‘Tis this season again, when my mail box is stuffed with catalogues advertising products I have no interest in and my car radio spills out seasonal music, most of which I don’t like. [First-class mail basically doesn’t exist anymore, having been eradicated by email. I do get print periodicals I want to read. And Christmas music does contain some of the most beautiful hymns, such as “Silent Night” and “Come all ye Faithful”. I could do without “The Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” and other popular music with a banal message.]
But more importantly still, all the media are full of messages deploring the “War against Christmas” and urging to “Keep Christ in Christmas”. Of course Christmas was originally a feast celebrating the birth of Christ (the word itself derives from Middle English “Christ-Mass”), and its date on December 25 was arbitrarily chosen to be close to the winter solstice (the day in the year when the day is shortest and the night longest), which falls in December in the northern hemisphere, where of course this Christian feast originated. [In the southern hemisphere the winter solstice falls in June. On that date I was once in Australia and once in South Africa. It seemed a little strange to see Christmas displays full of snowy scenes when the temperature was in the eighties.] As for the Christ in Christmas, this relation was long severed in countries still looked upon as Christian. In Scotland and Scandinavia, Christmas is marked by a lot of public drunkenness, and on both sides of the Atlantic impatient children wait for the moment when they can open their presents (In America this has traditionally been on the morning of the 25th, resulting in a lot of juvenile insomnia on the night before. In much of Europe there is the more child-friendly tradition of unpacking presents on the evening of the 24th.)
The winter solstice was a feast day in ancient Rome. Much of our Christmas paraphernalia, such as the Christmas tree and the mistletoe, derive from the customs of barbarian Germanic tribes. And in modern Japan Christmas is a popular season for jollification (including Scotland-grade drunkenness) and the giving of presents, with no mention of Christ . Walk through the Ginza in Tokyo during the season and you will encounter Santa Claus ringing his bell, reindeer (including Rudolph), Christmas trees and mistletoes, and you will hear the same mélange of beautiful and kitschy music—as if you were in a shopping mall in America.
A war against Christmas? By implication that is a war against Christians. A sense of proportion is an important component of political sanity. To be outraged by attacks on Christmas displays on public property in the U.S. in a period when tens of thousands of Christians are murdered, raped, robbed and driven from their homes by ISIS in Iraq and Syria shows a remarkable lack of a sense of proportion. Actually this is too weak a description: The equivalence is an obscenity. It occurs in sermons by conservative Protestant and Catholic preachers. It is also found in the attacks against progressive secularism by conservatives like Bill O’Reilly. It is also part of anti-Western and anti-American propaganda by the Putin regime—Holy Russia standing against the decadence and impiety of the democracies.
In the U.S. the attack, such as it is, is mainly expressed in litigation about alleged violations of the First Amendment. Christmas was made a federal holiday by an act of Congress in 1825. As far as I know, nobody was much upset by this until recently. Now, the focus of most of the relevant litigation concerns actions on all levels of government—clergy and religious symbols appearing at national ceremonies, a monument to the Ten Commandments erected in front of a state court, a prayer at the opening of a town council meeting. Who are the people upset by such occurrences? Clearly they are a small albeit vocal minority of the citizenry. There are organizations committed to a very narrow understanding of the First Amendment, which I would characterize as Kemalism. It was the ideology of Kemal Ataturk, who founded the Turkish Republic and imposed this ideology on what remained a majority Muslim population. This is a view of religion based on a notion of disease control—religion is backward and potentially dangerous to a modern state, it is difficult to eradicate, but it must be kept out of public space and tightly quarantined so that it cannot intrude into that space. Kemalism worked well as long as the regime was basically authoritarian. As Turkey became more democratic, the “backward” Muslims started to vote; not surprisingly they voted their values. The U.S. is a democracy and a strongly religious society. Our Kemalists would never win an election. So they have to resort to the courts (the least democratic branch of government). What we have here are well-funded organizations, full of competent lawyers, notably the American Civil Liberties Union and Americans for the Separation of Church and State. There are some committed secularists. Very few are in principle anti-religious, let alone atheists. For what I think was mainly the result of historical accidents, Kemalists became a pressure group within the Democratic party, anti-Kemalists in the Republican party. Both camps have their kooky groups.
There is another aspect of the current holiday customs that, I think, cannot possibly be called a “War against Christmas”. It is the avoidance of explicitly Christian terms. Instead of wishing acquaintances or (perhaps more importantly) customers a “merry Christmas”, one uses phrases like “happy holidays” or “season’s greetings”. Of course one could describe this language as literally keeping Christ out of Christmas, but it is truly fanciful or plain paranoid to detect an anti-Christian antagonism here. Rather, what we have here is an expression of pluralist etiquette. Contemporary American religion is exuberantly diverse, and the pluralist etiquette shows respect for this fact. After all, we have fellow-citizens who celebrate Hanukkah, or Eid, or Divali—or Kwanzaa, that imaginary African festival invented by proponents of African-American culture. It would be quite a chore to decide which of these holidays should be named in one’s greetings. Halloween originated as a Protestant parody of All Hallows Eve, but to detect anti-Catholic animosity in its current usage is also paranoid (or, for that matter, in the phrase “hocus-pocus”, which was a similar parody of the priest’s words at the consecration of the Mass – “hoc est corpus”).
The “war against Christmas” is a political slogan aimed at progressive secularism. There is that other phrase often heard during the same season—“Keep Christ in Christmas”. It can be heard in both Protestant and Catholic sermons. The Knights of Columbus have initiated a program for children around this phrase. That is not so much a political slogan as a pastoral exhortation to Christians to take their faith more seriously. There is hardly any place in America where one cannot find a large number of churches, in which whoever wants to keep Christ in Christmas can do so in the company of fellow-believers, often with choirs singing the most beautiful hymns. Or, if they wish, these believers can stage a procession behind a large cross on a public street, with the police making a space for them and every court in the country protecting their right to do so. I don’t see how they are betraying their faith by sending “season’s greetings” to a Jewish, Hindu or agnostic neighbor. In a society marked by both pluralism and religious liberty individuals learn to live with what I call the two pluralisms: the pluralism of different religions living together in civic peace, and the dualism of the various religious discourses and the secular discourse which necessarily dominates large areas of a modern society—from the religious neutrality of the law to that of the market economy in which Christmas shopping is a significant fact (the cash register rings up sales regardless of race, color or creed).
There will also be sermons these days deploring consumerism and commercialism in the Christmas season. I may as well end with a personal confession: I like shopping malls (even if I can’t afford some of the items for sale); I like the hustle and bustle of happy consumers looking for just what they want in the plenitude on offer; and I particularly like a shopping mall at Christmas time—the lights, the decorations and at least some of the music. And people are really more friendly when “‘tis the season to be jolly”. Acts of kindness come more easily.
It was many years ago, very early in January. I had been drafted into the U.S. Army. I had been given a three-day pass at Christmas which I spent at what was then home in New York City—and spent in a very secular way, shopping and strolling through the festive streets of midtown Manhattan (though I vaguely remember going with my parents to a carol service at an Episcopal church). Now I was back for more basic training at a military installation in New Jersey. It was after midnight and I was on guard duty by myself, at some kind of storage area. It was bitterly cold. I was lonely, depressed, and anxious about where the Army was going to send me next. Then suddenly the words from a Christmas hymn popped up in my memory, the one about Jesus being born “in the cold of winter, when half-spent was the night”. It was acutely comforting. I had a Christmas experience all my own, with Christ certainly not kept out.