Went to Dancing Lights of Christmas in Lebanon tonight; presumed it'd be a fun driving light show with familiar Christmas favorites. For the first thirty minutes, the music was quirky (Christmas version of Enter Sandman? Well, sure!) but the wife and I found it tolerable enough. Then they synced the lights to Amazing Grace, which we found strange, but in the context of the other weirdos, didn't give it much weight.

Until the next song. It was Christian artist Go Fish's Christmas With a Capital C . It's an Evangelical culture war anthem - one section of lyrics, as example:

God's got a law / And we've pretty much destroyed it / We're gonna get judged / There's no way to avoid

For those who haven't been to Dancing Lights, there's a lot of thought that has to go into selecting each song, as they have to be synced to the dozens of different light displays in the attraction. So this wasn't just a one-off by a DJ that night.

What upsets me isn't that I'm a non-Christian and I'm offended - I'm a church-going Protestant. It's that slipping culture war content into what otherwise appears to be a very secular attraction only deepens the divides in our communities and makes bigger messes for ecumenicals like myself to clean up. If they're going to do this, they need to be more honest about it - code the advertisements with crosses and 'Reason for the Season'-type verbiage. Or, you know, just play traditional Christmas songs.

It's also just very strange to have such blatant Evangelical content in an attraction that's on public land. I can't imagine making this little jab at the corporate libertines is really worth the potential consequences of pissing off the right person with the right amount of power, time, or inclination.