#446: Do Muslims and Christians Worship The Same God?

 As Christians attempt to celebrate the sacred season of Christmas amid a sea of consumer excess, the last thing we need to see is conflict among ourselves.  So it was sad last week to see a Christian college punish a professor for quoting Pope Francis. 

Administrators at Wheaton College in Illinois, a leading evangelical college, placed Larycia Hawkins, an associate professor of political science, on administrative leave last Tuesday after she suggested that Christians and Muslims follow the same God. Her December 10 Facebook posting read: “And as Pope Francis stated last week, we worship the same God.” The college offered this rationale:

"Dr. Hawkins’ administrative leave resulted from theological statements that seemed inconsistent with Wheaton College’s doctrinal convictions, and is in no way related to her race, gender or commitment to wear a hijab during Advent."

The Internet predictably exploded with sites asking “Do Christians and Muslims worship the same God?” (google it!) The result is a flood of pseudo-academic gobbledygook detailing supposed differences between the “Christian God” and the “Muslim God.”

Many arrive at the same conclusion as Bryan Fischer, columnist for the American Family Association:

Do Christians and Muslims worship the same God? The answer is an unequivocal and unambiguous "No." Muslims themselves will confirm this to you if you know the questions to ask.

  Some of these commentaries argue about words: the origin of “Allah” and “Yahweh” and “Jehovah,” for example.  Some argue about whether Abraham sacrificed Isaac or Ishmael.  Some argue that Allah is not a loving father, or that Allah has no son.  Some finally, detail many differences in Christian and Islamic beliefs. 

All of which provides ample evidence that Christianity and Islam are not the same religion.  We do not share the same faith, which is why interactions between us are called “inter-faith” events.  But all these things are beside the point. 

All these arguments, however distinct, make the same basic error.  It is called a “category mistake”:

A category mistake is an error in logic in which one category of something thing is presented as belonging to another category. For example, to say "the rock is alive" assigns the category of life to that which is not alive. Another example would be to say that an idea is the color blue. It mistakenly applies the category of color to a concept in the mind.

https://carm.org/dictionary-category-mistake  

In short, the arguments above all waste our time by making the points that do not even apply to the question about the “same God.”

The category mistake here lies in thinking that talking about “the same God” is equivalent to talking about “the same concept of God” or “the same ideas of God”  or “beliefs about God” or even “names of God.”

These are all mistakes, because the question is not if we all believe the same things.  In fact the question is not about us (our ideas, concepts, beliefs, words) at all.  It is about God. It is not about our beliefs, but about the object of our beliefs. And as Saint Thomas wrote, the object of our faith is not an idea--it is a being, or even Being itself. 

Let me take an everyday example. I have three children.  Do they all acknowledge the same father?  Perhaps one thinks I am generous, another thinks I am wasteful, and a third thinks I am stingy.  They have very different ideas of me--but their ideas do not change me. I am still father to all three.  Do they all love the same father?  Perhaps one thinks she is my favorite child, another believes I have no favorites, and the third thinks I’m the best father in the world.  None of those things alters the main fact--I am still their father, and if they love their father then they all love me. 

My kids’ ideas may be right or wrong, of course.  But those ideas do not change who I am.  Different people’s ideas about God may also be right or wrong.  But they do not change God. 

So Muslims do not believe Allah has a son.  But then, Jews do not believe in the Son of God either.  Nor do Unitarians.  Nor did the 4th century Arians, who believed Jesus was only human.  Then there were the Docetists, who did not believe that God’s Son became human.  And the Jansenists, who believed that God’s grace destroyed our free will.  And the Greek and Russian Orthodox Christians, who do not believe, as we do, that “the Spirit proceeds from the Father and from the Son.”

Are we to conclude that Jews, Unitarians, Arians, Docetists, Jansenists, and Othodox Christians all worship a different God?  Of course not.  That would make a mockery of Western monotheism, which began with the notion that the God of Abraham is the only God, that all others are frauds.  We may disagree with those others, or believe they are wrong in their beliefs.  We may even judge, as history does, that Arianism, Docetism, and Jansenism are heretical beliefs incompatible with true Christian faith.  But we cannot say they worship a different God.  We all share the same monotheism. 

By definition, monotheists acknowledge only one God.  If Jews worship a different God from Christians, then the God of Abraham cannot be God at all.  So why do we use their scriptures?  Why don’t we reject their God?  But of course, we do not--any more than Muslims reject our God. 

