Tim Wildmon

AFA president

October 2006 – AFA was mentioned on Paul Harvey recently. You know you have arrived when you are mentioned on Paul Harvey’s radio broadcast. I’m not sure that has ever happened before. 

What Mr. Harvey was talking about was this: AFA had noticed that Sam’s Club promoted the upcoming Christmas season with a full page in the August/September issue of Source, the company magazine. However, while the page mentions “holiday” many times, it never uses the word “Christmas.” We urged our online supporters to contact Sam’s and ask them not to censor out the word “Christmas” or replace it with the generic “holidays.” Nearly 300,000 people responded, and that got Sam’s attention. Within two days of the e-mails, Sam’s wrote AFA and said this: “In our upcoming December/January Source magazine we plan to reference specific holidays such as Christmas and others, as we have in the past.”

I commend Sam’s for doing the right thing in this case. However, Wal-Mart, Sam’s parent company isn’t doing so well. (See here.)

When I first came to work here at AFA, my dad said something that has always stuck with me. After a particular issue where we had been successful, he said, “It feels good to win one every once in a while, doesn’t it.” He said it as more of a statement than a question.

Indeed, it does feel good to know that you took on an issue, informed the troops, they took action and the objective was achieved.

Concerning the War on Christmas, I expect that AFA’s spotlight on the excising of Christ from the Christmas shopping season will pay off. 

One might ask, what does it really matter if Sam’s Club or any other company uses the phrase “Happy Holidays” to acknowledge the time between Thanksgiving Day and New Year’s Day? The short answer is, nothing is wrong with the phrase. The problem occurs when you start using “Happy Holidays” to the exclusion of “Merry Christmas” in order to be politically correct.

And retail stores should be the last people in America to rid themselves of the word “Christmas.” When was the last time your family gathered around the Thanksgiving table and exchanged gifts? Never? Okay. What about this? When was the last time you heard of American kids running downstairs on January 1, excited to see what was waiting for them under the “holiday tree?” See what I mean? 

The retail stores stay in business because Americans celebrate Christmas. Period. So why pretend that people are “holiday shopping?” When something is so clearly evident and yet we choose not to call it what it is, it becomes apparent that those who subscribe to liberal political correctness are having an effect.

The bottom line is this: There are influential people in America who hate Christians and the traditional values that most Christians stand for. They are trying to eradicate the Christian influence in society and one way to do that is to change its remaining cultural symbols like Christmas. Why? Because the very word itself is a witness to the world.

I am writing about groups like the American Civil Liberties Union, Planned Parenthood, the National Education Association, People for the American Way and Americans United for the Separation of Church and State and their ideological comrades on college campuses and in the media. These groups want to purge from America any public acknowledgment of Christianity’s God. That brings me back to “the rest of the story” (apology to Mr. Harvey).

AFA now has over three million citizens who receive our e-mail alerts. These are messages we send (about two a week) to people who want to take a stand with us. We give the basic information and then sugget some action steps. 

As evidenced by the Sam’s Club response and others, it is working. We can still win some and then hope that the sum of our victories will help us defeat the secular agenda to de-Christianize our country. While we may get weary in standing for these traditional values, for the sake of our children and grandchildren, we must not quit. Standing together we can have a much greater impact.

Sign up to receive our AFA action e-mail alerts at www.afa.net. Good day.