Why the new need to qualify holiday greeting?

Let’s call it Facebook Theology.

Over the past year, I have noticed an interesting trend on social media. A religious holiday comes, and people will post appropriate photographs and graphics, and offer the following greeting: “Happy (name of holiday) to those who celebrate.”

On the one hand, I find that greeting to be odd. To whom else would you be wishing a happy, say, Hanukkah, or even a “Shabbat shalom,” other than to those who celebrate it?

But, on the other hand, something is going on here, and it speaks to how Americans now understand religion.

In my woefully unscientific observation, based on my Facebook feed, the “to those who celebrate” wishers are overwhelmingly Jewish.

They are most likely responding to something that’s been simmering in American religious culture for a long time.

It is the default setting of American religiosity, the ubiquity of a Christian religious culture.

Jews and other non-Christians constantly encounter “Merry Christmas!” and experience seasonal Santa Claustrophobia. It is inescapable and it seems to be starting earlier and earlier with every passing year.

Ah, religious conservatives will say, there you go! This is the

“war on Christmas!”

Sorry, Virginia: there is no war on Christmas. This is a different kind of war.

It is not a “war on …” It is a “battle for …”

It is a battle for American religious pluralism.

Many non-Christians are tired of being thrown theological bones during this season — of being less than and Other.

Many of them hear “Merry Christmas!” as, at the very least, presumptuous, and at the very most, hegemonic.

They do not want to echo the chutzpah of “Merry Christmas!” So, they make their offerings of, say, “Happy Hanukkah!” gingerly.

I get it — even though I now accept warm wishes of “Merry Christmas!” in the way it was intended — as an act of generosity and graciousness.

The sales associate at Target is hardly my idea of a religious zealot, ready to carry the cross into battle as soon as her shift is over.

Ours is a brutal and coarse culture. Why not accept a good wish, even if it is not the way we would have wanted it phrased?

Yes, we recoil from the loudness of “Merry Christmas!” and the “in your face” nature of public Christian observance.

Being who you are too loudly is, at the very least, a nuisance and perhaps even vulgar.

But the opposite is also true.

There is something in that “to those who celebrate” that seems too cautious and too timid.

This is the industrial byproduct of secularization. It is the public softness of the religious claim.

Here, my teacher is the late sociologist of religion John Murray Cuddihy. Western civilization, he wrote, rests on secularized Christianity, and in order to be fully accepted in it, the classical Jew was obliged to euphemize himself.

He had to be “nice,” to renounce the “intensity, fanaticism, and inwardness,” the “too muchness,” of his personality and his history. The “ordeal of civility” was the price of admission to the heaven on earth of American social status.

So, yes: A happy Hanukkah — to those who celebrate.

Perhaps we all should.