If you live in rural areas plenty of people tout the "bring merry Christmas back" mantra. The origin of the cups story may be one person but it's reflective of a larger group.
I don't know how to present this theory in a falsifiable way, but I get the distinct feeling that a lot of these culture war battles are conjured up out "weak man" arguments in a hyper-real manner.
Buzzfeed writes an article about how conservative nuts (more properly a single conservative nut) is boycotting Starbucks because there's no Madonna in their latte foam. Blue tribe clicks the article and laughs at Red Tribe for being so stupid. Red tribe clicks the article and decides "Blue tribe is laughing, at us!". Red tribe grifter starts accepting donations to buy Starbucks cups and throw them into a paper shredder. Blue tribe starts a Foundation for Freedom from Religious Latte Art demanding depictions of Satan in their lattes. Suddenly everyone has extremely strong feelings about something as absurd as whether or not there should be a Madonna depicted in their latte.
In many cases, it seems the original nut turns out to be someone who spent most of their life at reality TV auditions.
If you take that one step further down the sequence of events, though, we'd be aiming that critique at the Christian side of the media that's been making hay about the "War on Christmas" for decades. Find one person saying something, or one company doing something you can take the wrong way, use it to tell your audience they're under attack; lather, rinse, repeat. Growing up in it, I'd hear about this stuff in youth group, in chapel in school, even in not-officially-religious classes like History. Before the internet, it wasn't easy to escape that bubble if your parents were deep into it.
Or do posters here really think there really are a lot of people out there trying to eliminate Christmas?
To be clear there are people who take offense to the phrase “Merry Christmas”, which is what some traditionalists (Christian or not) take issue with, but no one is making a weak man argument about them either, i.e., no one says most people take offense to Merry Christmas.
That's why weakmen are super weapons. You have to use them. If you do look at your own tribe and say 'yeah that person is a loon' then you risk the whole tribe itself, and you can't have that.
"the cups story may be one person but it's reflective of a larger group" is exactly the "weak man" fallacy/mode of group stigmatization that the blog post is about.
Maybe that's why they are so upset?
But for sure, I happily celebrate the cultural holiday known as Christmas.
If someone chooses to say "happy holidays" rather than "merry Christmas" out of sensitivity or political correctness, that does not constitute cancelling. The term cancelling is usually used for deliberate and sustained social pressure and boycotting campaigns. As far as I am aware this has not occurred on any significant scale to try to stop people from saying "merry Christmas".
In the other direction, however, this has very much happened. Conservative Christian organizations have called for boycotts of companies who don't mention Christmas in their Christmas marketing (or, in some cases, even just for mentioning non-Christian holidays) repeatedly over the last two decades. [0]
To avoid weak-manning here: I'm sure this is a pretty fringe group and not at all representative of Christians in general. But it is clear that the campaign to force people to use traditional Christmas greetings and imagery has always been more prominent and aggressive than the campaign to abolish traditional Christmas greetings.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_controversies#Retail...
When you interact with public employees and 10 out of 10 say "Happy Holidays", it becomes a social norm. Breaking that norm then feels uncomfortable, and people who are already biased against Christians will seize the opportunity to say that Merry Christmas is insensitive.
You can only say that the messaging for "Bring Back Merry Christmas" is more aggressive - the tactics on the Happy Holidays side are certainly ruthless, because there's a profit motive behind it.
In this case, as you said yourself, it's just a plain and simple profit motive. Companies want as broad appeal as possible, so they instruct their employees to use neutral greetings. There is no intent there to destroy the traditional greeting, so it's clearly not cancelling.
I think it feeds into the feeling of victimhood. It seems all-encompassing. Which makes these people sternly-pro-Merry-Christmas.
Your last few sentences are right: the people I know who are outraged about the war on Christmas are Christians of a certain type who feel like they have not received what has been promised to them. They're well-off, have houses built for them in nice new suburban developments, have a couple cars, don't seem like they're hurting for money or jobs, but they've just really got a chip on their shoulder about other people getting what they deserve.
I'm probably re-centering a category right now :) This was a very interesting article and it's fun to try to find all the examples of this I can.
This creates a harmful tribalism.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/an-unmerried-woman/
From that article, Walmart tries to play it off like they only "suggest" their employees say Happy Holidays.
But I've worked at Walmart, and if you've ever worked at a place like that, you know that people who don't follow "suggestions" are quickly fired.
They do other dumb things, like for a long time plenty of people wouldn't buy any music there, because they censored it. Here's the New York Times making a parallel argument to yours, 25 years ago:
https://www.nytimes.com/1996/11/12/arts/wal-mart-s-cd-standa...
