Mr Holdsworth looks at the plans to destroy the interior of Notre Dame.
It's that time of year again, when Christians of various stripes complain about the war on Christmas and if it isn’t Christmas it’s some other effort to marginalize or erase Christianity from the public sphere. By a war on Christmas, they mean the watering down of the festival of Christmas in order to turn it into some secularized silhouette of its former self.
For example, the vernacular authoritarians will complain that it’s offensive to non-Christians to use the word Christmas, so we have to substitute it with some vacuous alternative like “happy holidays” which is amusingly ironic because holiday means holy day which should give you some indication of the origin of the concept of a holiday… it comes from the Catholic Church scattering days of celebration throughout the Gregorian calendar, which the Church invented. All of which is to say, if you want to fully vandalize the Christian cultural heritage to make it appear like it never existed, there’s more work to be done.
And when some Christians complain about such cultural appropriation, they are met with ridicule from non-Christians as well as some Christians who claim that this is not worth getting upset about and that if you truly think you’re being persecuted, go learn about REAL persecutions and martyrdoms and if your current marginalization doesn’t compare, then stop being such a mollycoddle.
This kind of response is a bit absurd, though, if you compare it to other possible scenarios where this might apply. Imagine if someone broke into your house and stole something of value to you and when you called the police for help, they said something like, “you know there are people who have been murdered recently. Unless what has happened to you is that bad, you shouldn’t be complaining to us.” It’s a reprehensible assessment of a victim’s experience that insists that unless they have suffered the worst out of anyone, then their suffering, to whatever degree it is measured, doesn’t matter. Which is insane.
But I’d add, that Christians have good reason to have an elevated sensitivity to this kind of thing because it doesn’t take much for a subtle current of animosity towards Christians to turn into something far more insidious and terrifying.
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