The campaign against secular holiday ads finally jumped the shark this year, and with only a few weeks left in the season, the ’09 Christmas War was shaping up to be a real dud. But then, an unlikely culture warrior stepped into the fray.
Garrison Keillor, writer and host of NPR’s Prairie Home Companion, was panned this week for a syndicated column he wrote about his visit to First Parish in Cambridge.
The author, speaking Monday during a promotional tour for his new book, took inspiration from a handful of Unitarian audience members who altered some of the words in Silent Night at the end of his appearance.
You can blame Ralph Waldo Emerson for the brazen foolishness of the elite. He preached here at the First Church of Cambridge, a Unitarian outfit (where I discovered that “Silent Night” has been cleverly rewritten to make it more about silence and night and not so much about God), and Emerson tossed off little bons mots that have been leading people astray ever since.
Unitarians listen to the Inner Voice and so they have no creed that they all stand up and recite in unison, and that’s their perfect right, but it is wrong, wrong, wrong to rewrite “Silent Night.” If you don’t believe Jesus was God, OK, go write your own damn Silent Night and leave ours alone.
And all those lousy holiday songs by Jewish guys that trash up the malls every year, Rudolph and the chestnuts and the rest of that dreck. Did one of our guys write “Grab your loafers, come along if you wanna, and we’ll blow that shofar for Rosh Hashanah”? No, we didn’t.
Most of his column was taken from the first ten minutes of his speech, which opened similarly with a spoof on Unitarians. He also altered the lyrics of the folk song “Angels Watching Over Me” in the middle of the program to take another poke at Unitarian theology.
If you’ve spent any time listening to Prairie Home Companion, then you know that Keillor’s tongue-in-cheek religious humor is usually pretty innocuous, and Lutherans are just as likely to be the butt of the joke as Unitarians. But the reference to Jewish song writers was probably ill-advised. In the context of a get-your-damn-hands-off-my-holiday column, even when it’s satire, the line comes off between curmudgeonly and genuinely anti-Semitic.
“What happened that caused Garrison Keillor to pen such a goofy and confusing piece?” wondered one reader. “He ought to apologize whether he means it or not,” suggested another. The Minneapolis Star Tribune, which ran the article on Dec. 16, followed up with a blog post the next day asking readers if the Old Scout had, indeed, gone too far.
We tried to get in touch with the head minister and music director at First Parish to get their reactions to Keillor’s column, but we haven’t heard back yet.
Update 12/21: I received an e-mail today from Rev. Fred Small, the head minister at First Parish. He said that he submitted a response to Salon.com, one of several sites that published the column, and he’s waiting on their reply.