To repeat: the question is not whether we all believe all the same things about God.  The question is not about us at all.  The question is about God.  In short, the focus is not on our beliefs but on the object of our beliefs—and God is and remains the same God whether our beliefs are right or wrong. 

So how do we know we all worship the same God if our beliefs are so different?  The obvious way to consult our traditions. Here is what the Catechism of the Catholic Church says:

The plan of salvation also includes those who acknowledge the Creator, in the first place amongst whom are the Muslims; these profess to hold the faith of Abraham, and together with us they adore the one, merciful God, mankind’s judge on the last day.

--CCC 841, quoting the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium 16, from Vatican Council II.

Vatican II's Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions, Nostra Aetate, 3, makes the teaching of the Council perhaps even clearer:

The Church regards with esteem also the Moslems. They adore the one God, living and subsisting in Himself; merciful and all-powerful, the Creator of heaven and earth, who has spoken to men; they take pains to submit wholeheartedly to even his inscrutable decrees, just as Abraham, with whom the faith of Islam takes pleasure in linking itself, submitted to God.

And here is what the Quran says:

We believe in God and what has been sent down to us, and what had been revealed to Abraham and Ishmael and Isaac and Jacob and their progeny, and that which was given to Moses and Jesus, and to all other prophets by the Lord. We make no distinction among them, and we submit to Him.-- Quran 136:2

If we compare these statements, it is clear beyond doubt that both Catholicism and Islam claim to worship the same God--the God of Abraham.  So we share the same God, but we do not share the same beliefs about God--which should be obvious, since we belong to different religions. Jews, Christians, and Muslims all live by different belief systems, including different beliefs about God.  But we all claim the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as the one true God.  “Yahweh,” “Allah,” “Trinity”--all these are different names for the same creator. 

This truth may threaten some Christians. Stating this truth may cost Larycia Hawkins her job.  But the reasons people use to deny this truth inevitably fall into that “category mistake” I explained above.  In fact, what they are really giving us are the reasons why Muslims are not Christians. 

Did anyone think they were?

   © Bernard F. Swain PhD 2015

#379: The Money Scam

As we move from the Christmas season into Epiphany, one look back suggests how far we have YET go to honor the Christmas promise of Peace.

Traditionally, Christians celebrate the Feast of the Holy Innocents on the Fourth Day of Christmas, December 28 (http://www.catholicculture.org/culture/liturgicalyear/calendar/day.cfm?date=2012-12-28).  Thus for centuries Christians have used the Christmas season (December 25 to January 5) as a time to not only celebrate the birth of Jesus, but also to honor the suffering of innocent children as well. 

But this year, in the wake of the Newtown tragedy, some people are dishonoring those children with disingenuous arguments and self-serving proposals.

The NRA leadership says “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” This reminds me of the popup on my PC screen from a company offering, for a fee, to rid my computer of the very virus that same company had sent to my computer!  The scam is: cause the problem so you can offer to fix it.

If banning combat-style weapons is not a practical option, it is mainly because there are already 300 million guns owned by private citizens--some of them bad guys.  So now the NRA offers a solution (armed guards in every school) to the very problem they have promoted for decades: widespread easy legal ownership of weapons designed for mass killing.

It’s an old Fascist trick, of course.  In 1939, the Nazis invaded Poland in response to a supposed Polish attack against a German radio station, which in fact they had themselves faked. Hitler said: “In order to put an end to this frantic activity no other means is left to me now than to meet force with force.” Sound familiar?

The NRA is of course the main lobby for the weapons industry--and their efforts over the years have enabled the flood of weaponry that that now engulfs us.  Having succeeded in shaping a nation literally armed to the teeth, they now conveniently trot out the hypocritical notion that the only solution is more weapons in more places.

Supposedly appealing to common sense, they compare guns in schools to banks with armed guards. security in American airports, power plants, courthouses, sports stadiums and Secret Service agents.  But all analogies limp, and this one too: mostly those people have chosen to put themselves in harm’s way.  Would the NRA have us accept that the same is true of our schoolchildren?  That parents place them in harm’s way? That going to school, like being President or handling massive sums of money, inevitably brings a high risk that requires armed protection?

The underlying worldview is obvious: there is no such thing as a safe place, there is only a well-protected (i.e well-armed) place.  This implies that we are all in harm’s way, all the time, everywhere.  The inevitable alternative is armed protection for everyone at all times.

