The grinch who fibbed about Christmas: Falwell's holiday hokum.

"Why bother?"

That was the reaction of a few of my friends, including a number of Americans United supporters, after seeing me on television or quoted in their local papers rebutting the idea that there is a "war on Christmas."

I can understand the sentiment, but this issue is far from trivial. Religious Right efforts to make 2005 the year of the "war on Christmas" got under way long before Halloween. The Rev. Jerry Falwell announced that he was mobilizing more than 700 lawyers in a battle to "save Christmas" in mid October. About the same time, Fox News Channel host John Gibson published a book titled The War On Christmas.

I knew it was going to be a long holiday period. My first thought was to ignore the whole thing. Fox News was calling us to do three different shows on the same day, and I did not want to feed their conspiracy theories.

But the stories just kept coming and soon began appearing in the legitimate media as well. Falwell was being quoted all over the place, and reporters seemed to be accepting his wild claims that the season was being captured by the spirit of "political correctness" run amok, leaving the dark hint that soon children would not realize there was a holiday to celebrate at all!

Some of what Falwell was complaining about struck me as picayune. He seemed obsessed with greetings used by store clerks, for example, and he threw a fit after a Boston city government press release referred to the arrival of a "holiday tree." The mayor hadn't approved such a designation and immediately informed Falwell of that fact. (We do not know the current location of the writer of the press release, but I'll bet it is colder than Boston.)

Soon hard-to-swallow stories were flying left and right. Public schools were being accused of banning the colors green and red, forbidding students from saying "Merry Christmas" and changing the words of well-known Christmas carols to strike out religious references. To most of the readers of this column, this all sounds pretty unlikely. But, frankly, I became convinced that if these accusations went uncontested, they would become "true" just by dint of repetition. I knew Americans United had to fight back to correct the record.

I accepted an offer from www.beliefnet.com to do a back and forth e-mail dialogue with Gibson so that I could deal with some of his claims point by point. AU also issued an open letter to Falwell, reminding him (and the public) that generating a phony controversy around Christmas, heralded by Christians as a "season of peace," makes a mockery of real faith.

Most importantly, AU investigated the Religious Right's most common examples of the "war on Christmas." Guess what? They're bogus! Two schools accused of banning red and green did no such thing. Another school was accused of rewriting "Silent Night." In reality, it was putting on an 18-year-old play that changes the words of familiar Christmas carols to fit the play's secular theme of homelessness.

How do these crazy stories get started? Some people just believe what they want to believe heedless of the facts. I was discussing this issue on "The Michael Medved Show" when a caller insisted that a Chicago television station had cut out Linus' reading from the New Testament when it aired "A Charlie Brown Christmas."

I was skeptical. During a commercial break, Medved's staff received two calls from people who had seen the same broadcast and noted that the Linus scene hadn't been cut. Michael is a conservative, but he immediately put the myth to rest. I wish every conservative was that forthright in correcting untruths.

I know that even Falwell can't seriously believe that "anti-Christmas" advocates are ruining the holiday. He and his supporters want people to believe that this is an example of an even bigger conflict, a war against Christianity itself. David Limbaugh recently issued a paperback version of his popular book Persecution, which suggests the U.S. government is a hair's breadth away from cracking down on Christians like the Roman emperors of old.

I also know that spreading false stories about what is happening in public schools is a good way for the Religious Right to further its crusade against those vital institutions and the dedicated men and women who teach there. Falwell once said his ultimate goal is the abolition of the public school system and its replacement with a network of Christian schools. These attacks are part of that.

So you see, the stakes are really much higher than whether someone does or does not think calling an evergreen a "Christmas tree" or a "holiday tree" is a big deal. For me, it is about the need to tell the truth. If government actions violate someone's constitutional rights, we have to say so. However, as people struggle to deal with the multiplicity of religious and philosophical viewpoints in America, it is also important not to permit false and pernicious stories to circulate unfettered by analysis and criticism.

Barry W. Lynn is executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State.