INTERVIEW

Fighting the War on Christmas

CBN.com – LEE WEBB: While you’re shopping this holiday season, you may be greeted at the store with the phrase “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas.” And your child’s public school may be decorated with religious symbols like the Jewish menorah and the Islamic star and crescent, while Christian nativity scenes are banned. In his latest book The War on Christmas, FOX News Channel’s John Gibson says things are getting out of hand. “In America,” he says, “respect for diverse beliefs and customs has come to mean discrimination against Christianity.” While groups like the ACLU want to remove all references to Christianity from public display, Gibson says other world religions clearly don’t face the same scrutiny.

PAT ROBERTSON: Well, John Gibson’s new book is The War on Christmas. And, John, it’s a pleasure to have you on The 700 Club. I’ve enjoyed being with you on FOX. Thank you for coming on The 700 Club.

JOHN GIBSON: Thank you very much for having me, Pat.

PAT ROBERTSON: What prompted you to write this book? It’s a tremendous story of what’s going on in our country.

GIBSON: Well, part of it was that kids were coming home and saying to their parents, ‘Look at this nice tree I drew.’ And the parents would say, ‘What is that?’ And they’d say, ‘Well, it’s a holiday tree,’ or, ‘It’s a giving tree,’ or, ‘It’s a friendship tree.’ And I heard from a few parents who talked about how they were alarmed that the school was changing the name of the Christmas tree and changing the name of the Christmas holidays. You know, it’s now called the winter break in most schools, and I don’t know anybody worshiping winter.

ROBERTSON: I haven’t worshiped winter in a long time. Maybe those Teutonic ancestors back in the German forest. Well, listen, I understand there’s some people who actually forbid teachers, for example, to say ‘Merry Christmas’ to their students. Could you tell us about some of that?

GIBSON: Well, that happens a lot. I mean, this secularization of schools in which other religions are taught—because kids should know about Judaism or Islam or whatever, they should know about, which is fine enough, I suppose—and Christianity is treated as pure religion. And because it’s pure religion, it has to be out of the school.

ROBERTSON: We’re going to do a piece, I believe, tomorrow or the next day about Kwanzaa, which according to our next guest, is a total fraud. And yet they have Kwanzaa celebrations all over the schools.

GIBSON: Right. Well, that was made up, as your guest will tell, by Ron Karenga, a Black Panther in the 60s, in L.A.

ROBERTSON: A Black Panther.

GIBSON: Former Black Panther.

ROBERTSON: Radical . . . .

GIBSON: Right.

ROBERTSON: . . . . Marxist.

GIBSON: And if it’s going to be a celebration of African roots, okay, fine. And I guess you could call it paganism. Why have that in the schools, and tell the teachers, ‘You can’t put up a Christmas tree, because that is purely a religious celebration?’

ROBERTSON: Who’s leading the charge on this? We’ve had Christmas for so many years. I went to school in New York, and I worked in New York, and it was so wonderful at Christmastime in New York. I mean, it’s just delightful. But everybody was singing Christmas carols, and everybody was saying, ‘Merry Christmas.’

GIBSON: Well, they still are.

ROBERTSON: Yes?

GIBSON: Because you don’t find these forces going to Congress and saying, ‘You know that federal holiday you call Christmas? Please cancel it,’ because then we’d all be on to them. So, what they do is they go after little school boards in little towns, and they go after people who don’t have the legal wherewithal to defend themselves. But I debate your friend, Barry Lynn, all the time. I would say that Barry Lynn and Americans United for the Separation of Church and State are behind a lot of this.

ROBERTSON: Barry is. Barry says that if a church is burning down, the local community could not send a fire engine to put the fire out, because that would violate, quote, ‘separation of church’—he is fanatical.

