The keep Christ in Christmas campaign enlists Muslims, Jews

National Catholic Reporter, Dec 16, 2005

The movement defending Christmas as a Christian holiday has attracted what may seem like unlikely allies: religiously observant Jews and Muslims.

Their support bucks the assumption that religious minorities prefer a neutral approach to the season, desiring "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas" at retail checkout lines or "Frosty the Snowman" over "O Holy Night" at public school concerts.

Islamic support for Christmas stems in part from religious doctrine. While observant Muslims can follow the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad in respecting Jewish and Christian holidays, they say they have little motivation to value Santa-based winter holiday celebrations.

When it comes to Christmas, "the more religious it is, the more acceptable it is to Muslims," said Ahmed Bedier, director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations' Central Florida office. But there is also the issue of Islamic self-interest.

Bedier's organization recently requested that a school board near Tampa, Fla., include a one-day Muslim holiday. The school board voted instead to scrap all religious holidays. After a storm of protests, the Christian and Jewish holidays were reinstated.

"We would like to see one standard applied in terms of recognizing religious holidays," said Ibrahim Hooper, national communications director for the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

Muslims, he said, would welcome religious Christmas displays--for example at a public library--as long as Eid al-Adha, the upcoming Muslim holiday marking the yearly pilgrimage to Mecca, was recognized in the same space.

At a Dec. 1 Washington news conference, a small group of Jewish leaders spoke in defense of public Christmas celebrations, framing the issue as a struggle between a Bible-believing culture and the dark, potentially anti-Semitic, forces of secularism.

"Jews and other non-Christians have a stake in maintaining morality, based on a Judeo-Christian ethic. The disappearance of Christmas undercuts that ethic," said Don Feder, who founded the group Jews against Anti-Christian Defamation earlier this year.

While Jews once endorsed secularism as a safe alternative to Christian dominance, today they face a choice between "a sinister secular society on the one hand, and a society of benign Christianity on the other," said Daniel Lapin, an Orthodox rabbi and president of the Seattle-based Jewish group Toward Tradition.

--Religion News Service