{"id":13701,"date":"2007-11-24T10:30:31","date_gmt":"2007-11-24T15:30:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/13701.html"},"modified":"2007-11-24T10:30:31","modified_gmt":"2007-11-24T15:30:31","slug":"this-week-in-god-89","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/this-week-in-god-89\/","title":{"rendered":"This Week in God"},"content":{"rendered":"

It may have been a fairly slow news week in light of the holiday, but the God Machine had plenty to offer. First up is a new poll<\/a> that will be of great interest to the “war on Christmas” crowd.<\/p>\n

A new survey found that 67 percent of American adults prefer the holiday-specific greeting in seasonal advertising, while only 26 percent want to see “Happy Holidays.”<\/p>\n

There wasn’t a gender gap in the answers: Both men and women like seeing “Merry Christmas” in store windows, according to Scott Rasmussen, president of Rasmussen Reports, an independent polling company.<\/p>\n

But from a political perspective, there was a sleighful of difference: 88 percent of Republicans wanted to see “Merry Christmas,” while just 57 percent of Democrats favored it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Now, this report was published in the far-right Washington Times, which adds its own slant to news items. As such, it was “only<\/em> 26 percent,” whereas I thought the exact opposite — more than one in four Americans want stores to drop “Merry Christmas” and go with “Happy Holidays”? Indeed, 26% sounds like quite a bit.<\/p>\n

As far as I can tell, retail outlets generally don’t care much about religion, politics, or Fox News initiatives; they care about selling products and making a profit. “Red” and “blue” pale in comparison to “green.”<\/p>\n

With that in mind, with two-thirds of the country preferring the Christmas-specific greeting, most stores probably won’t push too hard in the other direction. But so long as more than a fourth of the public prefers more generic holiday well-wishes, and nearly half of Democrats agree, a lot of outlets are going to hesitate, figuring out who to alienate and how.<\/p>\n

Remember the reason for the season — waging a silly culture-war fight that pits communities against one another based on some amorphous religio-political commercial conflict. It warms the heart, doesn’t it?
\n
\nOther items from the God Machine this week:<\/p>\n

* Huge shake-up<\/a> at Oral Roberts U (thanks to tAiO for the tip): “Facing accusations that he misspent university money to support a lavish lifestyle, the president of Oral Roberts University has resigned, officials said Friday. The resignation by Richard Roberts was effective immediately, according to an e-mail statement from George Pearsons, the chairman of the university’s Board of Regents…. Mr. Roberts received a vote of no confidence last week from the university’s tenured faculty. The regents will meet Monday and Tuesday to decide how to conduct a search for a new president, Mr. Pearsons said in the statement.”<\/p>\n

* Bill O’Reilly loves to talk about his religious grounding, but he’s a little confused<\/a> about his holy book: “On the November 13 edition of his nationally syndicated radio show, while discussing the ‘secularists’ and their refusal to acknowledge the ‘holy war going on,’ Bill O’Reilly cited the Book of Revelation, the final scripture in the New Testament, saying, ‘This was written — what? Five thousand years ago?’ But the Book of Revelation, which addresses the end of the world and the return of Jesus Christ, was, according to the book itself, written by ‘John’ on the Greek isle of Patmos, after receiving ‘[t]he Revelation of Jesus Christ’ (who was born about 2,000 years ago).” I’m afraid the secular progressives must have gotten to O’Reilly.<\/p>\n

* Another mega-church, another sex scandal<\/a> (thanks to SKNM for the tip): “The 80-year-old leader of a suburban Atlanta megachurch is at the center of a sex scandal of biblical dimensions: He slept with his brother’s wife and fathered a child by her. Members of Archbishop Earl Paulk’s family stood at the pulpit of the Cathedral of the Holy Spirit at Chapel Hill Harvester Church a few Sundays ago and revealed the secret exposed by a recent court-ordered paternity test. In truth, this is not the first — or even the second — sex scandal to engulf Paulk and the independent, charismatic church. But this time, he could be in trouble with the law for lying under oath about the affair.” Wow.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It may have been a fairly slow news week in light of the holiday, but the God Machine had plenty to offer. First up is a new poll that will be of great interest to the “war on Christmas” crowd. A new survey found that 67 percent of American adults prefer the holiday-specific greeting in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13701","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13701","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13701"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13701\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13701"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13701"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13701"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}