Taking on Christmas

Drivers approaching the Lincoln Tunnel this holiday season will be the targets of an atheist advertisement that its sponsors describe as a strike against Christmas.

A billboard near the New Jersey entrance to the tunnel shows a silhouetted manger scene with the message, “You KNOW it’s a Myth. This Season, Celebrate REASON.”

The $20,000 campaign is sponsored by a national organization called American Atheists.

“If the religious right wants a war on Christmas, this is what they’re going to get,” American Atheists President David Silverman says, referring to past criticisms of efforts to question the season’s spiritual foundation.

The billboard joins a $200,000 national television, newspaper and magazine advertising campaign sponsored by the American Humanist Association and the Stiefel Freethought Foundation.

Those ads juxtapose passages from religious texts selected because they appear to advocate for “fear, hatred and intolerance” with quotations from humanist scholars that promote “love, equality, peace, freedom and reason,” according to a press release.

The Catholic League has struck back with its own billboard near one of the Lincoln Tunnel’s New York City entrances, which counters: “You know it’s real. This season, celebrate Jesus.”

The league also sent statues of Nativity scenes to the governors of all 50 states, asking them to place them in their rotundas in response to atheists “out in force this year trying to neuter Christmas.”

The controversy comes on the heels of studies reporting that rising numbers of Americans identify themselves as nonreligious: 15 percent in 2008 compared with 8.2 percent in 1990, according to the Trinity College American Religious Identification Survey.

The Pew Forum on Religion in Public Life reported in April, however, that of the 5 percent of its survey respondents who said they do not believe in God or a universal spirit, only 24 percent actually identified themselves as atheists.

American Atheists’ message is aimed at what Silverman describes as closet atheists: people who attend religious services during the holidays without believing in them.

“Stay home,” he says. “Don’t give the church money. Don’t give the church power. Tell the truth to your friends and families.”

Newark Archdiocese spokesman Jim Goodness says the true meaning of Christmas is too resilient to be threatened by a sign.

“We’re looking at well over 2,000 years of this message being part of humanity,” he says. “One message on a billboard that’s going to be there for a month isn’t going to change that.”