It must have been a slow news day. Self-proclaimed American evangelist and social media personality Joshua Feuerstein mocked the new Christmas cup from Starbucks on YouTube, and his video has been shared over 500,000 times. But before all that sharing took place, the media was all over it like mermaids on a Starbucks cup, so it isn’t any wonder the video began to circulate like wildfire.
The first report I saw was from the NYPost: “Christian group slams Starbucks holiday cup as ‘war on Christmas.” The “Christian group” turned out to be Feuerstein and a student pastor in Fla. and somehow from those two people, social media began reporting on Christians going crazy over the cups.
I have been drawn to Starbucks like a moth to a flame since then, camera in hand, looking for those crazy Christians who refuse to foster children (says one Facebook meme) while wasting time being offended by Christmas cups. So I visited a Starbucks in Green Hills on Monday, and one in Bellevue on Tuesday… and I didn’t see any Christians throwing fits, acting offended or paying any attention to the holiday cups. In fact, in Green Hills the clerk didn’t know what I was talking about and wasn’t sure the red cup was the holiday cup! It was just a red cup!
I manage three Christian forums on Facebook, publish a Christian website and am the Gospel Music and Entertainment columnist for Examiner.com. Yet no one has commented, emailed or contacted me about the cups. I have 1,347 friend on Facebook, predominantly from the Christian music industry, and I have yet to see one friend on Facebook post about how offended they are over the Starbucks cup.
It’s a non-issue that the media and people who like to mock Christians are using to, well, mock Christians. Sadly, some Christians are actually berating other Christians for being offended, and I daresay they don’t know anyone who is actually offended. They are just having a knee-jerk reaction or worse, jumping on the self-hate bandwagon.
The media loves to build controversy, because controversy sells. You know what else sells? The Christmas holidays, so Starbucks will take full advantage of the holidays to make money. On Instagram people began posting photos with the red cups and a hashtag “StabucksRedCup claiming Starbucks would donate to an unnamed “good cause” for every photo and hashtag posted. It looks like Starbucks itself is fanning the flames of the controversy, because it is just more free publicity for them.
But maybe Starbucks will donate a pittance of what they rake in to a “good cause.” Perhaps the “good cause” will be Planned Parenthood, which Starbucks is a big supporter of. Maybe the blood-red cup symbolizes the blood of the innocents Planned Parenthood harvests for organs. Now, THAT’S a story, but who can pay attention to dismembered babies when we have a HUGE story like a couple of Christians objecting to a not-very-holiday holiday cup? Meanwhile Starbucks is laughing all the way to the bank.
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