GIBSON: Well, no, he is. And if you say to Barry, ‘When did a Christmas tree become a religious symbol?’ I mean, most Christians don’t look at a Christmas tree and say, ‘That’s a symbol of my religion.’ But he says if there’s any celebration of Christmas in school—and he includes a tree or Santa Claus, or even the colors red and green, then it has to be forbidden. I mean, look, this is how in Plano, Texas, the school district got around the banning red and green in the school.

ROBERTSON: Red and green?

GIBSON: Yes. They said that . . . .

ROBERTSON: Well, how about St. Patrick’s Day, a little green on that, is that against the . . . . ?

GIBSON: Well, they haven’t got around to that, too. And St. Valentine’s Day may be teed up next.

ROBERTSON: Red, yes.

GIBSON: . . . . the way things are going, as well.

ROBERTSON: Well, who else besides Barry Lynn is on the case?

GIBSON: Well, the muscle is the ACLU, when push comes to shove with a lawyer, and it’s usually an ACLU lawyer behind it.

ROBERTSON: They have announced that—I mean, there’s no question about it. Nadine Strossen said, ‘Our goal is to secularize the American marketplace. We’re going to take all vestiges of religion, all vestiges.’

GIBSON: Correct.

ROBERTSON: That’s their goal now.

GIBSON: And they’re doing a pretty good job in these corporations. The human resources department usually has a person called the ‘diversity officer.’ And when that diversity officer issues a memo, it’s hard for the CEO to say no. And so this is how you get all that stuff where stores are changing the name of Christmas trees to holiday trees, and people aren’t saying ‘Merry Christmas,’ they’re saying ‘Happy Holidays’; because some diversity officer has issued some memo.

ROBERTSON: But what about Hanukkah. I mean, can’t somebody say ‘Happy Hanukkah?’ Is that okay?

GIBSON: Well, sure. But, Pat, this is what’s going on, is there are such things out there as guilt-wracked Christians, people that think that their religion is so big, it’s time to make a little room on the bench for the populations of other religions that are smaller populations. And Hanukkah is a cultural interest: Kids should know about it same as Islam. But Christianity and Christmas are treated as pure religion, and ‘therefore, it should be out.’

ROBERTSON: I noticed that the ADL has put out a memo that they’re going after Christians. And I just hard to believe, as the rapprochement is taking place between the Christians and Jews, that this spearhead would—are they leading the charge against Christmas, too, or are they on the...?

GIBSON: Well, Abe Foxman and the ADL weigh in on this from time to time, but this gets at what’s really going on. I mean, what really is going on is there’s a war on Christians. And the reason is politics. They look at you and other Christians leaders who take political stands and they say, ‘Pat Robertson’s against abortion, so we’re against Christians, because they’re against abortion,’ or gay marriage or whatever the issue may be. The opposition to political issues that organized Christians may take, and some do, gets transferred over to the practice of their religion in public.

ROBERTSON: Well, they certainly have a visceral dislike for George Bush.

GIBSON: Well, no, they do.

ROBERTSON: And any of that spins off to . . . .

GIBSON: The New Yorker has a headline that says, ‘Bush Feels that He is God’s Instrument in Iraq.’ Now, when The New Yorker invokes God, it’s basically to tell the audience, ‘That guy is crazy.’

ROBERTSON: Yes. Well, they’ve done that, and he’s being assailed. Well, what else is going on about Christmas? Where have you found other instances?

GIBSON: Well, the thing that blew my mind was the instance in the law school in Indiana, in Indiana Law. Christmas trees, Santa Claus, the colors red and green, and the word Christmas, the Supreme Court has never said they need to be banned. There’s no argument like the nativity scene. And certainly they know that in the law school, yet they took a Christmas tree down knowing full well there was no constitutional bar to it. In Eugene, Oregon—this was about five years ago, I tell the story of the guy who might have been the first guy in the country to ban Christmas trees, and what a miserable episode that turned out to be in his life. I talked about Plano, Texas, where the fight between Christian parents and the school got to be so bad, the school even banned red and green. And there was a little town in Covington, Georgia, where a school board member wanted to put the word Christmas back on the school calendar, “Call it the Christmas break. That’s what it is. It’s not the winter break.” And the ACLU came in and argued that if that happened, if that word appeared on the school calendar, it would be a coercion of little kids to become Christians.

