Bill O'Reilly and quite a few Christian extremists have said that 'secularists' want to "cancel Christmas" because they "fear … the philosophy of Jesus."

The American culture of victimization needs and nurtures people and controversies like this. You're nobody in this country (the richest and among the freest in the history of the world) unless somebody is trying to oppress you. "I kvetch, therefore I am."

The crusaders do have a few good stories to tell. For example, how about that town decorating a conifer in front of City Hall, only to call it "the community tree"? Or school districts banning Christmas carols? Or the department store that changes its official greeting to "Happy Holidays." As reported by Eric Boehlert on Salon.com, many of these tales get twisted in the retelling. "You're not allowed to say Merry Christmas in many department stores," declared Tony Snow of Fox News, calling this nonexistent ban "an attack on Christianity."

Some of the de-Christmasification stories are true, and some quite absurd. To the extent that the cultural Christian Soldiers are griping about some overzealous corporate and government bureaucrats expunging and/or trying to expunge Christmas, they have a point.

It's nonsense, however, to suggest that Christmas finds itself on some endangered-holiday list. The United States is not a Christian nation, but it is a majority-Christian society and a predominantly Christian culture. The Constitution forbids us as a nation to "establish" one religion over others (or, in the view of some, to establish religion itself over nonbelief). But even the government must sometimes bend to social reality. Christmas will always be an official holiday, and the eight days of Hanukkah will never be. And members of minority faiths will always have to accommodate to the majority-Christian culture more than that culture can accommodate to them.

That's not so terrible, is it? The important thing is religious freedom, which we all enjoy. Muslims in the United States enjoy more freedom to practice their religion as they see fit than they would in some officially Muslim countries. Members of minority religions who chafe at every small reminder of their minority status are being just a tad oversensitive.

Members of the majority christian culture who chafe at every small accommodation of the minority's sensitivity are being oversensitive too. But people in the media, in government and in churches who are encouraging Christian majority resentments are worse than oversensitive. They are, in a word, thugs.

Accommodations to minority sensitivity, even when excessive or silly, pose no serious threat to Christianity or to its overwhelming dominance of American culture. To suggest that dark forces are succeeding in killing off Christmas is so spectacularly at odds with reality that minority paranoia starts to seem justified.

Why are these allegations of a war against Christianity coming up now? Not only is there no such war on Christianity going on, the balance between minority accommodation of the majority culture and majority accommodation of minority sensitivities hasn't even shifted in favor of the minority.

The real explanation is close to the opposite: The majority is feeling its oats. Or, more accurately, a few would-be cultural-warriors think this is the moment for the majority to feel its oats. It's part of the agenda coming out of the last election. They don't think they're losing the culture war. They think they're winning, and it's time to go on the offensive.

My festive season wish for 2005 is less sensitivity all around. "Merry Christmas" is not a sentiment that needs to be guarded against, and neither is "Happy Holidays." I wish all of you here, both.