“Waging A Hopeless War Against Demographic Shifts”: Fox News Has Already Lost Its War On Christmas
Take down the Christmas tree Holiday Conifer and pack up the Nativity set Biblical-themed diorama: The War on Christmas is over, and the secularists have won.
While Fox News was busy insisting that Santa (and Jesus) are white, a couple of new polls pointed to something that the network has been warning about for years: Christmas has gradually become less of a religious holiday, and more of a cultural one.
First up, a Public Religion Research Institute survey released Tuesday found that almost half (49 percent) of Americans believe stores should use non-denominational greetings like “happy holidays.” That’s up slightly from three years ago, when 44 percent preferred a less-religious platitude to the traditional “Merry Christmas.”
At the same time, just under half of all Americans (49 percent) now believe the Biblical story of Christmas — virgin birth, angels, three wise man, and so on — is historically accurate. That’s a steep decline from a decade ago, when fully two-thirds of Americans believed the story was completely true.
So what happened to America? In a word: Aging.
Younger Americans are far less likely than older ones to view Christmas as a religious holiday. Much like how same-sex marriage, marijuana legalization, and other once-untouchable wedge issues have been blunted by the nation’s shifting demographics, the same phenomenon is evident in America’s changing views of Christmas.
A recent Pew poll bears out this point. In the survey, 51 percent of respondents say Christmas is “more of a religious holiday,” while 32 percent say it is more so a cultural one. But among adults ages 18-29, only a 39 percent minority say they celebrate Christmas as a religious holiday; among those 65 and up, 66 percent say the same.
Moreover, though seven in ten respondents in the survey say they typically went to religious Christmas services as children, only 54 percent say they plan to do the same this year.
The shift reflects America’s growing body of so-called “nones,” or the religiously unaffiliated, whose share of the population rose from 15 to 20 percent in the last five years alone. With that group on the rise, and with millennials beginning to skew the nation’s overall demographic makeup, an uptick in support for a more secular Christmas should be expected.
So Fox News is sort of right in saying that “Yes, Virginia, there really is a War on Christmas.” But the war isn’t one being waged by fanatical, intolerant liberals and foaming-at-the-mouth atheists. It’s one being waged by inexorable shifts in America’s demographics and beliefs.
By: Jon Terbush, The Week, December 18, 2013
“Jesus Wasn’t White, But Santa Definitely Is”: It Also Seems That Santa Is From Mississippi
This past week, Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly and her guests were discussing an article by Aisha Harris in which Harris described how Santa’s consistent depiction as a white man made her feel uncomfortable and excluded as a young black girl in America.
As her panelists began to broach the topic, Kelly made what she clearly thought was an important interjection:
And by the way, for all you kids watching at home, Santa just is white. But this person is maybe just arguing that we should also have a black Santa. But, you know, Santa is what he is, and just so you know, we’re just debating this because someone wrote about it, kids.
And she went on:
Just because it makes you feel uncomfortable doesn’t mean it has to change. You know, I mean, Jesus was a white man too. He was a historical figure; that’s a verifiable fact – as is Santa, I want you kids watching to know that.
So, according to Kelly, Santa is white, and so is Jesus. And I must say, in my opinion, she is half right, which is one more half right than she usually is.
Jesus isn’t white, but Santa definitely is.
Santa is basically a benevolent imaginary character with super powers. And if you’ve seen any superhero movies, those types of characters tend to usually be white. So his whiteness is really no surprise. But if white people want Santa, they can have him. All he ever got me for Christmas was socks and cologne. And you can only have so many bottles of Eternity.
Santa has the complexion of an egg. He is obese, and he rarely speaks in complete sentences. Not only is Santa white, it also seems that he is from Mississippi. The only times they name streets after nonwhites is when they lead civil rights movements, and even then it’s controversial. Santa has a street named after him for no good reason (remember “Santa Claus Lane”?). He is definitely white.
Santa is bit of a loner. Every year, he sits around his house making intricate gadgets with his imaginary assistants for 364 days. Then, he only visits his actual friends for one day. He is white for sure.
Santa makes his darker, subjugated, captive workers put in all the effort while he takes all the credit. As far as I know, those reindeer are not getting paid. Master Santa enjoys the fruits of their hard labor. And what do they get? A song. And it’s only about one of them. What an injustice!
So, Santa is unquestionably white. But what about Jesus? Kelly said that Jesus’ whiteness was a “verifiable fact.” Now, I have a bit of a personal connection here. I am a Palestinian, as was Jesus. He was born in Bethlehem, just south of Jerusalem. Jesus lived most of his life in Nazareth, which also happens to be the city of my origin. But I have never lived in Nazareth because of… well, that’s for another time.
