About.com: Taking Back Christmas as Engineered Hate

If there is one thing that theitards know, it's hate.  They are probably the most proficient purveyors of that sentiment.  So, if there is a time of year when their culture is in the forefront of the media and everyone's mind, it's their precious christMyth season.  At this time, isn't it a perfect time of year to promote and foster as much hate as possible?

Taking Back Christmas as Engineered Hate

What do you suppose is behind the Christian Right's campaign to "take back" Christmas from the "godless" hordes of liberals and secularists? It's an important question because this sort of thing didn't occur during earlier decades -- the Christian Right was occupied by other issues. Unless we understand why this obsession developed in recent years, we won't be able to properly deal with it.

BS wrote a couple of years ago when the "War on Christmas" was still pretty new:

[W]hen conservatives piss and moan about secularists taking Jesus out of their precious holidays, they would do well to remember that he only moved in there, himself, recently. ... [T]his whole thing is an engineered working-up of people.

The [2004] election has been over for a month, and despite blather about "coming together", it's apparent that the right wing, the media, and the right wing media (as they become ever-more indistinguishable) are unable to even wait until the re-coronation of their beloved chimperor before they start taking the inevitable cultural swipes at the great liberal enemy.

This was a depressing assessment of the situation, but it also sounds like it had more than a little merit -- and that just makes it worse. Attempts by the Christian right to whip up mobs against an internal "enemy" can only lead to tragedy for one group or another. Enfranchised majorities who are made to feel like oppressed victims can lash out in ways that do real damage to society in repayment for completely unreal wrongs.

Of course, their manufactured "War on Christmas" isn't the only attempt by the Christian Right to engineer hate; if anything, it's actually the least successful. It has helped them raise a lot of money I suppose, but it hasn't produced a lot of widespread hatred and activism. Contrast that with the hate they have engineered against other groups like gays over the past couple of decades and Muslims over the past few years.

There is a pattern here which is unmistakable; the only question is to what degree it is deliberate and organized and to what degree it is merely a spontaneous expression of internalized bigotry and fear.