Of course, in that situation it's somewhat likely that Christians comprise most of the group that Walmart is trying not to bother.
There are good reasons to know your audience before using the greeting, but it’s very rare to hear it at all in many parts of the US, which does seem strange when 90% of the country celebrates Christmas. Since Happy Thanksgiving and Happy Halloween are completely fine to say to a stranger I think it’s fair to say the greeting has been canceled, for better or worse, regardless of original intent.
Yes, its very controversial to claim that is the general view.
> here’s a Huffington Post article that argues against it
But…it doesn’t argue either against saying Merry Christmas or that it is “rude” to say it (or that anything is “rude”.) It argues that it is illegal (a form of workplace religious discrimination) for your boss to compel you to say it, outside of narrow circumstances where it may be a bona fide job requirement.
This confusion of arguments that being compelled by government, an employer, etc. to do X is improper and/or illegal with arguments that choosing on your own to do X is immoral, rude, etc. is sadly common.
“If you do celebrate Christmas, then please don’t forget that there are many other religious holidays being celebrated in December. Some of your customers and coworkers may not want to have Christmas shoved down their throats.”
It definitely might be clickbait but it was one of the first Google results. Clearly at least some people think the greeting is “shoving Christmas down their throats”
There are two views here, broadly, about canceling 'Merry Christmas':
a) it's a popular view on the left
b) it's not a popular view on the left, but some on the right have acted as if it is
View b) is equivalent to agreeing that this whole thing is an example of a 'weak man' argument, and a) is equivalent to disagreeing with it. I struggle to see how anyone could read camjohnson26's comments and conclude that they meant b). They cited a link as evidence of a) and complained when I suggested it wasn't persuasive.
1) The left saying: "Those silly righties are mad at Starbucks because they won't put Christmas decorations on their cups!"
2) The right saying: "Those silly lefties hate religion so much that they get mad if you tell them merry christmas!"
You started this thread by mentioning the first one. Someone replied to you that 'bring merry christmas back' was indeed a thing. Then camjohnson26 replied to them, saying "They wouldn’t feel like they need to bring Merry Christmas back if the overly politically correct voices hadn’t tried to cancel it in the first place."
Note that the first half of that (people trying to bring the greeting back) is a reference to weak man 1, and the second half (people trying to cancel the greeting) suggests that weak man 2) wasn't an exaggeration, it really happened. It is that latter half that I responded to.
Does the left think it enough to meet some arbitrary threshhold that allows us to call it 'widespread'? I dunno, that sounds totally subjective and semantic. Luckily that's not what we're arguing about (I just used that term as a short way of saying 'as widespread as the right has claimed'). What we are arguing about is: were the claims from the right about the left being against 'merry christmast' roughly accurate, or a big exaggeration? I claim the latter, and camjohnson26 (I'm fairly sure they would agree) was saying the former.
I'm a liberal, living in a very liberal city. I don't need you to tell me what the left thinks. Believe me, I've heard plenty of politically correct stuff from my side that I think is silly (and presumably you would agree). This just isn't one. You can go to a collectivist bookstore with BLM posters in the window, where the History section is labeled "Herstory," and still be wished a Merry Christmas by the person running the register.
You're welcome to disagree of course but this might be a good time to step back and remember where the goalposts started. You didn't set out thinking this was something you would have to prove with evidence. You said, "I don't think it's controversial that..." and then a bunch of people said it was.
In any event, I don't think it's super important; this seems like it is clearly an example of a 'weak man', because however strongly the left does or doesn't think it's rude to say Merry Christmas, it seems incontrovertible to say that Fox News presented us as believing it somewhat more than we do, and for the reasons discussed in the article.
Strongly disagree. Also, the first sentence of the article you link kind of contradicts you here. Please consider the possibility that this is one of those ginned-up-for-clicks things.
What's worse: There are some people who celebrate Christmas but who choose not to wish others a "Merry Christmas" out of fear of offending them. Peak woke.
As in the OP, there's probably somebody you can point to who holds any dumb position you want to argue against, but there isn't really an anti-Christmas side of the public discourse in America.
Likely more prevalent are the people who don't like corporations, public services, etc. wishing everyone Merry Christmas year after year while ignoring the holidays of other religions.
To avoid all of this, many places are switching to "Happy Holidays", except there are a not-insignificant number of people who are upset by this and feel that companies/governments should be saying "Merry Christmas" because they should be aligned with Christianity.
I have yet to see anyone get riled up.