The reason why is deftly satirized by this Toby Keith video courtesy of Stephen Colbert:

I decline to make Christmas a grenade in the politicized culture wars our nation is coming to specialize in.  I refuse to let the thought or mention of Christmas fill me with anger and resentment.  I resolve to let the thought of Christmas be an occasion of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, faithfulness and self-control.  (Galatians 5:22-23)

Does that mean I believe there’s no hostility to Christmas in our culture?  Of course there is.  There has always been hostility to Christmas because there has always been hostility to Christ in our culture—and in every culture.  The rationale for the hostility changes with time.  Four centuries ago, Christmas was rejected as too papistical.  More recently, it has been attacked directly (as a warmed over pagan myth), subtly dissed by lefties bent on multiculti relativist pieties, and, most dangerously, subverted as a commercial bonanza and made a sort of shibboleth for angry culture warfare that isn’t so much interested in the joyful celebration of the birth of Christ as in the angry denunciations of ideological enemies.  So we get the spectacle of some Christians honoring the Feast of the Nativity by fuming and keeping a tally of how many shopkeepers said “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas”.  Such folk are in dire need of Insensitivity Training. They have fallen for the mythic narrative of a Golden Past when Christianity and civil society were at peace and believe that it is a betrayal that our culture now is more hostile to Christ. 

In fact, however, Christianity was born and raised in hostility to Christ.  Herod tried to murder Jesus in the cradle.  The world eventually succeeded in murdering him on Golgotha.  The powers and principalities with which we are perpetually at war have sought ever since to do to us what they did to him:

Then the dragon was angry with the woman, and went off to make war on the rest of her offspring, on those who keep the commandments of God and bear testimony to Jesus. (Revelation 12:17)

That’s why Christmas is immediately followed by the feast of various martyrs such as Stephen, the Holy Innocents, and Thomas a Becket.  Cradle and cross are inextricably linked. 

Since I acknowledge that there is indeed hostility to Christmas, then what’s wrong with complaining about the War on Christmas? 

Answer: Culture warfare is not spiritual warfare.  The devil is the ape of God.  He constantly offers us counterfeits.  So magic looks like miracles, divination looks like prophecy, and seance looks like prayer to the saint.  In the same way, culture warfare looks like spiritual warfare, but it’s not.  It’s a politicized counterfeit of spiritual warfare.  Culture warfare takes Christian things and subtly fills them with pagan content. The worship of some creature such as “America” or “traditional values” or “Xmas” or “the good old days” gets all balled up with the worship of Jesus and replaces it like stone replacing bone in a fossil.  Jesus made his great beachhead landing on the Normandy of satanically-occupied earth on the first Christmas in joy and humility, not in frustration, anger, resentment and with the sense that he was fighting a losing battle.  When we listen to the culture war narrative of “It’s all going to hell in a handbasket” instead of the truth of our faith that Christ is the hope of glory, we begin to fight with the weapons of this world such as fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, anger, selfishness, dissension, party spirit, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and the like (Galatians 5:19-21).  Indeed, America is now a leading exporter of all these values and the secularized monstrosity called Xmas urges them on us every day of December until midnight on Christmas day, when Xmas ends just as Christmas is beginning. Demagogues manipulate pious Christians into defending those idols with the weapons of this world (especially anger and resentment against the ideological enemies of the demagogue) often while thinking we are defending Christ with the weapons of the Spirit. How can we tell when this is happening?  When we stop, take our pulse, and realize that we are speaking about Christmas with anger and resentment at its enemies far more than we are speaking of the Incarnation of our Lord with joy. 

Conversely, spiritual warfare takes created things and fills them with Christian content.  It takes a glass half full approach by letting grace build on nature instead of teaching us to sullenly regard the imperfect as the enemy of the gospel.  Does somebody wish us “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas”?  They at least recognize something sacred about the season.  So joyfully wish them a “Merry Christmas” back.  Refuse to feel persecuted.  We still live in a country where we are free to express your faith.  Are some people hostile to it?  Are others hostile to the hostile?  More’s the pity for both of them.  (And, really, how often do you actually meet flesh and blood people who are hostile to or offended by “Merry Christmas”?)  So let not your heart be troubled.  You have been set free in Christ for the great good pleasure of making merry at Christmas in a world that is increasingly afraid to do so lest it be perceived as either too “Christian” (among the perpetual fretters about multiculturalism and indifferentism) or else too kumbayah (among the angry culture warriors).  The Christian faith dares to be merry in a world full of grievances and petty tribal enmities.

Christmas did not make its initial conquest of the world by complaining that there was a war on Christmas.  It conquered by saying, “Behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy!” in a world too timid to be happy. As St. Paul says:

We put no obstacle in any one’s way, so that no fault may be found with our ministry, but as servants of God we commend ourselves in every way: through great endurance, in afflictions, hardships, calamities, beatings, imprisonments, tumults, labors, watching, hunger; by purity, knowledge, forbearance, kindness, the Holy Spirit, genuine love,  truthful speech, and the power of God; with the weapons of righteousness for the right hand and for the left; in honor and dishonor, in ill repute and good repute. We are treated as impostors, and yet are true; as unknown, and yet well known; as dying, and behold we live; as punished, and yet not killed; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing everything. (2 Cor 6:3-10)

For though we live in the world we are not carrying on a worldly war, for the weapons of our warfare are not worldly but have divine power to destroy strongholds. We destroy arguments and every proud obstacle to the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ. (2 Cor 10:3-5)

This year, let us dare to have a Merry Christmas!  Christ is born to walk singing to His Father through a dangerous world.  It is for the joy set before him he endured the Cross!  Let us follow Him in joy!