Take Haynes' position with a grain of salt: he's working in a subtle promotion of an approach he helped design. On the other hand, he's attracted some attention from the crackpots:

Charles Haynes had come to the attention of traditional Christians and Jews when he worked for Americans United for Separation of Church and State. They wondered why he would be on the advisory board of The Pluralism Project when also on the board was Wicca priestess Margot Adler.

Haynes also had been executive director of First Liberty Institute and had helped develop the curriculum, "Living With Our Deepest Differences," for the controversial Williamsburg Charter Foundation. The curriculum included a variation on the notorious "lifeboat" game where the students determined who lives or dies. It also pronounced that the peace and women's movements were among "the most glorious accomplishments" in U.S. history. And it asked students such privacy-invading questions as what changes there have been in their parents' and families' beliefs.

The curriculum at its core advocated the development of "a common vision for the common good." These are terms commonly used by communitarians, who believe individual needs and rights should be de-emphasized or balanced against the interests of the community or society as a whole. Primary promoter of the curriculum was Os Guinness, who is today on the BLP advisory board along with communitarians Jean Bethke Elshtain and Mary Ann Glendon, plus Ellen Frankel who co-edited THE COMMUNITARIAN CHALLEGE TO LIBERALISM. The aforementioned 4 individuals constitute a majority of the BLP advisory board, and on the BLP board of directors is communitarian David Blankenhorn. Elshtain, Glendon and Blankenhorn all signed "The Responsive Communitarian Platform," which stated: "There is little sense in gun registration. What we need to significantly enhance public safety is domestic disarmament....We join with those who read the Second Amendment the way it was written, as a communitarian clause, calling for community militias, not individual gun slingers."

Why would the BLP, producer of THE BIBLE AND ITS INFLUENCE for our schools, choose to be advised and directed by individuals with such views?

So he can't be all bad. (Before Fred Clarkson jumps on me, I use the term "crackpot" advisedly. This is not reasonable material.)

Haynes' basic position is that there is no culture war. He explains it in Michelle Goldberg's Salon article on the "War On Christmas" (via bjooks):

According to Haynes, though, there is no war on Christmas. "I certainly wouldn't put it that way," he says. "The big picture is that there's more religion now in public schools than ever in modern history. There's no question about that. But it's not there in terms of the government imposing religion or sponsoring it, and that bothers some people on the right. They miss the good old days when public schools were semi-established Protestant schools.

In the last two decades, says Haynes, "religion has come into the public schools in all kinds of ways ... many schools now understand that students have religious liberty rights in a public school, so you can go to many public schools today and kids will be giving each other religious literature, they will be sharing their faith. You go to most public schools now and see kids praying around the flagpole before school."

The reason fights over Christmas iconography recur, says Haynes, is that "there are still some school administrators who are so afraid to deal with religion that they go too far in keeping it out, and it only takes a few bad stories in this era of the Internet for many conservative religious people across the country to think that public schools are hostile to their faith."

Ironically, when school officials do go too far, the ACLU is likely to challenge them, on the grounds that the government can neither promote nor restrict religious speech. "A lot of the things the ACLU does to help religious people and religious students are not high-profile cases; they don't get much attention," says Haynes. "The Christian student who is told she can't bring her Bible to school, the ACLU gets those kinds of calls, and often it doesn't become a lawsuit, but they will quietly tell the school you can't do this, you have to treat everyone fairly."

[...]

The war on Christmas trope lets the right pretend to be playing defense when it's really on the offensive -- against the ACLU, separation of church and state, and pluralism, to name just a few targets.

The words after the ellipses are Goldberg's.

I've been arguing this point since about 1993: there is no Culture War, never was. The term itself was invented (or at least brought into the English language) by Patrick Buchanan for his own partisan ends. The rhetoric has never matched the reality that most Americans agree broadly on most social and moral issues, from abortion to the place of religion in public life. Elites at either end of the spectrum ginned up the entire conflict to raise cash and advance political agendas. As Goldberg notes, the right is still at it.

Two things suggest themselves here. The first is that, as Haynes suggests, the internet acts as a kind of cultural resonance chamber. It's like any other rumor mill, but powerful. Blogs are going to play an important role in neutralizing that kind of activity: as more citizens become net-literate, they'll turn increasingly to blogs for news and analysis. So bloggers, take heart! What you do here will make a difference eventually.

But the second is that the "solution" to this problem that doesn't exist is to empower ordinary citizens to turn off the noise machine from both left and right and find agreement on their own. Imagine, for example, how different the situation in Dover may have been had the school board there been able to step back from the creationist agenda being pushed through its leaders and negotiate a compromise. Intelligent Design might have been taught in a Social Studies class, and the whole expensive controversy avoided.