Photo by Dan Kiefer on Unsplash.
Tis the season for the life and death struggle over holiday greetings. You may have seen by now that Starbucks will be using all red cups for the holiday season–a simple design with no reference to anything Christmas-related (or really to anything at all). Apparently, this has outraged some Christians who are now scheming for ways to poke Starbucks in the eye with all the Christmas bad cheer they can muster. (I say “apparently” because (1) I don’t assume people online are who they say they are, and (2) I’ve seen far more Christians outraged over the outrage than outraged in the first place.)
Which raises an increasingly relevant question: how should we respond when the secular saints and corporate gatekeepers decide that this time of year has nothing to do with Christmas and that Christmas has nothing to do with Christ?
I understand the angst. It is annoying when the local nativity scene which offended exactly no one for 50 years is forcibly removed, or can only stay up when an obnoxiously insincere ode to Satan is placed next to it. It is sad that in a country which is still overwhelmingly Christian (even if in name only) that you have to see your kids in the “winter program” sing about snowflakes and candles and Santa and almost anything that happens in December that isn’t Christmas. I too think it is silly for stores, in an effort to keep in lockstep with the purveyors of Correct Speech, to prohibit their clerks and coffeemakers from uttering the words “Merry Christmas” when the same store manager probably rails on the evils of censorship in his free time and teaches his kids to “question authority.” So yes, keeping Christ and Christmas out of the public square is a step backward for a culture that once believed the month of December was about something more than shopping and trying to stay thin.
But reviling when reviled is hardly a wise or biblical strategy. I get the frustration. And yet, surely we can do better than communicate to the watching world, “Screw you! I’ll get you to say ‘Merry Christmas’ if it’s the last thing I ever do, jerk!” If the idea is to keep words like Christmas in the public square–and hipper-than-thou Christians take note, that’s not a pointless goal–there are better ways to go about it.