Opinion: Christmas and Koran-bashing

This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.

At first glance, the “war over Christmas” (my preferred term for what right-wingers call the “war on Christmas”) might seem a separate issue from the controversy over Rep. Virgil Goode’s Koran-bashing. Goode is the Virginia congressman who is irked because an incoming Muslim member of Congress wants to use the Koran at his unofficial swearing-in.

Don’t be so sure.

Goode is fair game for the abuse he is receiving, not just because of his obtuseness about the need for religious freedom but also because he seems to be in urgent need of a fact-checker. Goode linked his criticism of the Koran oath-taking with his opposition to immigration by Muslims.

‘If American citizens don’t take up and adopt the Virgil Goode position on immigration,” the congressman said, “there will likely be many more Muslims elected to office and demanding the use of the Koran.’ Problem is: The incoming Muslim congressman, Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), is not an immigrant but a native-born African-American who converted to Islam in college.

Goode’s criticism is so cartoonish that it’s tempting to dismiss him as an eccentric outlier. I’m not so sure. I speak as a veteran of the Christmas wars – I used to be a newspaper editor in Pittsburgh, Pa., ground zero for one of the great Christmas display controversies to reach the U.S. Supreme Court (read the opinion here). My abiding impression of the seasonal skirmishes over religious displays is that they aren’t about religion so much as they are about bragging rights.

Let’s face it: It feels good to be in the majority, and it feels even better when your majority status is institutionalized (consecrated?) by government. The Pittsburghers who clamored for a Nativity scene at the county courthouse could have gotten their manger fix at lots of locations in the city, including churches. But that wasn’t the point. The agitation for returning religion (our religion, that is) to the so-called public square is rooted, I’m afraid, in a desire to flaunt one’s majority status. (Anyone interested in a longer version of this argument can find it here.)

I suspect the people cheering on Goode are motivated by the same anxiety about “us” losing ground to “them,” and I’m not sure it matters that the Koran is (mis)used by Muslim terrorists.