This idea of a fortress-culture, constantly threatened and vulnerable and surviving only by the force of arms, reflects a vision of lawless society unmatched even by the towns of the “wild west” (where, e.g., schoolmarms were not armed, and people checked in their guns on arrival).  It denies the long-held notion that in a civilized society public safety is the norm, and that police are capable of protecting the citizenry from widespread violence.

This repugnant vision surrenders all hope of a peaceful society in which the average citizen can “hang up his gun at the sheriff’s office” and live secure from lethal attack. As both social vision and practical program, this approach is a scam.

Criminologists know from long study that there are three ways to protect the public against the kind of mass violence that struck Newtown.

First, we can better identify and control people who pose a threat to themselves and to others.  Time after time the killers turn out to fit the profile typical of sociopaths: reclusive, socially maladjusted loners, usually young white males, unable to function among their peers.  We have repeatedly failed to identify such people and provide the treatment, help, and control they need before their behavior becomes dangerous. (The NRA is at least right on one point: our media and video-game culture, by fetishizing gun violence, probably makes such people even more dangerous.)

Second, we can prevent the ready access of such people to victims.  No doubt this may mean tightening security in key places, including schools.  And given the entire NRA-fueled flood of guns in America, it may even require armed guards (after all, while I never purchased the virus spreaders’ “solution,” I still had to pay someone to fix my PC).

Third, we can reduce the ability of dangerous people to inflict harm.  The actual damage they do depends on the lethality of their weapons--and today’s weapons are far more lethal than any in our history.  The same week as the Newtown attack, a man in China armed with a knife attacked a school, stabbing 22 children.  Four were seriously hurt, but none died.  The main difference between that outcome and the 26 dead in Newtown was the weapon itself.

To get serious about protecting our citizenry, we must address all three of these conditions.  We must build a civil society where (1) dangerous people are identified and their behavior is controlled, (2) reasonable security systems are in place, and (3) weapons of mass murder are no longer a commonplace threat.

Behind such common sense principles are some controversial truths.

First, this is not a Second Amendment problem.  For one thing, the right to bear arms is no more absolute than any other right; it can be limited and regulated in the interest of public safety.  But more importantly, the Second Amendment applies to gun owners, not to gun makers or gun sellers. As Justice Scalia explained in his majority opinion in the Heller case:

Like most rights, the Second Amendment right is not unlimited. It is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose...The Court’s opinion should not be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.

 Thus:  A citizen’s right to bear arms does not give any particular weapons manufacturer the right to make or sell any particular weapon.  In short, citizens can bear whatever arms they can buy--but combat-style weapons should never be on the market in the first place!

The old IRA bumper sticker read, “If guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns.” But where do outlaws get their guns?  Obviously, they get them from the same gun makers everyone else does!  The only reason bad guys have combat-style weapons is because we allow their manufacture and sale to the general public. The real issue here is not gun control at all—it is the regulation of gun commerce.

Second, it takes no genius to explain why such weapons are on the market, in defiance of all logic and common sense.  The answer is: money.  The industry for which the NRA lobbies is perfectly content to sell us more weapons to prevent the very carnage that its previous sales made possible--but it is not willing to curtail any sales that limit its profits, and it spends millions annually on the lobbying to protect those profits.  The sad truth is, we are governed by leaders who have already been bought by an industry for which trafficking in arms trumps public safety.

Third, the money behind guns reflects a much deeper problem than mere private sales to individual consumers.  The attachment to guns is deeply imbedded in our public policy as well.  Since World War II, the U.S. has consistently been the world’s largest manufacturer, seller, and trafficker of all weapons from handguns to nuclear missiles.  Many of the world’s trouble makers (such as the Taliban in Afghanistan) rely on the firepower of U.S. weapons.  Many of the world’s trouble spots are fueled by “Washington bullets.” Weapons building brought the U.S. economy out of the Great Depression, and we have been the world’s arsenal ever since.  Indeed, worldwide U.S. weapons sales tripled in 2011, to $66.3 billion--more than three-quarters of the global total!

  The horrific truth is that our inability to stop the spread of guns is merely the byproduct of living in “Arsenal America.”

Fourth, people who tell us the problem is the “monsters” out there are deceiving both themselves and office.  While it is true that we cannot create peace and security by eliminating all evil, we are nonetheless wrong to buy the notion that America’s widespread violence is inevitably built into human nature.  This crisis is not natural, it is national.  No other civilized nation comes close to our violent crime rate, and few allow the sale of combat-style weapons.  Americans typically live in a bubble that defines our life in our own isolationist terms, without reference to the experience of other countries.  But in this case, to ignore how other countries have achieved the secure, pacific life we are failing to provide is nothing less than criminal blindness.

