Religious Holidays as Social Problems

The holiday of Christmas has become a global social problem because it invites terrorism and other forms of violence. In fact, violence is a part of many religious holidays. On Purim in 1996, Palestinian terrorists killed 13 people and injured 125. During 2006 Ramadan, the spike in U.S. military deaths showed how religious holidays can motivate violence. Around the world, people remember Christmas violence—in the United States, Indonesia, Philippines, Tibet, Mexico, Romania, Algeria, the United Kingdom, Bosnia, Pakistan, Iraq, and Israel.

Puritans of colonial Massachusetts insisted that no proof existed of Jesus' birth on December 25 and outlawed Christmas in the second half of the 17th century. They were also protesting what they considered the pagan orgy of Christmas misrule. Elsewhere, the commemorations often led to relaxed norms against public excess and worker unrest. Drinking and mumming were central commemorations between colonial and Civil War eras. Mummers were rowdy groups of poor young men who sang carols or shouted rhymes and demanded food and drink from the wealthy, whose homes they boisterously entered. Insufficient “gifts” would cause mummers to riot through homes. Such commemorations thus inverted and perpetuated violent class relations.

As industrialization developed, observance of the Christmas holiday changed. Mythmakers like Washington Irving and Clement Moore borrowed the image of Santa Claus from German immigrants, and stories, poems, and drawings popularized Santa, the Christmas tree, presents, and family. By the 19th century's end, Christmas was codified in law, and a commercialized, family holiday replaced boisterous Christmas commemorations.

Throughout the 20th century, Christians continued periodic Christmas protest, fighting secularism and commercialism. In the contemporary United States, Christmas philanthropy increases, but conflict persists. Feminists target domestic violence even though scientists debate whether there are holiday spikes. Anti-suicide activists claim Christmas season as their bane, even though scientists deny a holiday spike. Christians resent deletion of Christmas carols from school assembly programs, while non-Christians object to nativity displays on municipal tax-supported property.

Recently, neoconservative Fox News anchors Bill O'Reilly and John Gibson and televangelists Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson organized a two-pronged Christmas campaign. First, a legal team zealously defended Christmas celebrations that had been banned. Second, a cultural team politicized Christmas commercialism. The televangelists' previous campaign was “keep Christ in Christmas”; their newer campaign asked to keep Christ commercialized, sponsoring boycotts of stores that refused to change advertising or in-store greetings from “Happy Holidays” to “Merry Christmas.” By 2005, campaigns successfully changed advertising and store practices, and according to Gallup polls, induced a major change in public opinion.

[Page 776]U.S. Christians may protest on a peaceful Christmas, but elsewhere, Christians more likely link Christmas and overt violence. Christmas terrorism emerged in the Far East on Christmas Eve 2000, when bombs exploded during Catholic and Protestant church services in Jakarta and five other Indonesian cities, killing over a dozen people, wounding hundreds, and worsening religious relations in the predominantly Muslim country. In 2004, in a Philippine port city, a bomb exploded in a market packed with Christmas shoppers, killing 15 people, injuring 58. In this predominantly Christian nation that had seen little terrorism, authorities blamed Muslim terrorists from the South Philippines. On Christmas 1997, a bomb exploded in the Tibetan capital, the biggest explosion in a series of previously ignored terrorist incidents. This Christmas bombing, however, brought international attention and meant Beijing could no longer ignore the problem of Buddhist terrorism.

...