Dennis Prager on "Holidays"

Dennis Prager has this video up on the meaning between the difference of saying "Merry Christmas" and "Happy Holidays". While I agreed with much, if not most, of what he said, I do think he made a critical error that could undermine his entire case. 

How can Prager say that Christmas is his Holiday, but not his Holy-Day? They're the same thing. To separate the meaning of Holiness from Holiday, Prager is doing exactly what he is trying to fight against, Secularization. You can't secularize Holiness but then fight against the secularization of Christmas.

The word Holiday literally means Holy Day. Because that is what the word means, we use them equivocally (Holy Day = Holiday). So, Prager wants to make two claims. 1) Christmas is his Holiday and 2) Christmas is not his Holiday. 

This looks like an outright contradiction. Prager has some possible responses. 

The first is that he wants to make a distinction between Holiday and Holy Day. A denotative understanding of the word makes this distinction impossible. 

The second way he could respond is that there is a connotative difference (and connotations can be more flexible). He could say that while Christmas is not his Holiday in the sense that it is Holy to him, it is his Holiday, in the sense that has nothing to do with Holiness. But if that is true, then he is using the word that didn't seem to exist prior to the mid 19th century, before the rise of global secularism. And the reason it didn't exist was because there was no connotative meaning of the word. And so, if we want to combat secularization, that is, having nothing to do with the Holy, then we shouldn't be using the word "Holiday" in any sense that has nothing to do with holiness. But this secularization is what he fighting against and simultaneously giving in to. So he can't call it his Holiday and not his Holiday if he wants to combat secularism. 

Another objection Prager can raise is that he is using it in a somewhat observant and detached manner, that is, he is using the label without making any claims about whether it is indeed holy or not, the way Christians recognize Ramadan is an Islamic holiday, or the way that Muslims recognize Passover is a Jewish holiday. But if that is the case, then while Prager can use the word Holiday appropriately, he cannot designate it as "his" holiday no more than I would ever call Ramadan "my" holiday. 

I think the best response Prager can give is that because America has such a strong Christian founding, there is a Christian *Culture* that he inherits as an American. And because Christmas is a part of Christianity, so too the culture of Christianity, whether its citizens are Christian or not, celebrates Christmas. If that were the case, I mean, I guess he has a point, but because I view Christianity as more creedal than cultural, and I don't really separate Christian culture from Christian beliefs, I'm made uncomfortable by Prager calling Christmas his holiday because you can't really reduce the celebration of the birth of Christ as a cultural event. While it did have it's cultural impact, it's vastly greater than that.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Milo

Image
So I decided to go see Milo Yiannopoulos at UCSB yesterday. I was really hesitant to do so, and decided not to go, but a few of my friends wanted to go, and they're all losers who don't drive, so, I had to take everyone. I didn't know much about Milo, and I still don't, but I did learn some things. In some of the more, ahem, colorfully conservative pages of facebook that I follow, Milo has been something of an iconoclast, destroying the feminist narratives left and right. But I also know that he is an active homosexual and he is a rabid Trump supporter (even calling him "Daddy"). So, for those reasons, I was never interested in what he had to say. He was, to take a phrase from Lenin, a useful idiot. That was my impression. But I was wrong. A few days before the event, I had read somewhere on these pages I follow but wont name, that Milo believed himself to be a Christian, and a Catholic at that. I dismissed this immediately, and my opinion of him stoppe...
Read more

What Does The Bible Say About Birth Control?

From the early church up to 1930, virtually every church believed contraception was a sin. That fact alone should have us induce that contraception is in fact a sin. Yet, there are many Christians today, even in my own congregation, that will never entertain the possibility of contraception being a sin.
Read more

Is Canon 28 Binding?

In my previous post , I discussed Canon 28 of the Council of Chalcedon (you'll find the full text of the canon there). But I should have put an asterisk on the conversation because Canon 28 isn't properly part of the council. You'll remember from an earlier post , that what makes a council ecumenical is ratification from the Roman Pontiff. Canons are part of councils. And naturally, canons also have to be ratified. However, Canon 28 was not ratified by Pope Leo (Roman Pontiff at the time). So Canon 28 isn't part of the council and thus isn't binding.  If you are Orthodox, this may sound too convenient. I've already suggested why Roman Ratification is the correct theory in the previous link. However, I want to add two things. First, even Saints in the East agree with the Roman position, and second, a case can be made for Canon 28 not being problematic for Catholicism.  First, there are the sayings of Pope St. Gelasius (about 490 AD), and Pope St. Gelasius is...
Read more