority then you still got bigotry of the atheist and the religious minorities. Not only are atheists not exempt from bigotry, but in the modern world have been some of the worst participants in it, with Christians being often the victims.
And if someone has the goal of an atheistic state oppressing all religions, you got an oppression there too. Both that and nor not allowing the majority the right to celebrate their religion are a case of a worse value system and not a better one.
Moreover, like non Christians have their own countries and there is no agitation of this nature, so do Christians have theirs. In fact there is no agitation of this extend about avoiding actual mistreatment of Christians neither in Israel nor in Muslims countries the two examples you mentioned. There is some by the Christian community in Israel but not much attention by those eager to complain about religious bigotry. Albeit, the worst state about mistreating Christians is one of the Muslim ones and not the Jewish one. Maybe Pakistan.
I guess a final point to be made is that experience with the progressive movement and identitarians who align with it tells us that even one-sided multi-culturalism has not been the end point. In fact we see some double standards even now and it is rather plausible that once Christian religion has been even further delegitimized, this will be enforced savagely with the tactic of associating Christianity with evil oppression and hatred, while there will be more tolerance towards other religions like the Jewish and Muslim ones you mentioned. This fits with the general pattern of an alliance of minorities against the majority. So if Christians want to avoid bigotry, the last thing they ought to do is listen to the Anti-Christians.
More options
Context Copy link
It seems to me there is a trade off between inclusivity and tolerance. Tolerance permits the majority to arrange society as they like while permitting effectively opt out whereas inclusivity encourages society to either be neutral or even adopt according to the minority.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Good observation. Lately I've been feeling like Christmastime begins and ends on the 24th, when I go to church for once in a year. And I'm not even religious. The Advent season, which in my childhood spanned late November to early January, used to be festive and distinctly Christian - but over the last thirty years, the Christian connotations indeed seem to have been lost, and it cheapened the whole affair to the point where it really is all about chocolate and presents and seemingly random themes like reindeer and jolly santa clauses.
Something's been lost. I guess I could still get the original Advent feeling if I actively sought it out, but it's no longer "in the air", as they say.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I'm an agnostic so I'm not particularly concerned with Christianity. I'll put it simply. There is no such thing as "the holidays". So any direct call to name it "the holidays" is a direct attack on Christianity by its definition. Christmas is more or less a secular holiday at this point, so attacking Christmas underlies an anti-Christian worldview since the average non-Christian is fine celebrating Christmas. The only person that would care about this from the anti-Christmas perspective is one who is against Christianity having any public rituals or any role in society.
I mean, I'm an atheist for whatever that's worth.
For my part I think of the "holiday season" as encompassing all the holidays from Thanksgiving to New Years. Christmas is the biggest of those but not the only one. I'm also unconvinced that because Hanukkah is not that big in Judaism it deserves to be ignored.
I'm also unclear on how attacks on Christmas can be anti-Christian if Christmas is not particularly Christian. Are people opposed to Christmas because of its celebration of consumerism anti-Christian?
I'm not convinced that you're describing people who exist. The main critics of toyotathon and Christmas sales are religious Christians who see it as taking away from the true meaning of the holiday. The main criticism of public Christmas celebrations is Christianity.
More options
Context Copy link
This is looking for a loophole and a gotcha to justify attacks on Christians which are anti-Christian.
Christmas is particularly Christian and to the extend it has been de-Christianized it is still attacked on the basis of Christian origin and being too Christian.
But that isn't the primary argument you have used against Christmas but that it is Christian and it is religious bigotry for not equal space to be given to other religions and not undermining the Christian one. So it isn't correct that opposition to Christmas is mainly about anti-consumerism.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link