In future Decembers, the remembrance of the “Holy Innocents” will include not only those babies in first century Israel, but those schoolchildren for whom modern day America was a death trap.  We dishonor them, their families, their peers, and ourselves if we do not finally insist that their lives are more worth more than all the money in Arsenal America.

 © Bernard F. Swain PhD 2013

348: What’s Happening to OUR Holiday?

This is the last of my Christmas flashbacks. It comes from early this year, looking back on Christmas 2011.

As the Christmas Season finally concluded last week with the Feast of the Epiphany, my mind remained cluttered with varied and contrary thoughts about the way our culture is treating Christmas. Even after more than two weeks’ reflection, my view is not completely clear. Still, I would like to share my thinking so readers can do some thinking of their own. Bear with me as I move from point to point; it may or may not add up to a coherent argument.

First, there is little surprise that what Catholics call “Advent” is virtually invisible in American culture. Even within the Church, Advent meant little more than “Little Lent” to most Catholics until the last 40 years, and by then the rising power of consumerism had already absorbed the entire calendar between “Black Friday” and Christmas Eve. Indeed, our economy has become so dependent on that period’s retail sales (for some retail items, that single month yields the majority of annual revenue) that it would appear downright un-American to insist that people spend much of December in quiet reflection and preparation rather than frantic shopping and celebration.

Second, the traditional “12 days of Christmas” have largely disappeared as well. I wonder what people think now when they hear the song? In any case, after a month of nonstop shopping, parties, concerts and outings leading up to Christmas day, most people are too out of gas to rev up for an additional 12 days of celebrating. Besides, not much is happening once Christmas Day passes--except gift returns, post-Christmas sales, and end-of-year preparations for New Year’s celebrations.

Third, you probably noticed that in 2011, more than previous years, the very word “Christmas” has become endangered. Advertisers and media referred to “the holidays,” the “holiday season,” sometimes even simply “holiday.” Governors renamed their state Christmas trees the “Holiday Tree”; people wished each other “Happy Holidays,” and commercials even parodied Christian attempts to refocus on Christmas, telling us that it is the “season of the reason” for buying a new car.

It almost seems that Christmas is becoming the holiday that dare not speak its name (to paraphrase Oscar Wilde)!

My initial reflex is to adopt my traditional Christmas role as cultural curmudgeon. Growing up, my kids got used to their dad’s way of digging in his heels: traipsing through the woods on Thanksgiving weekend to find a suitable Jesse Tree, painting it and adding one decoration each day during Advent, lighting an Advent wreath each night at dinner, buying our Christmas tree only days before Christmas, then decorating it and installing our Christmas lights on Christmas Eve, scheduling family gatherings during Christmas week. To this day, they tend to turn a jaundiced eye when Christmas displays appear immediately after Thanksgiving, when “holiday music” fills the malls in November, or when Christmas trees appear tossed into the trash on the 3rd Day of Christmas.

But despite my usual hardline instincts for preserving a “traditional” approach to Christmas, I also feel a growing discomfort when I notice that my reactions are matched by many people whose assumptions I do not share.

Some of these people argue that we must preserve Christmas because we are a “Christian nation.” I respectfully disagree. Our nation has Christian roots, but is officially non-sectarian.

Others see themselves defending “traditional” Christmas, when in fact many Christmas customs they defend are less than 100 years old. Even the celebration of Christmas itself is not a constant tradition in our national history. In Puritan New England, for example, its observance was largely outlawed, and in the new American republic even Congress was in session on Christmas Day. We invoke “traditional” for many Christmas customs that have little real tradition behind them (the Christmas crèche is one exception, dating from Francis of Assisi).

Of course, some people simply argue we must preserve “the reason for the season.” But they’re often unclear about what that reason is. Jesus’ birthday is undoubtedly a significant event--but what does celebrating it signify? Some equate it with the “Incarnation” (God taking on human flesh), but Catholicism observes the Incarnation on March 25, and Catholics surely do not wish to argue that the unborn Jesus was not already God in human form. Others see the event as manifesting God’s gift to the world, but we already have Epiphany for that.

