This war on Christmas was waged when the San Bernadino holiday party shooting prompted a spike in guns sales. This is a slap in the face to Jesus and his mandate: “If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also.”
It’s odd, given how black Christian people are told we must must immediately forgive any and all violence towards us, that Republicans would celebrate a Nevada assemblywoman who sent out a Christmas card in which every adult member of her family is toting a gun. As the Intercept put it: “Gun industry executives say mass shootings are good for business.” The church of capitalism demands more gun sales, and so Jesus’s call to cheek turning must be damned.
Police brutality is pretty effective at snuffing out the Christmas spirit, too. Consider the iconic moment of police threatening protesters beneath a season’s greetings sign in Ferguson last year. We Americans have gone from one hellish Christmas to the next, and brave protesters have been occupying malls and interrupting shoppers’ business as usual. Yet we’ve still seen more than 1,000 police killings since the last time our “Christian nation” gathered around to recall how the angel brought God’s message with the birth of a child: “on earth peace, goodwill toward men”.
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