In “Merry fucking Xmas, part II”, I mentioned in passing a piece from the Washington Post by E. J. Dionne Jr. called Peace on Earth? Not with this season’s Christmas wars. It’s a good bit, by a Xian, but sensible and worth a read. A few tastes:

The Christmas wars seem hotter this year. Listening to conservative talk shows and watching the lawsuits fly around, you’d think there’s a conspiracy to block celebrations of the birth of Jesus Christ. Politicians who speak of “the holidays” instead of “Christmas” now face angry Christian protests… Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and nonbelievers, meanwhile, insist that government should not push the faith of the majority into the faces of those who do not share it… [this] view is now being dismissed as “political correctness,” an increasingly meaningless phrase invoked to attack any point of view that conflicts with conservative preferences. If respecting the rights of religious minorities is “political correctness,” that makes Thomas Jefferson and the First Amendment “politically correct”… There is something defective about a religious tolerance open to every expression of religion except for the faith of those who believe most passionately… But such respect cannot come at the expense of the rights of those who are not Christian. At the personal level: What in the world is “Christian” about insisting on saying “Merry Christmas” to a devout Jew or Hindu who might reasonably view the statement as a sign of disrespect? At the level of government: Is it really “Christian” for a religious majority to press its advantage over religious minorities, including nonbelievers?… The great Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr wrote that “the chief source of man’s inhumanity to man seems to be the tribal limits of his sense of obligation to other men.” I fear that in these Christmas debates, Christians are behaving not as Christians but as a tribe: “We will pound them if they get in the way of our customs and rituals”… Tribal behavior is antithetical to the spirit of peace and good will. In this season, we ought to be taking the most expansive possible view of our obligations to others.

I don’t agree with every word. But not bad, for one of “them”.