Now it’s very possible that Megyn Kelly may have been a little confused here. If you simply type “Bethlehem” into Wikipedia, chaos ensues. There are Bethlehems all over the place. There’s one in Pennsylvania, one in New York, one in Connecticut, and one in Maryland. And it doesn’t stop there. They even have Bethlehems in England, South Africa, Switzerland, New Zealand, and the Netherlands. This can be quite overwhelming.
If you take a quick look at a map of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, there’s a town just 9 miles up the road named Nazareth. If you didn’t know any better, you could have thought Jesus grew up in that neighborhood. But that part of eastern Pennsylvania is also just a few miles from New Jersey, and I really can’t imagine Jesus having anything remotely to do with New Jersey.
Now, even if Megyn knew that the Nazareth and Bethlehem we associate with Jesus were halfway across the world, she still could have thought he was white. After all, the United States government defines white people as “original peoples of Europe, North Africa, or the Middle East.” That would make Jesus white, except for the fact that he would not be the kind of white person that Megyn Kelly meant. In other words, I don’t think Megyn Kelly would consider my dad white, or Paula Abdul white, or Ahmed Ahmed white. But Jesus would look much more like any of those people than he would like her.
So Jesus wasn’t white. He didn’t look like Brad Pitt. He looked like Tony Shalhoub. He looked less like the pilgrims, and more like the people the pilgrims stole land from. He was not a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant. He was an Olive Semitic Nazarene Jew.
If Jesus were here today, he would be exactly the kind of guy that most Fox News anchors would be in favor of racially profiling. He would be on the No Fly List (my editor is making me point out that Jon Stewart made a similar joke), not that Jesus needs a plane to fly, but whatever.
And by the way Megyn, if Jesus were here today, he wouldn’t be a Tea Partier or a Republican. In fact, he wouldn’t even be a political conservative. He would believe in his own mantra of “that which you do to the least of my brethren, you do to me.” He would be upset that we spend more money on building monuments to him than we do on feeding our poor. He would be dismayed that we are supporting repressive governments to serve our interests. And he would be disappointed that we spend four times as much on our military than we do on educating our children.
After much criticism of her comments, Megyn Kelly responded with the “I was just joking” defense. “Humor is part of what we try to bring to the show. Sometimes that’s lost on the humorless,” she said of her declaration of Santa’s whiteness. But Megyn is making the same mistake many young comedians make early in their careers. See, a “joke” is a “joke” because it’s “funny.” And you don’t decide if it’s funny, your audience does. Megyn, what you said wasn’t funny. Well, we were laughing, but it wasn’t because you were trying to be funny.
As far as Jesus goes, Kelly did admit that it had been wrong for her to proclaim Jesus’ whiteness. Jesus’ race is “far from settled,” she acknowledged. She couldn’t bring herself to say he wasn’t white.
Megyn, please listen to me. Jesus’ origins are not “far from settled.” He was not white. He was from Palestine, not North Carolina. He was from where I am from, not where you are from. He fought against injustice and inequality. He was from my world, not yours.
White people can have the old, fat, white fantasy figure. But we’ll keep the olive-skinned, liberal, generous, charitable freedom fighter. We know much better what to do with him.
By: Amer Zahr, Time, December 18, 2013
“A Bleeding-Heart Liberal”: Why Conservatives Should Hate Santa Claus
The war over the War on Christmas has flared up again. Slate’s Aisha Harris fired the latest salvo with her piece last week, “Santa Claus Should Not Be a White Man Anymore,” prompting a famously confused response from Fox News host Megyn Kelly that “Santa Claus just is white” and “Jesus was a white man, too. He was a historical figure, I mean, that’s verifiable fact—as is Santa.” Every single living being on the Internet weighed in. Kelly later defended herself in the usual manner of someone who regrets having said something: “Humor is a part of what we try to bring to this show, but sometimes that is lost on the humorless.”
She was not joking, of course. To conservatives—of which she is one—the War on Christmas is a very real and serious thing, and the holiday’s two most revered figures, Jesus and Santa, must be defended at all costs from liberals who would dare make the holiday more inclusive. What’s even weirder than the insistence that Santa is white, though, is that conservatives dare to defend him in the first place. He’s a conservative’s worst nightmare, actually.
