Last Friday
Today is the last Friday of 2024 and five days until 2025.
_____
About 45 years ago, the late Rev. Jerry Falwell poisoned our politics by introducing his Moral Majority organization. Our politics haven’t been the same since. Divisiveness and hate now run rampant. The GOP is now MAGA.
MAGA puts on a pedestal the likes of Donald Trump, Ken Paxton, and Matt Gaetz.
I have said it before. The GOP, err MAGA has lost all moral high ground.
I really don’t see the point of today’s Op-Ed in the Chron today. Here is how it starts:
This holiday season brings an extra reason to be joyful: A recent poll found that Americans’ belief in the existence of a “War on Christmas” has fallen dramatically since 2022, to 23%. Peace on earth and mercy mild!
Perhaps with the ongoing “invasion” of our southern border, Fox and other conservative networks have decided that it’s best to focus on drumming up support for one war at a time. Or maybe waging a two-decade war over the Prince of Peace with imaginary grinches has finally grown wearisome, even if Donald Trump is still manning the barricades.
The idea that there’s a war against Christmas has never been about the ability to practice Christianity, only the fear that America is under siege by secular liberals and their allies among Jews, Muslims and people of other faiths. It is based on the claim that saying “Merry Christmas” rather than “Happy Holidays” is culturally verboten, rather than a well-intentioned (one might even say Christian) effort at inclusive grace.
The tragedy of making up a forever war on Christmas to score political points isn’t that it’s been needlessly divisive. It’s that so many Christians spent so much time confusing a greeting with the gospel. In taking aim at secularization, they trained their fire on the most superficial and meaningless target, rather than the big prize: infusing the Christmas season with more of Christ’s spirit, in the face of the avalanche of commercialism that overwhelms it.
The work of rescuing Christianity from partisan warriors is captured in an inspiring new book, Your Jesus Is Too American. Its author, Steve Bezner, is the pastor of a large evangelical church in Houston, Texas, which I visited recently on a cross-country RV trip.
“It’s not unusual,” he writes, “to see signs featuring a cross draped in an American flag or even Jesus wearing an American flag as a sash.” Those images lead to “people being convinced that being an American citizen is synonymous with being a Christian” — and often, that being a Christian is synonymous with being a Republican.
“You’re not a Christian if you vote for a Democrat,” a megachurch pastor in Dallas said earlier in the year. He was hardly the only person to make that claim, which has led many Christians to believe, Bezner writes, “that our salvation is found not in Jesus but in who occupies the White House.”
Here is the entire read: Christmas lessons for looking beyond partisan politics in 2025.
It should go like this. Nope, MAGA. Your leaders regularly display immoral behavior. You don’t have the moral high ground to claim your values are better than mine and others. That goes for how we greet folks during the Christmas season and how we choose to vote. Nope. Every time MAGA tries to play this card, slap them down.
_____
There are 13 college bowl games today and tomorrow. Among them are the Alamo, Holiday, Liberty and Pop-Tarts Bowls, and bowl games being played at Fenway Park and Yankee Stadium. Got it and place your bets.
_____
The featured photo is an all everything Astros cup I got for Christmas. Pretty cool.
