Now that Thanksgiving is over along with the annual trotting out of the Plymouth Rock pilgrim story as proof that America is a “Christian nation,” we can start looking forward (so to speak) to much the same thing from evangelicals during the Christmas season.

It’s already begun.

‘Naughty or nice’

The Christian Right has started to raise its yearly alarm, without evidence, that secular heathens are waging a widespread “war on Christmas,” Rob Boston wrote this week in his “Wall of Separation Blog” on the Americans United for Separation of Church and State website.

“Liberty Counsel, a group of fundamentalist Christian attorneys best known for championing the stunts of soon-to-be former Rowan County, Ky., Clerk Kim Davis, is determined to make us use the appropriate, religiously correct terminology this year,” Boston wrote. “Its annual “Naughty and Nice Retail List” for 2018 is designed to punish retailers who fail to toe the line.”

You probably well remember Davis, who as a taxpayer-paid county clerk in 2015 refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples — two months after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled such discrimination illegal — and thus became a darling of religious fundamentalists and alt-right reconstructionists. In fact, it was worse than that, Boston wrote in an earlier post:

“Understand, Davis didn’t just say that she’d pass the task onto someone else. Davis ordered everyone in her taxpayer-funded, government office to refuse to extend to LGBTQ people a service they had a legal right to receive.”

Later she changed horses and decided to refuse licenses to everyone, meaning someone else in her office had to do her job while she kept getting paid. Although she wasn’t fired (but should have been), she was just beaten by 700 votes — by a Democrat (Elwood Caudill Jr.)! — in her midterm bid for re-election. Sad.

Keeping retailers pious

Getting back to the Liberty Counsel initiative, it’s part of the Religious Right’s widescale creation of such “naughty and nice” lists to try and punish retailers who not only don’t say “Christmas” enough in their online advertising and promotional materials to meet evangelical criteria, but also don’t promote Christian scriptural doctrine enough.

The gist of the initiatives is the fundamentalist idea that, as Boston notes, “there’s only one way to celebrate the Christmas holiday — theirs!”

To tabulate these lists, Liberty Counsel (and other groups) assign people to comb through retailers’ websites and count, among other things, the number of times they use the term “Christmas,” as opposed to words like “holiday” and “season.” The monitors — “Christmas Police,” Boston calls them — also count the number of “authentic” Christianity-derived merchandize retailers sell, such as nativity scenes. (Assumedly, not selling “Christmas trees” won’t earn demerits because trees, notably sparse in Bethlehem we’re told, aren’t really a historic part of the Christ story.

Unfortunately, the campaign is inconsistently vetted, and whereas one store selling a ton of Liberty Counsel-friendly Christmas stuff might get blacklisted as “naughty” because it doesn’t seem to say “Christmas” enough in its promotions while another outfit might get a thumbs-down for exactly the opposite problem.

Good luck with that

But Liberty Counsel is nothing if not self-deluded. As Boston points out, good luck getting retailers to change anything that might negatively affect their bottom lines. He wrote:

“Big Businesses. They want to make money. If Liberty Counsel, the American Family Association and other members of the Christmas Police actually expect faceless, bottom-line-obsessed corporations to lift up the religious aspects of Christmas for them, they’re bound to be disappointed.”

Let’s hope he’s right.

I’m counting on customers at Starbucks, say, to care not a wit if (as last year) a non-Christian symbol appears on a Starbucks cup in which their beloved seasonal eggnog latte is served.

This holiday season, remember that any American can still say “Christmas” anytime they want, anywhere, or any other stand-in term for the holiday, as always. Or not. Such choice is what America is all about. Forcing people to say things — religious things, would be particularly inappropriate — is so not what we’re about.

If Benjamin Franklin, for example, knew someone was trying to force all Americans to mouth religious terms, I’m pretty sure he’d have told them to go fly a kite.

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