On saving Christmas
It's the middle of November in Litchville. The town museum's had its wreaths and garlands up for almost a month, now. This weekend the men were out by the water tower setting up the town's lighted plastic creche. Before too long, the few stores and businesses we have will be switching into Christmas mode, if they haven't already.
There's no evidence to be found of a plot by fiendish secular humanists to take the "Christ" out of "Christmas." Even those of us who aren't especially comfortable with the creche (which, displayed on its own as a community symbol of faith, would probably not stand up to a legal challenge) generally keep our mouths shut - the reality here is that the backlash is not against religious folk, but against folk who would dare speak concerns about the tricky weave of religion and our life as a community. If there's a "war on Christmas," as fundies like Pat Robertson and Bill O'Reilly like to claim, there's no evidence of it to be seen here.
As this excellent article in Salon points out, there's really no evidence to be seen of it anywhere. There's far too much good stuff in this article for me to summarize - just go and read it (for free, if you're willing to watch a brief ad) for yourself.
One of the fundies' most bizarre bellyaches to me has always been the complaint against stores that aren't "properly celebrating Christmas." This usually is code for using the expression "happy holidays" in any context, but can be far reaching, getting applied to store decoration, merchandise and its display, music on the PA, and so on.
The ever-astounding Bill O'Reilly seems to have latched onto this trope bigtime the last few - dare I say it? - "holiday seasons." Last December,
"Hate crimes against Christianity"??? I may be wrong, but it seems to me that more damage has been done to the celebration of Christ's Nativity by the wholesale appropriation of the day by stores (secular, capitalist instutions if ever there was such a creature). Christmas means big business to these operations, and with each new Christmas sale and Santa display, the stores maximize Christmas' profit factor... if at the same time taking it from the realm of "holy day" and turning it into mearly one more "holiday" to capitalize on.
Not enough celebration of Christmas in our stores? Good grief! I'd be delighted if I never saw another Christmas display again - not because I'd like to kill Christmas, but because I'd like to save it. It's disgusting to see the birth of Jesus turned into an opportunity to make hordes of money. It's appalling that our excitement as December 25 draws near has more to do with what's under the tree than with the steadily-spreading light of the Advent wreath and the Light-of-the-World baby it foreshadows.
The single greatest threat to Christmas is not the ACLU, "happy holidays," or some imaginary secularist cabal: It is the long, profitable descent into irrelevance. Rightists want more Christmas in the public sphere; the conundrum is that the more some version of "Christmas" worms its way into our cultural milieu, the more it comes to take on the flavor of all the other stuff that is part of that stew-pot. Perhaps it gives a faint dash of generic "religious" seasoning to all the hodgepodge of stuff in the mix, but it loses its distinctiveness - and in the process, its only real significance - by getting stirred in with everything else.
In other words, the more something called "Christmas" is public property, the less it belongs to the Church. And removing Christmas from its proper place in the Church is not only blasphemous, it is also its death sentence.
As a pastor and as a Christian, my job isn't to try to inject Christmas into all these things around me that have nothing to do with Jesus, and might in fact be thoroughly opposed to his kingdom (in practice, if not in words). My job is exactly the opposite: to keep Christmas from being co-opted by a culture that doesn't understand it and doesn't wish to; to keep our consumer society from injecting itself into the faith life of the Church.
It is well and good for the Church to seek to influence the world - that is, after all, very near the heart of our mission to tell the Good News. But the Church, the body of Christ, would do well to remember that the Jesus whom we proclaim prayed for us to be in the world, yet not of it (John 17:11, 15-16). We have this great Good News that God put on human flesh and became one of us, in order to mount the greatest rescue operation the world will ever see - it all began in Bethlehem with a God-baby. The Church cannot afford to either compomise this Good News by allowing all the cultural garbage to shape our Holy Day, or to assume that getting Macy's or Wal-Mart to use the phrase "merry Christmas" is somehow the same thing as "making disciples of all nations."
Christmas must be saved, yes. But it's the capitalists and of-this-world Christians who are threatening to deal it a knock-out punch... not the "secularist conspiracy."
