The opinion of the Carrier editorial board on the Starbucks red cup controversy
Last week, Starbucks unveiled their newest holiday cup design, an annual tradition since 1997 that has included such iconic Christmas symbols as snowmen and reindeer. This year, however, they opted for a more minimalist approach, and the cups are simply red.
Proving that they are capable of getting offended over just about anything, evangelical Christians have expressed outrage about the company’s lack of Christmas representation. On Nov. 5, former pastor and self-proclaimed social media personality Joshua Feuerstein posted a video on Facebook in which he claimed that Starbucks removed all Christmas symbols from their cups because “they hate Jesus.”
In his video, he encourages Christians to “trick” Starbucks into acknowledging Christmas by telling them that “Merry Christmas” is their name, forcing the baristas to say the phrase. Since the video’s release, it has been shared on Facebook over 500,000 times, and the #MerryChristmasStarbucks hashtag has started trending on Twitter.
The Atlantic of Aug. 4, 2014 explains that the idea of persecution is central to the Christian faith. However, it goes on to say that in America, religious conservatives have begun claiming persecution when none actually exists.
Changes in public policy, including the Supreme Court’s ruling in favor of same-sex marriage, have created tension between the general public and the religious right. Conservatives are quick to extrapolate this tension into religious persecution, claiming that their faith is being violated.
Interestingly, the protests have only given Starbucks more publicity. On Sunday, Forbes reported that the company’s stock prices have not gone down, and that the people protesting are still buying Starbucks products. This is extremely unusual, because most protests of this nature call for boycotting the product or service in question. But Christians seeking to “trick” Starbucks into saying “Merry Christmas” are encouraging protesters to buy their products.
This is an extremely ineffective method of protest and proves that the Christians in question do not care about change. Their strategy is entirely focused on gaining attention.
By claiming that Starbucks is erasing Christianity, Feuerstein and others in the movement are overshadowing incidents of actual persecution. For instance, on Nov. 3, just two days before Feuerstein posted his video, the American Center for Law and Justice published a report detailing the human rights violations that the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has committed against Christians and other religious minorities in their territories.
Christians in ISIS territories are being forced to convert to Islam on threat of death, and being taken from their homes. This is real persecution that we need to address. By claiming that a red Starbucks cup was created to persecute Christians, attention is diverted from people who are being killed for their faith. This delegitimizes the idea that Christians can experience persecution.