Consider the lyrics to “Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town”:
He’s making a list / Checking it twice / Gonna find out who’s naughty or nice / Santa Claus is coming to town
He sees you when you’re sleeping / He knows when you’re awake / He knows if you’ve been bad or good / So be good for goodness sake
That he’s “making a list” sounds more than vaguely McCarthyistic, I’ll admit, but this is 2013, not 1954. You know who makes lists these days? The National Security Agency—for the express purpose of finding out who has been, or may one day be, naughty. By monitoring your emails and cell phone metadata, the NSA also has a pretty good idea of when you’re sleeping or awake. (Another agency that likes lists: the Internal Revenue Service.)
Santa invades our privacy in more literal ways, too. He breaks into everyone’s homes in the middle of the night—a crime that no one of any political persuasion, except perhaps anarchists, should endorse—and once inside, what does he do? He leaves presents totaling hundreds or thousands of dollars under your tree. You know who else gives Americans free stuff simply for being alive, rather than making recipients work for it? The bloated federal government and its social safety net. Every day, millions of Americans open unearned gifts in the form of Medicaid, unemployment insurance, TANF, and food stamps.
Santa’s home address further complicates matters. Eventually the North Pole will become the equivalent of a Caribbean beach, converting Santa into the world’s most famous and influential climate-change activist—at which point the only coal being mined in America will end up in presents beneath conservatives’ Christmas trees.
And as longtime Santa actor Jonathan Meath points out, “Santa is really the only cultural icon we have who’s male, doesn’t carry a gun, and is all about peace, joy, giving, and caring for other people.” Sure sounds like a bleeding-heart liberal to me.
Note: Humor is a part of what we try to bring to this website, but sometimes that is lost on the humorless.
By: Ryan Kearney, The New Republic, December 16, 2013
“Who Cares If Santa Claus Is Real?”: The Megyn Kelly Scandal Is About Race
The brouhaha over Megyn Kelly’s comments about Santa Claus continued this weekend with Kelly’s astonishingly dishonest non-apology. But first a recap: after an article in Slate argued that Santa Claus should not necessarily be played by white men, Kelly expressed outrage on Fox News over the politicizing of her beloved Christmas. “Santa just is white,” Kelly stated. “Santa is what he is.” (She added that Jesus was “a white man too.”) Understandably, the internet erupted in outrage, Jon Stewart mocked Kelly, and various commentators pointed out that the Santa Claus most people recognize today is barely based on Saint Nicholas, who himself was from what today is Turkey. So, on Friday Kelly went back on her show to address the controversy.
It’s here that I should say my once stalwart confidence in the P.R. geniuses at Fox has been shaken. Apparently the best they could come up with was that Kelly was joking (as she states in this clip: http://mediamatters.org/embed/static/clips/2013/12/13/33245/fnc-kf-20131213-whitesantaresponse ), but then she proceeds to play the clip from the previous show where it is abundantly clear that she was not joking. Guys, c’mon! This isn’t rocket science. Kelly then went on to say that America is becoming too politically correct and sensitive, and that Fox News is targeted for its politics.
It’s this last bit that is the most interesting, and also explains why people have been focusing on the wrong aspect of this story. “Race is still an incredibly volatile issue in this country, and Fox News and yours truly are big targets for many people,” Kelly said. Well, yes. Both those things are literally true. But Kelly wasn’t saying them because they are true. She was saying them because one of Fox’s most popular topics is that white people are victimized by accusations of racism, and must tiptoe around all racial topics. (Of course this would be less true if our society didn’t have so much racially insensitive garbage peddled by the likes of Fox News, but let’s leave that aside). In short, Kelly was playing the victimization/self-pity card, which white conservatives have oh-so-charmingly been playing for decades.
But why is this especially relevant? Because this same card was the whole point of the original segment. Why do you think a Fox panel was discussing a Slate piece in the first piece? Well, because they want their audience to feel under siege, and who better (in the minds of Fox execs) to be under siege from than non-whites.
The historical accuracy of Kelly’s comments, which has garnered the most attention, is nearly irrelevant. Imagine for a moment that Santa was real and white, and then imagine that Jesus was white too. And then ask yourself why Fox would run the segment. (Hint: It would have nothing to do with historical accuracy). Fox wants to rile up racial feelings because that is what Fox does. The accuracy can be called into question here, but what is truly despicable is the intent.
This particular Fox News controversy was about religion; yesterday’s was about Sean Hannity lovingly interviewing George Zimmerman; tomorrow’s will be about God-knows-what. Our #1 news channel loves dealing in racial innuendo, regardless of the ostensible topic. Santa has nothing to do with it.
By: Isaac Chotiner, The New Republic, December 15, 2013
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