Oh, right, I see I misread your post. Carry on.
First, I’m not sure percentages accurately reflect what’s going on. Tell me that you spent 5% of last year sleeping, and I’ll wonder how you’re still alive: that was a sleep deprived year. Tell me you spent 0.05% of last year murdering people, and I’ll think of that as a pretty murdery year for you. We can’t just declare something arbitrarily not X if X is less than a certain percent.
That said, I’m surprised at what you say here. 5% of a day is a little more than an hour. If someone is spending more than an hour a day engaged in purely religious activities, yeah, I’m gonna think of them as a pretty religious person. What’s the cutoff for you? 10% (~2 hours)? 15% (~3.5 hours)? 20% (~5 hours)?
Religion is like salt: a little bit of it heavily flavors the experience.
Of course we can, it would vary from topic to topic.
It’s relative to the amount of time spent on secular activities, not the total hours in the day. So if someone spent 1 hour on religious activities and say 4 on secular ones, that’s not the 5/95 split I’m talking about.
A little? Like, say, One Drop?
Oh my! That is clever!
And what you’re encountering in this thread is that the people who live in the culture and celebrate the holiday in question put the bar in a very different position than you do. Most consider the holiday religious, even those who don’t consider themselves particularly religious. What makes your opinion more significant?
Side note, genuine question, not snark. Have you lived in the US? If so, where and for how long?
I don’t need convincing that the holiday is associated with Christianity.
I need evidence that the actual activities people engage in are more religious in nature than not. That the $1 trillion spend isn’t mostly spent on Mammon. That the secular entertainment and traditions like presents and lightshows and trees don’t take up most of the holiday. I don’t think you’re going to have much success at that. All I’m hearing here is “They’re doing all those things…but they’re really thinking of Baby Jesus while they do them” which is not very convincing. Or to quote some book or other, “By their fruits you shall know them”.
They need to sue their wallets and their media representatives for slander, then.
They’re also going to have to account for those Americans in this thread who do agree with me.
I don’t have any particular reason to lie to myself either way about how religious I am actually being, I guess. So for example, I’m not going into debt (as something like a third of people do) and pretending that’s Christian anything. I’m also not seeing that kind of secular activity and excusing it as “but they thought of the Magi while they whipped out that plastic…”. There’s nothing religious about an orgy of spending and feasting. Well, not Christian religious, at least - it’d fit right in with a potlatch.
No. Is that somehow relevant? It’s not like the spending and other activities aren’t well-documented. They dominate the media for months on end, in fact.
And anyway, I’ve already covered the ridiculous notion that the US is somehow more religious than South Africa. So is your argument that Americans Christians are less religious … except at Christmastime?
That’s not helpful, and it’s not what I said. But the amount of religious celebration I see in my community around Christmas makes me deeply skeptical of the claim in the OP, or of your modified version. I’ll trust that you’re describing your experience in South Africa correctly, and that your American friends are reporting their experiences accurately; it’d be helpful if you’d trust that I’m reporting mine accurately as well.
Yes, but the media isn’t an actual representation of what people do and believe. You don’t have the context of the culture to understand that spending money on gifts doesn’t invalidate the reason for buying the gifts. You also fail to understand the context of those who are not Christian and don’t celebrate Christmas because it is a religious holiday because that isn’t represented in the media very much.
So yes, it’s very relevant.
It’s the same implication as what others have said, when I first raised that they were basically making a One Drop rule for religious content. Now, you’re not at the extreme that considers St Valentine’s a religious holiday, but you’re agreeing with them about Christmas.
Are you saying your community spends more time on the religious side of Christmas than it does on the secular aspects? Or that your community is immune from the holiday spending spree?
I trust that you’re reporting the religious side of things accurately, but I think you’re sharply discounting the amount of secular activities. You never did reply as to whether your dad buys your daughters presents, but if he does : how long do you think he spends shopping for them, wrapping them, etc? Do you take that time into account as secular time? How does it compare to Baby Jesus story time?
I don’t see how spending time on the secular aspects of Christmas invalidates the time spent on religious aspects. I think that’s the major divide here. That just seems completely irrelevant to me. If you said, “despite the massive amount of energy spent on the secular side, the amount of energy spent on the religious side is tiny”, that would make sense. I don’t agree with that, but I think that would be a completely valid argument. But “yes, they care deeply about the religious significance of Christmas, but they also buy a lot of non-religious crap because it’s an excuse to buy stuff you want” doesn’t invalidate the energy a person invests in the religious aspects, in my mind.
The media content may not be (although I’d quibble that it’s that removed from reality), but the existence of the media is. I’m repeating myself (again) but it’s also the consumption of the media that I’m talking about.
In the case of Christmas, where buying gifts isn’t a religious commandment, the reason is secular.
I don’t agree that context is going to somehow render the secular things I can clearly see, like tree toppers, somehow actually religious.
Only if you are pretending that somehow America is a secret society that doesn’t reveal its actual practices in so many channels. I don’t get my information on American Christmas from the plot of Hallmark movies, I get it from news reports, from business news, from actual Americans I know (from Seattle to Louisiana, and the Twin Cities to Boston, and Houston to South Carolina), and all the entertainment media you produce.
Tell me all the plastic reindeer on the roofs are made up. Tell me I imagined Mariah singing “Santa Baby”. Tell me you don’t prize spending on Christmas so much that a sizeable fraction of you end up in debt. Tell me those things, and I’ll buy that I’ve been wrong about the degree to which the holiday is secularized.
It doesn’t invalidate it, if by that you mean render that act non-religious.
But for considering the degree of secularity of the holiday as a whole? It does cancel it out.
Slight correction - the Mariah song is called “Oh Santa”, not “Santa Baby”.
No, it doesn’t. If I make a soup with 8 cups of water and half a cup of salt, nobody is going to say, “That soup has way more water than salt, it’s not a salty soup.”
Religious and secular components aren’t on a 1:1 basis canceling each other out.
Tell me the 67% of the people who say their celebration of Christmas is Strongly or Somewhat Religious is made up? You’re cherry picking evidence and excluding the experiences of the people involved.
My wife decorates the house with Santas because her mom (now passed away) loved Santa. But she also has the creche from her childhood and until recently we went to midnight mass. The two things aren’t mutually exclusive, and the secular aspects of certain rituals have a religious basis.
You’ve offered many insights into things in South Africa that someone who hasn’t lived there would never know. I think your viewing of American media has given you a skewed notion of how people behave and believe. If you think that someone putting plastic reindeer on their roof somehow means they aren’t deeply religious you are sorely mistaken.
Why?
Serious question. I don’t think it does in the least. It just means that Christmas has multiple aspects.
If it used to have half a cup, and now it has a tablespoon, are people going to be justified in calling it watered down?
Neither are they at a One Drop basis.
It’s not made up, it’s just cognitive dissonnance. Unless that $1 trillion isn’t mostly being spent on tree trinkets, turkeys and toys…
I’m going by what people actually do, not just what they say. I’m not excluding their experience, but I’m not privileging it over the other evidence.
And we’re back to strawmen. 
They can be deeply religious, but if they’re spending their time around the holiday doing the secular reindeer-hanging, I’m counting that time as secular.
If you’re going to judge things as secular or religious, you have to have some basis for comparison.
So no amount of secularity is going to be enough for you, clearly.
No-one has argued that it doesn’t.
Sure–but if they tell me it’s not salty, I’ll disagree–especially if it has a quarter cup.
That’s exactly my point. I’m saying that in my experience, there’s enough religious activity at Christmas that it’s a significantly religious activity around this time. The amount of secular activity doesn’t cancel it out, nor does the amount of religious activity in the past.