Bill O’Reilly is wrong. The governor of Rhode Island is not the newest threat to Christmas. Neither is the Freedom from Religion foundation or their atheist alternative to nativity displays. The biggest threat to Christmas is, ironically, those who fight to maintain a celebration of the holiday under the auspices that it can be celebrated for its universal ‘secular’ values. Presumably this is a well-meaning attempt to include nonbelievers in the holiday celebrations, but it’s a plan bound to backfire spectacularly, since the logical conclusion of the notion that Christmas can be celebrated by some without reference to any religious meaning, is that it can just as well be celebrated by all as a holiday with no religious connotation at all. In an attempt to be inclusive, the very people who are up in arms about the “war on Christmas” are handing the victory over to the enemy. But there really isn’t a “war” on Christmas. Let’s think about this for a moment. A war is something that is fought between two opposing forces when at least one wants to defeat the other. But a war does not need to be fought if the one side has already won. More besides, you fight against some target, but when there’s nothing to fight against, how could you fight? There’s nothing left in the vestiges of the celebration of Christmas in the secular society for anyone to fight against. The secularists have made Christmas their holiday, now all that’s left is to change the name and the carol lyrics and the transformation will be official. The real antagonists in the “war of Christmas” are the much-too-fixated-on-the-superficial religious folks who think that by keeping the celebration, they are accomplishing something. They’re not. And if they do “save Christmas,” with the way it’s celebrated, even if they “win the war on Christmas,” they will have lost the battle to promote the message at the core of Christmas, having jettisoned it in order to appeal to the secular masses. Would it be so bad if the temptation to buy a lot of stuff went away? If a holiday that most people complain has drifted away from its traditional message just up and disappears? What would be lost? Certainly nothing of value, for that has been lost already. Now we would just be losing the pretense. The idea that everyone can celebrate Christmas, whether they believe Jesus Christ is the Messiah or not, is like saying that everyone in every nation can celebrate Independence Day on the Fourth of July…well, no they can’t. That’s based on the American Revolution which kicked off on July 4, 1776. Every nation can’t celebrate that because it’s just not relevant to them. They didn’t achieve independence that day; those that do have an independence day celebrate it on their own respective day. You won’t find July 4th, corn dogs and fireworks in any other country. That’s because you can’t separate the history from the holiday that commemorates it. Christianity is at the core of CHRISTmas, which is why, not surprisingly, our secular society has moved away from celebrating Christ on that day. You can’t celebrate something you don’t believe in. It’s just that simple. The War on Christmas is a ruse. The real war, that of diluting or covering up the Christian message wherever it may be found in our culture, be it in founding documents, popular music from times past, or traditional holidays, has already been largely won. When you’re left with the ignoble aspiration of clinging to the tattered rags of what used to be a Christ-centered holiday – at least in theory – and raving about an unseen enemy that’s trying to be a “Grinch” and steal all your ‘joy’ and ‘holiday spirit,’ then in the eyes of many, you’re already a lost cause, fighting for a lost cause. A good general knows when to retreat. When you’re fighting a losing battle, the answer is often to fall back and regroup, to rethink your battle plans, not to go charging on defiantly until all of your forces are utterly decimated in a full frontal collision with the superior enemy army. Regroup. Rethink. The War on Christmas is a deception—and sadly, it seems very well to be a self-deception, where well-meaning believers have been caught up in fighting the symptoms of spiritual attrition in our society, rather than soldiering up to wage battle against the root cause of the decay.