The subversion of Christmas has as much to do with free market consumerism as it does the judicial conspiracies of the Left. Liberal preacher Eric D Barreto, writing for HuffPo, makes this wise observation, “When the Christmas season begins with pepper spray and shoving matches on Black Friday, when physical altercations break out over parking spots at the mall, when we obsess about the language of Christmas rather than its meaning, then we have certainly lost our way.” Thinking along similar lines, Christian skeptic Rachel Held Evans concludes, “The best thing that could happen to this country is for Christ to be taken out of Christmas – for Advent to be made distinct from all the consumerism of the holidays and for the name of Christ to be invoked in the context of shocking forgiveness, radical hospitality, and logic-defying love.”

But what Barreto and Evans miss is that the reduction of Christmas to profit is inseparable from a concerted intellectual effort to discredit Christianity as a worldview. Writing as guest editor of the New Statesman, Richard Dawkins – the Ayn Rand of the New Atheism – admits that he personally loves the “cultural legacy” of Christmas: “I’m happy to sing real carols, and in the unlikely event that anyone wants me to read a lesson I’ll gladly oblige – only from the King James Version, of course.” Dawkins has no intention of destroying Christmas. He would prefer to appropriate it and, by stripping it of its spirituality, reduce it from an experience of the divine to “just another holiday”. The world Richard Dawkins wants to live in is a little like the dinosaur room in a museum: full of the bare bones of old ideas, stripped of their flesh and devoid of life.