My own view is that we celebrate Jesus’ birthday as the moment when his place in history is announced--specifically, his role as the Prince of Peace, offering peace and goodwill to the human family. This matters because it creates an unbreakable bond between Christian faith and the cause of peace.

Finally, some people want to insist on trumpeting “Christmas” to resist what they see as a dangerous inclusivity that embraces Hanukkah, Kwanzaa and, even “Festivus,” and fears offending Jews, Muslims, and even atheists. Personally, I prefer to embrace that inclusivity, and to avoid offense, although I never assume that Christmas greetings will offend (in one store I asked a veiled employee, who was in fact Muslim, how she felt, and we ended up both offering “Happy Christmas” greetings!).

I hesitate to embrace any of these reasons for opposing current trends. Instead, I’m beginning to see this cultural divide--avoiding all but the most generic references to the “holidays,” vs. the loud proclamation of “Christmas”--as a symptom of another, deeper trend in America.

More and more, I sense America drifting (perhaps without much sense of direction) toward a new cultural destination, and, I would argue, toward its true destiny. For I now believe we’re becoming, finally, the land of the religious option.

By that I mean, we’re becoming a land where anyone has the option to choose any religion they want, or no religion at all. This may sound obvious (we think immediately of the First Amendment), but stop and think how rare it actually is.

For most of history, large nations typically mandated (or favored) one official religion and prohibited (or disapproved) all others. So people often had no option, or at least suffered penalties for exercising an option. In the last century, we also saw new nations (like the Soviet Union) that mandated no religion at all. And in much of Europe today, the religious option is tolerated but not well protected.
Even in America, the principle of religious freedom has clashed with the practice of favoring Christianity over all other religions. Americans today remain the most religiously active population of any advanced nation, but now the dominance of Christianity is being challenged by others.

The result is the kind of inconsistency that we might naturally expect when a society is going through a major cultural transition. For example, we hear “Christmas” less and less in the public realm, and we see less and less “Christmas” observance in our towns and cities, street, parks and public places--yet “Christmas Day” remains a legal holiday!

Similarly we continue to see trees, and lights, Santa Claus, and the exchange of gifts (indeed, all these have become key to our economies holiday sales) yet they have all been largely uprooted from their Christian origins.

Something like this has already happened with Valentine’s Day, and Saint Patrick’s Day, Halloween, and even Easter--although we are not yet avoiding those names, only their public religious observance.

Underlying such inconsistency is a conviction that Christianity should enjoy no special privileges. Thus, saying “The Holidays” comes to represent people of all faiths and no faith. The trouble is: why is December 25 a holiday at all, if not to observe the birth of Jesus? Should we print calendars that just say “Holiday Day” in that day’s box?

America may be destined to become the one nation where religion truly is an option--where one may choose any religion without facing mandates, or prohibitions, or privileges, or penalties; a land where the religious option is alive and widely exercised and fair to all traditions. When this happens, America’s religious profile will be nearly unique in all the world.

But meanwhile we are living with the inconsistencies of a transition in which the dominance of Christianity is challenged but not completely erased. In short, we are clearly living in a time of cultural flux, when our principles and our practices do not always match.

In other words, we Americans (and even we American Christians) are still making history. It is not always easy, and it is sometimes troubling and messy, but maybe it simply proves that God is not finished with us yet.

 Bernard F. Swain PhD 2012

WHO Stole Christmas?

Another Christmas-in-culture reflection, this one from 2003:

John Parise was asking for trouble. For five days, the Long Island DJ urged his listeners not to miss the “very big” announcement on his morning talk show. He told them to make sure the kids are listening. Then he dropped his bomb.

He told them there is no Santa Claus. Told them their parents buy all the toys. Told them the proof was hidden in the closets and the attic.

In seconds, the station was flooded with hundreds of angry calls and emails. “This guy’s the DJ who stole Christmas,” one Dad said. “It’s just cruel,” added Mom. Station managers called it “a big mistake,” and apologized, but the DJ defended his action.

What could he have been thinking? He said he was taking stand against the “commercialization” of Christmas: “Christmas has gotten as far way as possible from what Christmas is about. Christmas is doing for others, helping others.”

Well, yes and no. That is, yes, Christmas is about something more than “who has the best sales,” and “making sure your kid has the hottest toy on the block.” And yes, that something more does—indirectly, anyway—entail helping others. But no, that is not “what Christmas is all about.”

It’s really much simpler, much more concrete, and much more obvious than all that. Christmas is about the birth of Jesus. So explaining the “true meaning of Christmas” to kids is not that complicated—at least, it shouldn’t be.

