Starbucks has unveiled its new seasonal cup and this time it comes with the message “Give Good.” Customers are encouraged to colour in the cardboard container and even draw some pictures on it. Oh, what fun. The banality of the slogan aside, it is what it is. A coffee cup. But just as last year and the one before, it’s seen by some as the first shot in the war on Christmas, that chimera built by conservatives so that they can claim persecution and argue that their rights are being curtailed.

On an immediate level, the Christian complaint about Starbucks shouldn’t concern the design of their coffee cups but that their workers are being paid minimum wage while the company’s owners and directors earn millions. And that what are often immigrants and the less privileged open stores at 5 a.m. and work awful hours for an income that will never pay their rent and properly feed them.

But on a grander scale it goes to the very heart of the religion-based politics that did so much to elect Donald Trump and is solidly behind Andrew Scheer at a federal level and Jason Kenney in Alberta. Put simply, the Christian right has developed a new and rather unholy trinity. They campaign and mobilize in the name of the free market, the unborn child, and homophobia.

Such a distortion of faith has always held enormous power in large parts of the United States but has expanded to a worrying degree in Canada. Christmas is merely a battlefield of course and the war is seen as being far more long-term. One of the ironies of the yuletide moaning, however, is that it’s not atheism but capitalism that has exploited Christmas and thus ripped apart its meaning. Yet that very capitalism is revered by the same people who complain about the war on Christmas.

In Canada the Christian right, while solidly economically conservative, has coalesced around issues of sex and sexuality. Oddly enough there’s something decidedly pagan about the movement’s obsession with these issues, and their worship of the fetus god and what they see as the virtual sanctity of procreative sex. Perhaps they’ve got their revolutionary Jewish thinkers mixed up — more Freud than Jesus?

The logical and moral discrepancies don’t end there. That olive-skinned first-century Galilean never refers to abortion or homosexuality, seems delightfully unconcerned about how and why people make love, and is eager to understand and forgive those accused of sexual sin. But my golly He does go on and on about social justice, the plight of the poor, the sins of the rich, the corruption of power, and that the problems of the world are hypocrisy and self-righteous religiosity.

That pristine, sparkling teaching of hope seems to have been lost somewhere along the way by many in the church, although it’s still flowing through the world’s body if we look for it. Thing is, those who live the authentic message tend not to make a lot of noise about what they do.

Christianity should be defined not by what it opposes but by what it affirms, not by its anger but by its joy. At heart it’s about a terrifying and colossally challenging reclassification of love, demanding that we embrace those who we would prefer to reject and even despise. The option of hatred is no longer available — it was thrown out 2,000 years ago, just as were the money men in the Temple.

The paradox of all this bites away at a creed that should be life changing and world transforming. As an example, I have probably learned more about my faith from gay Christians than from any other people. They’ve stayed true even though they’ve faced discrimination and sometimes worse from those around them. Yet those wonderful people who have inspired me are even now thought to be hell-bound by so many of the men and women who become visibly upset by the myth that they’re not allowed to wish others Merry Christmas in November!

If the Christian right were more Christian and less right not only would the world be a better place but also people would have far more regard for Christians. It’s surely not so difficult to understand and we shouldn’t need a double espresso to grasp its truth, whatever the packaging.

Michael Coren is a Toronto writer.

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