Religious/Secular holidays in America (mostly Christmas, split from the Columbus Day thread)

[Kimstu]

@MrDibble

No, I’m saying the experience of American Jews doesn’t signify as to how the majority of Americans feel about Christmas tree decorations.

Moved goalposts. The claim you made that started this disagreement was

@MrDibble

Christmas, as the majority of society celebrates it, is now entirely secular, on a par with Thanksgiving. There’s no real rationale for objecting to it as a holiday on the grounds of its religious roots.

Yes, there is a valid rationale for non-Christians objecting to Christmas on the grounds of its religious roots. Because people who live in a majority-Christian society as part of a non-Christian minoritized identity group don’t always have the privilege of dismissing Christian symbolism as mere secularized background noise.

@MrDibble

No, I’m saying it doesn’t count as religious. I’m not denying that (those specific) angels, or hymns are Christian symbols in origin, as opposed to Buddhist or atheist. I’m denying that displaying them is a religious act.

Your excluded middle is showing again. Traditional Christian symbols can and do connote Christian religious significance, and the cultural normalization of Christianity, even when their display is not part of an overtly religious act.

@MrDibble

That while you see them as ‘too “Christiany”’, most see them as background, not worship.

The point is that many American non-Christians don’t like being expected to just blithely accept Christian religious symbols as neutral “background”. Even if they’re not being used for actual worship, such symbols are continuing to normalize the assumption of Christianity as the universal shared cultural context. People who grew up in Christian traditions, even if they now self-describe as “completely non-religious”, have the privilege of ignoring the ways in which this background differs from genuine secularism.

Like most people who grew up in Christian communities in overwhelmingly Christian societies, you naively imagine that if Christian symbolism isn’t being deployed in actual acts of worship, then it’s just neutral “background” that carries zero religious significance. But a lot of non-Christian religious minorities can see the Christian-culture bias inherent in that “background”. And it’s not because, as you patronizingly suggest, we can’t tell the difference between Christian symbolism used in actual rites of worship and Christian symbolism slopping over onto other parts of culture that are not religious rites.

@MrDibble

Blacks who don’t identify with slaveowners aren’t real Americans, gotcha.

FFS, dude, you’re expecting non-Christian Americans to treat the iconography of Christian angels etc. as a neutral de-religionized element of a shared secular holiday, even though in your next breath you can point out how Max_S is wrong in expecting Black Americans to treat the iconography of the white Founding Fathers as a neutral de-racialized element of shared cultural identity?

To paraphrase your own words: “You don’t see how that doesn’t necessarily map onto how American non-Blacks see these things as being? That while you see them as ‘too “slavey”’, most see them as background, not racial oppression.”