We do, of course, have holidays that are about some general social ideals, like gratitude and generosity (Thanksgiving), or patriotic sacrifice (Memorial Day), or the dignity of work (Labor Day)—but Christmas is not that kind of holiday. No, Christmas is more like Martin Luther King Day—a holiday marking a great man’s birth. Remember, Christmas means “Christ’s Mass”—the day when the mass of the day is in honor of the birth of “Christ.” That’s because Catholics, along with other Christians, believe Jesus to be the Christ—the Messiah. But even non-Christians can understand honoring the birth of the man whose influence has changed the world more than anyone else.

We always told our kids that Santa was the “fun, make believe” part of Christmas, and that Jesus is the real part. They knew that the tree, the ornaments, the carols, the presents, the annual reading of “The Night Before Christmas” and the stockings were all designed to make Jesus’ birthday party the biggest and best party of the year.

We always celebrated Advent during Advent, and Christmas during Christmas. Right after Thanksgiving we’d search the local woods for the perfect dead bough to make our Jesse Tree. At dinner we’d light the Advent Wreath, impatient for the night when we’d finally light enough candles to eat by candlelight. Meanwhile we added ornaments to the Jesse tree, already painted wintry white but gradually growing less bare and more colorful as Christmas approached.

It helped that our kids’ bi-lingual school was full of Hispanic kids whose families celebrated the Twelve Days of the Christmas season, all the way to the “Feast of the Three Kings” on January 6. It was a family joke that most people who sing “The Twelve Days of Christmas” never actually celebrate them—or even know when they are! We’re empty-nesters now, but to this day my kids expect our tree to go up just before Christmas day and stay up through the whole season—and they still scoff at the sight of trees in the trash on December 27 or 28. I sometimes joke that our family Christmas customs are the one piece of Catholic identity our kids hang on to.

Back then, we were like John Parise—we were opposing the “commercialization” of Christmas too. Twenty-five years later, that outlook seems rather quaint to me. Now I don’t worry about commercialism spoiling Christmas. I worry about Christmas being replaced by something else—a generic time of year called the “Holiday Season.” Seems to me, this “Holiday Season” has taken on a life of its own, quite independent of any “holyday.” It runs all autumn long now, and peaks with a month-long buying spree that ends on December 25—the very day when the Christian Christmas season starts!

So the stores start selling “holiday” costumes and decorations at summer’s end, and more and more people set out orange holiday lights and ghoulish lawn decorations in anticipation of Halloween. By mid-October, Christmas stuff goes on display, competing with Halloween stuff. Once the Trick-or-Treating ends, the real selling starts, and from then till year’s end people buy nearly 50% of all the retail goods sold all year, including more than 80% of toys and personal entertainment products, and nearly 90% of all jewelry.

This is no longer about exploiting a Christian holiday to make a little extra money. This is about the survival of Capitalism itself. It took the New Deal and World War II to end the Great Depression. It now takes the Generic Holiday Season to keep it from coming back. If some strange spiritual plague caused Christianity to die out within the next year, our consumer culture would have no choice but to continue the “Holiday Season” as usual.

The issue now isn’t that one of Christianity’s most sacred seasons might be profaned. After all, saying that the season is about “doing for others” may make it sound less commercial, but it doesn’t make it any more Christian.

Bear in mind that something like this has happened before. The Romans had a big winter festival, “Sol Invictus,” long before Christianity. December 25 was deliberately made “Christmas,” not because there were records of Jesus’ actual date of birth, but precisely to replace the pagan feast. What if we’ve reached the point in history where something else—a new sacred season called “The Holidays”—is replacing Christmas? That would explain why John Parise caught such flak when he made his “big mistake.” In a culture that increasingly avoids even mentioning Jesus in connection with “The Holidays,” Santa is a sacred idol in many families; exposing him as a myth is “cruel” because it breaks a sacred taboo.

The Romans were smarter, perhaps; at least their feast to the “Invincible Sun” worshipped something God created. Our culture has created its own idols: Santa, the mall, Capitalism itself.

So don’t blame the DJ for stealing Christmas. Or the Grinch. We’ve stolen it ourselves. For, just as the Romans were quick to quit their own traditional feast for the new Christian holyday, millions of American Christians are happy to join the new generic “Holiday Spirit”—provided nobody tells the kids the truth about Santa.

© Bernard F. Swain PhD 2003

#248: Does Christmas Have a Future?

