The made-up red cup controversy

Each week, The World and Everything in It features a “Culture Friday” segment, in which Executive Producer Nick Eicher discusses the latest cultural news with John Stonestreet, president of the Chuck Colson Center for Christian Worldview. Here is a summary of this week’s conversation.

Starbucks hates Christmas and Christians ought to be up in arms, a man named Joshua Feuerstein declared in a viral video about Starbucks and its plain red holiday cups. Feuerstein’s social media rant racked up 12 million views.

This week, John Stonestreet and I talked about how videos like that go viral. Stonestreet noted that many more people condemned the outrage against Starbucks than actually were outraged.

“I think this was completely a non-story,” Stonestreet said. “I think the ones who drove it were people who wanted to chastise any conservative Christians for being part of the ‘Christmas wars’ or whatever, and I don’t think there were any that actually existed.” At one point on the day the story broke, Stonestreet wondered whether Starbucks was behind the controversy as part of a marketing campaign.

“I’m not even sure this guy was serious,” Stonestreet said of Feuerstein.

That did not stop left-leaning, self-identified Christians from condemning conservative Christians.

“I saw quickly some popular, left-leaning Christian bloggers and Christian spokespersons trying to put this completely at the feet of conservative Christians,” Stonestreet said. “This is a lesson on social media for Christians. Make sure that a controversy exists before joining sides.”

For his part, Stonestreet did weigh in on the red cup scandal with a message of his own that quickly became one of his most shared tweets: “Total number of Christians outraged at #StarbucksRedCup: 1. Total number of people outraged at this outrage: a billion.”

Listen to “Culture Friday” on The World and Everything in It.