Religious-liberty group puts retailers on its list of foes for avoiding use of word ‘Christmas’
In its display of pettiness, Liberty Counsel spreads wrong message about the holiday
Isn’t the Christmas season supposed to be the time of year for honoring the Prince of Peace with wishes of goodwill for all?
Apparently the Liberty Counsel, a nonprofit organization devoted to promoting Christian values, especially in the legal sphere, hasn’t got the message.
Instead, as it has for 23 years now, Liberty Counsel is promoting its Friend or Foe Campaign, making clear this year that 18 major retailers are its foes — simply because they used the word “holiday” instead of “Christmas” in the way they themed their seasonal websites or downplayed the holiday season in its entirety. According to the list, the retailers, which include Barnes & Noble and Walgreens, “silence and censor Christmas.”
It’s a remarkable display of pettiness. Maybe it isn’t so remarkable, considering that the Liberty Counsel and groups with similar views have in recent years opposed items as benign as Starbucks holiday cups and viewed greetings such as “happy holidays” as discriminatory even though their intent is often to be anything but that.
But the “friend or foe” categorization, or maybe it’s the “naughty or nice” list, depending on which press release you read, is still petty. At its best, some of the more important “Christian values” a business might hold, such as whether it treats its employees fairly (see James 5:4) or follows the Golden Rule in the way it treats its customers, are ignored. At its worst, the campaign suggests that Christians care about linguistic superficiality, ignoring the Biblical principle that actions matter more than mere words (see 1 John 3:18).
And the fact is that the companies whose marketing strategies favor the word “holiday” over “Christmas” are hardly ignoring the Christian holiday. Christmas cards with explicitly Christian themes can still be found on the Barnes & Nobles’ home page, for example. And certainly items such as crèches and angel ornaments can be found for sale on the websites and in the stores of retailers that sell products used for home decorating.
Also particularly uncharitable is the list’s criticism of those retailers such as H&M and Nordstrom that have little holiday theming at all on their websites. Could it be that such downplaying is a simple marketing or imaging decision rather than an attempt to censor the religious underpinnings of Christmas?
Of course, the Liberty Counsel has a “nice” list as well as the “naughty” one. It was happy with retailers such as Hallmark that labeled its “Christmas cards” and Home Depot that labeled its “Christmas trees” as such. And of course it was delighted with the Christian-owned Hobby Lobby, which has pages devoted to “Christmas decorations.”
The whole Liberty Counsel campaign seems so tone-deaf in the way it ignores or even contradicts the Christmas messages of joy and promises of new beginnings. It seems more like something that would make the Grinch happy rather than anyone who has caught the holiday — oops, make that Christmas — spirit.