This reflection on Christmas in our culture comes from 2008:

The “Second Battle of Lexington” rages on in 2008.

More than two decades ago the ACLU launched a campaign to remove nativity scenes from public property, and in 1998 that movement reached the very town green in Lexington, Massachusetts where the "shot heard round the world" opened the American Revolution.

For nearly 30 years, the local Knights of Columbus had placed in nativity scene on Lexington Green, but now some town officials were threatening to revoke the K of C’s permit. The K of C countered with a threat to sue, and a diverse group of religious leaders invited me to help them build a consensus proposal to resolve the dispute.

Early on, this group--including a Mason, a Catholic priest, three Protestant ministers, and a K of C member--agreed to stand firm on the K of C’s First Amendment right to display Christmas symbols on public land. Their logic: to restrict religious observances and activities to private land would exclude even religious processions--including funeral corteges traveling public roads from church to cemetery!

Their final plan offered the compromise of restricting the nativity display to a shorter period, while acknowledging that other displays (Menorahs, Kwanzaa symbols, even Santa and snowmen) might claim equal rights.

The Lexington Selectman ignored the offer and dodged the First Amendment issue by claiming a security problem with the permit, and requiring the K of C to post guards 24/7 throughout the display period. The K of C, unable to manage this, settled for a "Nativity Pageant" held on a single day.

At stake in this “Second Battle of Lexington,” of course, was the erosion of Christmas as a public event--erosion that has continued since 1998 as similar battles have erupted around the country, reaching a new intensity and range in 2008. As USA today reported just last week:

Christians and traditionalists across the nation, fed up with what they view as the de-emphasizing of Christmas as a religious holiday, are filing lawsuits, promoting boycotts and launching campaigns aimed at restoring references to Christ in seasonal celebrations.

From New Jersey to California, Christians are moving to counter years of lawsuits that have made governments wary about putting Nativity scenes on public property, and that occasionally have led schools to drop Christmas carols from holiday programs.

Examples abound. A Federal judge ordered Bay Harbor Islands (Florida) to allow a nativity scene next to a menorah following a discrimination lawsuit. In Denver, church members picketed the holiday parade after their Christmas-themed float was rejected. A California group boycotted Macy's stores, claiming their parent organization had forbidden clerks from saying "Merry Christmas." The Maplewood (New Jersey) school board face protests for dropping even instrumental Christmas music from school programs. Parents in Mustang (Oklahoma) defeated a school bond referendum after nativity scenes were dropped from school holiday programs. Members of a church in Kansas City (Kansas) protested the secularization of Christmas by dressing like Jesus at their jobs, malls and restaurants.

What's going on here?

This battle is hardly new. In fact, disputes over Christmas predate the First Battle of Lexington. In puritan Massachusetts, the General Court banned Christmas observances in 1659 lest they compete with the Sunday Sabbath. Even taking the day off work was punishable:

Whosoever shall be found observing any such day as Christmas or the like, either by forbearing of labor, feasting or any other way . . . shall pay for every such offense five shillings, as a fine to the county.

Of course, while this ban was anti-Christmas, it was not anti-Christian; ironically, Lexington's first parish church was, in fact, originally built on the very Town Green where a crèche is now banned.

But over the centuries much has changed, and in recent years Christmas has become a lightning rod for the Americans who differ about the place of Christianity in American life.

Moreover this history of US conflicts over Christmas fits into a larger, longer history: the long-term evolution of Christmas in Christian tradition itself.

Early Christians did not have a feast day for Jesus’ birthday, until the need to compete with the Roman winter solstice festival "Sol Invictus" ("Unconquered Sun") required a distinctively Christian symbol for winter’s shifting from darkness to light. Designating December 25 as Jesus’ birthday fit the bill perfectly.

Subsequent centuries saw a modest feastday gradually expanded by the medieval period’s devotion to Mary, by Saint Francis of Assisi’s introduction of crèche and animals to the Christian imagination, by the focus on Saint Nicholas (later Santa Claus) and the custom of gift-giving that opened the door to today’s “Christmas Capitalism.” German, English, and French customs all melted into the Christmas we know now, replete with trees, wreaths, stockings, and carols. And the dominance of Europe in this evolution led to Christmas as a winter festival, though most Christians today live--as the first Christians did—in lands where Christmas falls amid mild weather or even during summer .

So unlike Easter, which has anchored Christian faith from the beginning, Christmas has not been a constant or essential fixture in Christian history. Generations of Christians managed quite well without any Christmas at all.

