This is from a mall in Istanbul.
Christians make up only about .16% of the Turkish population. Read that carefully. Not 16%. Less than 1%. .16.
Yet, there are decorations and background music in public spaces to commemorate their holiday.
Just to give you some perspective, that is about the same as if a mall in the US put up decorative posters of L. Ron Hubbard to display their inclusive tolerance of the Scientologist community.
Now, my point here isn’t to show how badly the US compares to a place like Turkey in terms of religious tolerance ( I mean, when is the last time you heard a mall playing recordings of the Talbiyah during Hajj season? Muslims make up about 4% of the US population, so, by the Turkish standard….).
My point is…we are a actually people under extreme compulsion. And one of the means by which that compulsion is being imposed upon us, is business.
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I am in Starbucks at this moment, listening to Ella Fitzgerald singing “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”. All of the people in here, the customers and the staff, are Muslims. But Starbucks is an international franchise. And it brings religion with it wherever it goes. That shopping mall with the Christmas tree is full of multinational retail outlets, the rationale is, foreigners frequent these places. They must be catered to. But of course, the reality is that at any given moment, the people in the mall, or the people in the Starbucks, are perhaps 90% Muslims. The penetration into our markets by multinational companies, imposes upon us, compels us, to change our cultures and values…in ways that have nothing to do with business.