There's no evidence to be found of a plot by fiendish secular humanists to take the "Christ" out of "Christmas." Even those of us who aren't especially comfortable with the creche (which, displayed on its own as a community symbol of faith, would probably not stand up to a legal challenge) generally keep our mouths shut - the reality here is that the backlash is not against religious folk, but against folk who would dare speak concerns about the tricky weave of religion and our life as a community. If there's a "war on Christmas," as fundies like Pat Robertson and Bill O'Reilly like to claim, there's no evidence of it to be seen here.
As this excellent article in Salon points out, there's really no evidence to be seen of it anywhere. There's far too much good stuff in this article for me to summarize - just go and read it (for free, if you're willing to watch a brief ad) for yourself.
One of the fundies' most bizarre bellyaches to me has always been the complaint against stores that aren't "properly celebrating Christmas." This usually is code for using the expression "happy holidays" in any context, but can be far reaching, getting applied to store decoration, merchandise and its display, music on the PA, and so on.
The ever-astounding Bill O'Reilly seems to have latched onto this trope bigtime the last few - dare I say it? - "holiday seasons." Last December,
O'Reilly began running a regular segment called 'Christmas Under Siege.' 'All over the country, Christmas is taking flak,' O'Reilly declared on Dec. 7. 'In Denver this past weekend, no religious floats were permitted in the holiday parade there. In New York City, Mayor [Michael] Bloomberg unveiled the "holiday tree," and no Christian Christmas symbols are allowed in the public schools. Federated Department Stores -- that's Macy's -- have done away with the Christmas greeting "Merry Christmas."' Instead, Macy's was using the malign phrase 'Happy Holidays.' Noting this, Pat Buchanan wrote, 'What we are witnessing here are hate crimes against Christianity.'
"Hate crimes against Christianity"??? I may be wrong, but it seems to me that more damage has been done to the celebration of Christ's Nativity by the wholesale appropriation of the day by stores (secular, capitalist instutions if ever there was such a creature). Christmas means big business to these operations, and with each new Christmas sale and Santa display, the stores maximize Christmas' profit factor... if at the same time taking it from the realm of "holy day" and turning it into mearly one more "holiday" to capitalize on.
Not enough celebration of Christmas in our stores? Good grief! I'd be delighted if I never saw another Christmas display again - not because I'd like to kill Christmas, but because I'd like to save it. It's disgusting to see the birth of Jesus turned into an opportunity to make hordes of money. It's appalling that our excitement as December 25 draws near has more to do with what's under the tree than with the steadily-spreading light of the Advent wreath and the Light-of-the-World baby it foreshadows.
The single greatest threat to Christmas is not the ACLU, "happy holidays," or some imaginary secularist cabal: It is the long, profitable descent into irrelevance. Rightists want more Christmas in the public sphere; the conundrum is that the more some version of "Christmas" worms its way into our cultural milieu, the more it comes to take on the flavor of all the other stuff that is part of that stew-pot. Perhaps it gives a faint dash of generic "religious" seasoning to all the hodgepodge of stuff in the mix, but it loses its distinctiveness - and in the process, its only real significance - by getting stirred in with everything else.
In other words, the more something called "Christmas" is public property, the less it belongs to the Church. And removing Christmas from its proper place in the Church is not only blasphemous, it is also its death sentence.
As a pastor and as a Christian, my job isn't to try to inject Christmas into all these things around me that have nothing to do with Jesus, and might in fact be thoroughly opposed to his kingdom (in practice, if not in words). My job is exactly the opposite: to keep Christmas from being co-opted by a culture that doesn't understand it and doesn't wish to; to keep our consumer society from injecting itself into the faith life of the Church.
It is well and good for the Church to seek to influence the world - that is, after all, very near the heart of our mission to tell the Good News. But the Church, the body of Christ, would do well to remember that the Jesus whom we proclaim prayed for us to be in the world, yet not of it (John 17:11, 15-16). We have this great Good News that God put on human flesh and became one of us, in order to mount the greatest rescue operation the world will ever see - it all began in Bethlehem with a God-baby. The Church cannot afford to either compomise this Good News by allowing all the cultural garbage to shape our Holy Day, or to assume that getting Macy's or Wal-Mart to use the phrase "merry Christmas" is somehow the same thing as "making disciples of all nations."
Christmas must be saved, yes. But it's the capitalists and of-this-world Christians who are threatening to deal it a knock-out punch... not the "secularist conspiracy."
posted by Bob at
11:38 AM
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