Campus Crusade for Cthulhu to the American Family Association: You Have Named the Wrong Enemy

ARKHAM, MASSACHUSETTS, December 1, 2014 — Campus Crusade for Cthulhu, International today responded to "The Fight for Christmas," published November 18 by the American Family Association, in which the ministry lays out its case for a seven-year campaign to defend the holiday.

Our position is that the case is sincere, the alarm is real, and the enemy has been misidentified by about five thousand years.

For the ministry's reference, and for the reference of anyone who has been reading its material and wondering who is actually on the other end: Cthulhumas is the winter observance of this organization. It runs the Days of Darkness, the solstice and the seven nights after it, and it closes on the twenty-fifth of December with Cthulhu Invictus — the unconquered one, so named because the sun has never managed it. We have been keeping the longest night for a very long time. We have never been quiet about it.

They have never named us. In seven years of Naughty-or-Nice lists, boycotts, action alerts and magazine features, the American Family Association has identified its antagonists as secular humanists, newspaper columnists, and other Christians. The list names retailers. In seven years it has not named a god.

Lynn Armbruster of this organization has written to Tupelo four times. She has received an acknowledgment of receipt, twice. The New England Great Old One Society reports the same silence; we have no relationship with that organization and mention it only because the silence appears to be ecumenical.

To be exact about the target, since the ministry's own material is not: we have no quarrel with anyone's Christmas, and none whatever with the people who keep it. Our quarrel is with an office in Mississippi that has been selling tickets to a war and will not let us into the building.

The article states the ministry's first proposition as "an intentional effort for over 100 years to secularize the U.S." That is the error, and it is the whole of the error. Secularization is a century old. It keeps no feast, holds no rite, and has never once shown up on the twenty-fifth of December to take anything from anybody. In 274 an emperor put an unconquered sun on the calendar and the winter feast changed hands. It changed hands again after that. The current tenant has held the lease for about sixteen centuries and has been telling everyone for seven years that it is the one being evicted.

We did not start the War on Christmas. We are what the war was about.

"They have spent seven years hunting for somebody to be at war with, and every December they walk straight past us to go find one," said Latonia Tobin, Executive Director of Campus Crusade for Cthulhu, International. "We are not hiding. We have a mailing address, a catalog, and three hundred twenty-three chapters. We are in the phone book. We are in the phone book under C."

Two days after that article ran, the ministry's press office called a one-month boycott of a pet supply retailer for the offense of saying "holiday," supplied its members with the corporate switchboard extension, and, in the same document, offered commemorative Christmas buttons at five dollars for ten and sixty dollars for two hundred. The same document notes with approval that a retailer it boycotted the previous year has since closed two hundred locations.

"An organization that sells the merchandise of its own grievance is not under siege," Tobin said. "It is in business, and it is a good business, and we say that as a competitor, because we also sell shirts. The difference is that we do not claim somebody is doing this to us."

Accordingly, Campus Crusade for Cthulhu confirmed Monday that it is writing to every company named on this year's Naughty list, to thank them. "Holiday" is not an insult in this house. It is nearly accurate, and it is a great deal nearer than the alternative. The letters go out with the season's catalog.

We are not applying to be the enemy. The enemy is a job with hours, and the ministry already has people doing it who are much better at being upset than we are. We are applying to be the subject — the thing the war has been about since before anyone thought to name it, the reason there is a twenty-fifth of December worth fighting over in the first place. Put us on the list under grievance, original. We will accept a footnote. We will accept an asterisk. After seven years of watching a pet store take the blame for our religion, we will accept nearly anything.

The Days of Darkness begin at the solstice. Campus Crusade for Cthulhu will keep them at three hundred twenty-three chapters, at Miskatonic State, and in an unrecorded number of houses that have never filed with anybody. Details of the observance are published at campuscrusadeforcthulhu.org/cthulhumas.

About Campus Crusade for Cthulhu Campus Crusade for Cthulhu is a religious nonprofit corporation founded in 1974 at Miskatonic State University. It keeps 323 chapters at colleges and universities across the United States, and correspondence with congregations elsewhere that it does not enumerate. Membership is free and open to all students, lettered and unlettered, including by correspondence. Campus Crusade for Cthulhu, International, the operating entity, is administered from the chapter house on Elm Street in Arkham, Massachusetts. Its filings are current.

Media Contact Campus Crusade for Cthulhu, International · Elm Street · Arkham, Massachusetts Media received by appointment. Not Thursdays.