It has been a fairly quiet Christmas Day in my home, and I’ve spent time on Facebook paying attention to what others are sharing. Three things seem to carry the most weight in the feed- (not in any particular order)

• Santa
• Christmas as a Christian holiday
• The NYPD officers who were assassinated.

What strikes me as I contemplate this brief list is how much each story revolves around what we choose to believe or disbelieve. Truly the NYPD officer’s story is the most complicated, but even there, the ideas about how the story is being positioned is intriguing.

The other two are far less emotional and inflammatory, and that is really saying something when any story makes a religious issue “less inflammatory.”

I’ve always been a bit surprised at how the myth of Santa and the myth of Jesus’ birth co-exist and some hold tight to the one while letting go of the other. What is it that signals when we are supposed to stop believing in Santa and why is there no similar guideline in place when it coms to the story of a virgin birth? Or maybe no dichotomy exists here. Even people who do not believe Santa is real, still attribute things like gifts to Santa. Maybe some do the same with Jesus– they aren’t really believers and yet they can be affectionately called Christians? Long before I stopped labeling myself as a Christian, I stopped believing in the virgin birth. I believed (and still do) that the myth was manufactured as a way to symbolize the power of God’s love. God acted in the world, not in a warrior manner like so much of the Hebrew Scriptures illustrated, but by becoming the most vulnerable God could be– a human baby, accepted, loved, and parented even though he was a bastard child born out of wedlock.

In my news feed was a story about the daughter of slain civilian Eric Garner visiting the memorial for the slain NYPD officers. This is a touching read and I believe gives voice to the ideas of many, many persons. The #BlackLivesMatter movement isn’t anti-police, but rather it is calling into question the use of excessive force which appears so often to be meted out especially towards people of color. But gun violence is always excessive force, used specifically because it is excessive, and murder is so often the real intention even if cloaked in flashy language about standing one’s ground, or other ideas about justified shootings.

At the same time, in my feed was a long post, supposedly written by an unknown police officer who claims his death will go unnoticed. The web site where the post is found, has a tag line: “God, guns, and guts made America the land of the free, and at any price we must fight to keep all three.” I especially love that part that says “at any price.” What a sentiment!

The police/anti-police rhetoric is as much a fallacy as Santa or the virgin birth, and people believe or don’t for reasons just as reasonable or irrational. Thy must enforce and manufacture this fallacy as one way to preserve the other great fallacy that God, guns and guts created a land of the free. They say “free” where most of us say, democracy, and the two are utterly and completely different. Who is it perpetuating these fallacies?

I have to say one more thing about police officers before a final focus on this false battle. In my opinion almost every single American police officer is a good person trying to do the right thing as he or she sees it. I say, American, because we really miss the obvious if we fail to grasp how American this problem is. Did you know there are “free” countries n the world where police don’t even carry guns? Even where we can cite American cops as using excessive force with a gun, it is most likely that they are only doing as they have been trained. In other words, we have a training problem, where we train officers to use excessive force, or where we fail to teach them how to de-escalate problems using less fatal tactics when possible. Those who want to paint it as good cops and bad cops may get further by refocusing efforts towards how officers come to act as they do, not only their actions alone.

God, guns, guts… where have we heard that type of rhetoric before, and what other rhetoric is often used as a way to maintain and support the status quo? Take a minute and list the contemporary organizations and entities who promote this notion of God, guns, guts by any means necessary. Then crack open your history books and look up the KKK as well as look up cross burning. We may think about the klan as being about racism, but I’d suggest it is more useful to see it as a desire to maintain the status quo where some had privilege and they were willing to do whatever necessary to maintain it while keeping others disadvantaged. As a gay, man, I can’t help but see the rhetoric of Far Right evangelicals as falling into this arena as well.

What do you choose to believe and what do you choose to disbelieve? How does a notion of God, guns, guts at any price enter into what you have chosen to believe or disbelieve? And what are your thoughts about how these ideas fit together? Comments welcome.