Every time I read about the likes of Bill O’Reilly complaining about the fact that not everyone celebrates Christmas, I wonder “where are the Christians complaining about the commercialization and secularization and general cheapening of Christmas? Where are the Christians saying ‘hey, this is a holiday with profound religious importance to us, we don’t appreciate the dilution of that’?”

Well, I just sorta got an answer in the form of a Chicago Tribune op-ed by Garrison Keillor. Unfortunately, Keillor turns out not to be the best emissary for this message. I found out about it through Greta Christina, and certainly agree that the tone of the piece is ugly, especially the crack about “lousy holiday songs by Jewish guys that trash up the malls every year.” In spite of this, I think the point has some validity. In her post, Greta stresses “cultural hegemony and Christianity being the dominant religious culture, and how being the dominant culture means you have to suck it up when other cultures adapt your traditions and put their own spin on it.” Does that mean the complaint would be valid if Christianity were a minority religion? Imagine this scenario happening with a minority religion, and I think most people would say “yes.”

But in reality, Christianity isn’t taken all that seriously in the mainstream culture, and mainstream treatment of Christian holidays is a major indicator of that. Given much of the Bible’s content, and what Christianity was like before the rise of political liberalism, to a great degree this is a relief. But it makes the complaints of serious Christians around the holiday season understandable.

Not that any of this will affect my behavior much. For me, Christmas is mainly an excuse to buy presents for people I wanted to buy presents for anyway. “Merry Christmas” saves me from a more elaborate explanation of the gift. And I’ll keep doing that. Thinking about this, I realize maybe I should take the holidays more seriously for all the reasons Greta gives in another recent post. Though that probably won’t affect me either.