US President Barak Obama has decreed that from now on Christmas trees in the White House should be called ‘holiday trees’. Obama’s latest attack on the Christian faith in the US is being repeated the Western world over and we need to wake up to this reality. Or at least we should if it were true. Because it isn’t and it’s time we stopped falling into the trap set for us by cranks with nothing better to do than send hoax messages.

I used the personal pronoun in the plural in that last sentence but actually I was being polite. I wasn’t taken in by the latest hoax email to arrive in my Inbox. It was so obviously a hoax I half thought it might be a spoof hoax; a double bluff to get us really stirred up! Some, however, did fall into the trap and sent the email to dozens of their friends.

Try thinking

Ironically the email begins, ‘Read this and think’. Unfortunately very little thinking was done after the person who passed it on to me had read it. If the grey matter had been engaged, even for a short time, it would have dawned on her that this was a hoax.

First, the whole email fits far too neatly into the ‘Obama is a Muslim and the spawn of satan’ narrative making the rounds of right-wing Christians in the US. He’s made some mistakes and the economy is bad but that doesn’t make him the antichrist with a secret agenda to lock up all Christians.

Winterval cancelled

Second, it fits the Western Christian narrative that we’re a persecuted minority who need to stand up for our rights. We’re not persecuted in the West and if we read stories about real persecution around the world you’d know that was the case. Coincidently the BBC reported this morning that the Daily Mail printed a ‘clarification’ in yesterday’s edition saying that it was not true that local councils in the UK were trying to rebrand Christmas as Winterval. Yet for some years this is the line they have been pushing and so many Christians have fallen into their xenophobic trap.

Third, Obama, being the political operator that he is, would never do this 12 months before he faces a general election. Even if he is a secret Muslim who plots the persecution of Christians every day before breakfast – he is far, far too canny to upset the Christian lobby in this way.

Manipulation

Fourth – and how obvious does it need to get before some folk get the hoax – the final appeal to share the email with friends is stuffed full of manipulative nonsense. Here are some quotes, ‘Funny how you can send 'jokes' through e-mail and they spread like wildfire, but when you start sending messages regarding the Lord, people think twice about sharing … Funny how when you forward this message, you will not send it to many on your address list because you're not sure what they believe, or what they will think of you for sending it. Funny how we can be more worried about what other people think of us than what God thinks of us.’ Shall we call this for what it is? It’s manipulative, controlling, cunning crap.

The story about Obama and his Christmas tree was a hoax. It never happened. It never would. But the email that sent it round is very real. And it is meant to play on our fears and suspicions about our status as Christians. The ironic thing about it all is that the author has chosen a non-Christian symbol to do so. The Christmas tree – like Christmas itself – is 100% pagan in origin. And to think many Christians have got into such a lather about it!


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