Yet for many American Christians, Christmas has come to overshadow Easter.

Children clearly anticipate Christmas stockings and presents more than Easter clothes and candies. Grownups spend weeks or even months in shopping and decorating. "Baby Jesus meek and mild" has more popular sentimental appeal then Jesus the itinerant preacher, Jesus the suffering victim, or even Jesus the Risen Lord. Many Christians confuse the birth of Jesus with the Incarnation of God into human form (more properly linked with Jesus’ conception, and officially observed on March 25). Santa has become such an object of faith that speaking the truth--that Jesus is the real part of Christmas, and Santa is the fun make-believe part--is a public taboo, to the point that many people link the loss of Santa with a loss of innocence or even a loss of faith.

And the marketplace's frenzy over Christmas has made Christmas more about “giving” than about embracing the Peace Jesus promised. Thus Christmas season has become so exhausting that, since many Americans are so tired of celebrating by Christmas Day, we often see trashed Christmas trees on the curb as early as December 26th.

In other words, we have largely lost the wise psychic rhythm of the Christmas liturgical tradition, which used Advent for quiet preparation and then celebrated Christmas beginning December 24th. For most, Christmas Day now ends the Christmas season rather than beginning it, and most Americans hear “The Twelve Days of Christmas” without knowing when they are.

Is this kind of Christmas really worth saving for the future? And is that even possible? For me, a few things seem evident.

One: “Christmas” in America will become increasingly detached from the cultural customs the protestors are trying to protect. Millions of Americans will celebrate Christmas with little or no reference to the birth of Jesus, and even the number of “Christmas Catholics” will dwindle.

Two: Ironically enough, Christmas Day will remain a legal holiday, simply because our economy cannot survive without it. Even during boom times, this season brings 40% of retail sales and nearly 80% of toys and entertainment sales. Without Christmas, American capitalism collapses.

Three: The “holiday season” will continue to evolve toward a generic celebration of winter’s shift from darkness to light, embracing symbols from Christmas to Chanukah to Kwanzaa to other symbolic traditions.

Four: Christians who maintain “the reason for the season” will find themselves increasingly a minority whose observance of Jesus’ birthday is the exception to the cultural rule—but Christians will also find that asserting their right to celebrate Christmas publicly will gain respect as a key proof that America is evolving a new identity as a nation simultaneously religious and pluralized.
In that sense, we will have won the battle for the future of Christmas.

© Bernard F. Swain PhD 2008

# 154: Spooked by the Season

My reflections on the place of Christmas in our culture have become a nearly annual tradition in CrossCurrents, so during the Advent season I am re-issuing several pieces from past years before posting my latest thoughts. This first selection is from 2006:

Christmas …has evolved: what began as a pagan feast was later “baptized” and adapted to a Christian world view, giving new meaning to the observance while obscuring its non-Christian origins. But a third stage has now emerged, whereby “baptized” celebrations get “commercialized” by consumer/capitalist culture in a way that obliterates both their pagan roots and their Christian meaning.

Like much of pagan religion, the original observance celebrated a seasonal fact – namely, the winter solstice. Thus the Roman feast of “Sol Invictus” (the invincible sun) marked the late-December phenomenon of days beginning to grow longer, celebrating their promise of spring and renewed life.

Christians chose December 25th to celebrate the birthday of Jesus, not because they had some historical record of the actual date of his birth (they did not), but because it seemed a perfect substitute: in place of “the invincible son,” Christians offered “the eternal Son of God.”

Of course, it’s no secret that modern America has totally transformed formed Christmas into the major commercial event of the year. Our culture has become so dependent on the “holidays” spending orgy that our economy would collapse without it.

…

This is one more example of the dumbing down of our popular culture: something that was rich in historical and human symbols has been reduced now mainly to one more spending spree. Could it be history’s revenge: what Christianity once did to paganism, Capitalism has now done to Christianity?

When I started out in Church work, troubled by the trend to commercialize Christmas, I wrote an article for parish catechists proposing that we “Give Christmas Back to the Pagans.” Now I think it’s too late for that, because I don’t think Christians really control Christmas anymore.

Perhaps it’s time for Christians to acknowledge that we no longer control the symbols of popular culture. If so, we must face up to the responsibility of celebrating our own symbols as a richer, more meaningful alternative to the newly dominant ones.

© Bernard F. Swain PhD 2006