ROBERTSON: Oh, please.

GIBSON: And they got the word Christmas barred from the school calendar.

ROBERTSON: Have you gone back and studied the use of Christmas? I mean, this is a time-honored tradition of our nation. We’ve had a Christmas holiday since the founding, and way before the founding, of this country.

GIBSON: Well, as you know, the Puritans, Christmas was also illegal for them, because it was a day away from work, and the Puritans were busy little workers. But since then, and since about the 1820s, Christmas has been, the one we know today, a religious holiday celebrated in the home as a family event around children, and that’s the American tradition of Christmas. And that’s what these people are trying to suppress. They’re trying to get it away.

ROBERTSON: How far do you think the left wants to go? I and the American Center for Law and Justice, we’ve been fighting the ACLU forever. But how far do you think they want to go in this fight against Christianity?

GIBSON: They want Christianity indoors. They want you to go in your church and close the door. They want you to go in your home and close the door. They don’t want any public expression of it, and they’re quite articulate on that point. They don’t try to hide it. That’s what they want. Now, it’s a clear misunderstanding of what Christianity is, a central tenet of which, and as you know very well, is to spread the Word.

ROBERTSON: Yes.

GIBSON: You can’t spread the Word if you’re forced to go indoors and close the doors.

ROBERTSON: Well, what about the whole concept of government? It looks like they just get apoplectic when there’s any touching of all that largesse of government like this faith-based initiative.

GIBSON: They do. And they will try to go to the mat on that. They’re in kind of a bind, because government needs to do better with the way it spends its money on initiatives, and the faith-based groups do a pretty good job of it. So they’ll fight that if there is any sign that religion is entering the activities; but I think that, basically, they’ve got a lost cause on that one.

ROBERTSON: As far as the Democrat Party, the blacks, African Americans, whatever, comprise a large portion of their voting bloc.

GIBSON: Yes.

ROBERTSON: And how can they go against black churches, which are the central rallying point for this community?

GIBSON: I have said it before, so I don’t think I’m getting in any trouble saying it today. I think one of the reasons Kerry lost is that Christian liberals felt that the hostility expressed by the Democratic Party toward Christians made them uncomfortable. African Americans did not turn out to vote for Kerry as they were expected to. Christian liberals of the eastern seaboard didn’t turn out as they were expected to. And I’ve always said, Look, if you’ve got Howard Dean going around complaining about right-wing evangelicals, other Christians are going to say, ‘Mm, this makes me a little uncomfortable to hear that kind of talk.’

ROBERTSON: Well, I think that if you haven’t got a Democratic nominee who can be called Bubba, you’re not going to get him in office. You’re not going to get a New England liberal.

GIBSON: Right.

ROBERTSON: No way are the black folks going to vote for people like that. They just aren’t going to do it.

GIBSON: Well, look, I talked about—and I’m sure you know him. I talked about this guy in my book named Charles Haynes who runs the First Amendment Center. It’s an avowedly liberal center. But they’re southern church people, and they go out and try to solve some of these problems that you find in schools. And the Democrats are going to have a real problem if they keep rejecting church groups.

ROBERTSON: It seems that way. But anyhow, that’s the big divide. Well, John, thank you for this book. Ladies and gentlemen, by the way, red may be banned in Plano, but this book has got a red cover, The War on Christmas. You ought to read it. And it’s time to do something about it, to stand up and fight. It’s available on CBN.com, or you can get it in bookstores everywhere across the country. John Gibson, thank you so much for being with us.

GIBSON: Pat, thank you very much. I appreciate it.

ROBERTSON: It’s a great pleasure having you on.

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