How to Win the War on Christmas

The quickness of Christians to see every skirmish in the culture war as an attack on Christmas does us more harm than good.

The other night I attended a Lessons and Carols service, an Anglican Advent tradition dating from the 19th century, in which key Scripture readings detailing salvation history ("lessons") are interspersed with hymns and Christmas songs ("carols"). Narratively and theologically, it's an extraordinary service, in that it begins with the Fall, continues with God's redemptive interaction with mankind through the Patriarchs and the Prophets, and culminates with the birth of the Messiah, the God-man, to a lowly woman of a minor Near Eastern tribe, in a barn in a backwater province of the Roman Empire. The service concludes with the marvelous opening of the Gospel of John, in which the true meaning of Jesus's birth is proclaimed -- both the tragedy of his life to come, and the liberation and salvation to all who believe in him, no matter the circumstances of their own birth. It is a story that is either a gorgeous myth, or, for Christian believers (like me), a gorgeous myth that happens to be true. In either case, it is exceedingly difficult to stand back from the seasonal busy-ness to take the Nativity story in all its strange and confounding glory. Just think: God became one of us -- and not a king or an emperor, but a common man -- so that we might be one with God. J.R.R. Tolkien, whose formulation that Christianity is a "myth that is true" is said to have led to his friend C.S. Lewis's conversion, said that true joy occasions "a sudden glimpse of the underlying reality of truth." So it is with the Nativity myth: a revelation that we aren't alone in a cold, meaningless universe, that God loves us so much that He became one of us, to show us how to live and open the gates of eternity.

How to reconcile a story as awesome as that with this innovation in Advent liturgies from a Texas megachurch?:

On Saturday night in Grapevine, about 4,000 people – nearly a full house – came for the first of the church's well-advertised 3-D Christmas services. Adults and children alike each got a pair of paper-frame glasses with red and blue plastic lenses.

They donned them for three brief videos shot in 3-D. The third re-created a real-life episode from last Christmas, in which [Pastor] Young's dogs got into the living room and tore up gift packages.

After that video, the lights went up, and Young himself, fully dimensional in jeans and a sweater, appeared on stage. "You can take your glasses off now," he said, laughing.

He then preached on the Christmas story, arguing that accepting Jesus as savior is the way to find depth in life.

...

Under his leadership, Fellowship also has become a leader in using technology in worship. His sermons are broadcast on big screens both in Grapevine and at satellite campuses. The main auditorium's lighting could rival that of a Broadway theater.

And on Saturday, the 3-D videos had to compete with a six-member band that used iPads to play "Feliz Navidad" and other Christmas songs.

To Young, taking advantage of the latest 3-D craze is just another way to reach people who might not otherwise come to church.

"Christmas is the best time of the year for people to give God a shot," he said.

Fellowship bought 28,000 pairs of 3-D glasses, but rented cameras for the videos, and spent about $8,000 overall to create the special effect.

The 3-D videos will be used in Fellowship's services Thursday and Christmas Eve. Young plans to use 3-D again in a sermon series early in 2011.

"What a great opportunity for the church," he said. "3-D is so hot."

Is there any "hot" thing that Evangelicals can't baptize by claiming that it's necessary to "reach" the unconverted? It's so embarrassing. I look at junk like this, and at the touchy-feely preaching and "relevant" stunts that I've endured over the years in my own church, and I can't altogether blame non-Christians from rolling their eyes at what we Christians get up to. Dallas's First Baptist Church has launched a Grinch Alert online watchdog list where Christians offended by the way stores and institutions fail to celebrate Christmas properly can anonymously shame them. A woman relates a discount chain's shame:

I was looking for an ornament that reflected the reason for the season, and I could not find anything that said Merry Christmas. I'm tired of seeing ONLY snowmen, Santa Clauses, snowflakes, birds, glitter, etc. I could not find a gift bag, an ornament, or a gift box with a manger or the Holy Family on it.

Think about that for a moment. Here is a Christian who feels that the feast of the birth of the Saviour is disrespected by the failure of a retailer to provide her with commercial gift bags featuring the Holy Family. The cognitive dissonance is jarring.

Then again, I have been in holy places like Jerusalem, and despaired over the Jesus junk spilling out of tourist-geared shops in the Old City, yet had to recognize that beyond the kitsch and the trash -- literally, a few steps away -- is a church built over the patch of ground on which tradition says God suffered, died, was buried -- and rose again. (And in that church, clerics of the ancient Christian churches fight like dogs). We are both wheat and chaff.

In his column Monday, Ross Douthat writes of two important books written this year about the state of the Christian religion in America. He praises both American Grace, by political scientists Robert Putnam and David Campbell, and To Change the World, by the prominent Christian sociologist James Davison Hunter. I happen to have read the Hunter book, which is mostly an elegy for Christendom, a lament over how the faith of our fathers has faded to increasing irrelevance. I've thought for a long time about why this is, and how we Christians might turn it around, without success. If a man as intelligent as Hunter fumbles for an efficacious prescription, I don't feel quite so bad that I myself have come up empty-handed. If what I've read about American Grace is true, then Christianity as anything more than a sentimental notion and a psychotherapeutic attitude is in eclipse. The megachurch burlesques have been somewhat more successful than us more traditional Christians at holding on to the faithful, but for all of us, the direction is downhill. If Putnam and Campbell are right, outright atheists are not gaining as much as their media profile would have you believe (in fact, they're not gaining at all), but people are falling away from traditional Christianity in large numbers. They could come back, I suppose, but if I were a betting man, I'd wager that their children will be atheists, or believers so nominal in their Christianity that they might as well be atheists.

It is not hard for me to understand why Christians feel besieged nowadays, especially at Christmas. Not every skirmish in the culture war counts as a "War on Christmas," and the quickness of Christians to complain about this surely does us no credit. On the other hand, there really is a steady rollback in public recognition of Christmas, as if recognizing the particularly Christian notion of the holiday were itself a grave offense. The message from the public sphere, or at least its self-appointed guardians, is that Christians should be ashamed of their faith. It is one thing to hold to one's faith while recognizing that not everyone shares it, and that non-Christians deserve respect; it is another to absorb the lesson that the sensitive and morally respectable thing to do is to denude one of Christianity's greatest feast days of its particular power.

Americans are so strange about this. In Germany, where Christianity has a far weaker hold on the public's imagination, they have no problem celebrating with annual Christkindlmarkts. But this year in Philadelphia, birthplace of American liberty, city government bureaucrats stripped the local Christkindlmarkt of its religious identity, rechristening it "Holiday Village." The public stood up to this PC nonsense, and the city's mayor reversed the decision. Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Daniel Rubin, who is Jewish, had a sensible take on the controversy, writing, "Yes, it's the Christmas season. Get over it. I have." Rubin says it doesn't hurt him to be wished a Merry Christmas, and that he enjoys partaking in another culture's traditions -- just as long as they leave him to his own.

What on earth is wrong with that? I'm about as whitebread a Christian as you can be, and in the cities I've lived in, I've enjoyed participating in the religious and cultural festivals of Asians, Jews, Hindus, Latinos, and so on. What kind of thin-skinned Puritan believes that somebody else's fun steals from his own? My Jewish friends love chipping in to decorate our Christmas tree. I have been truly pleased to sit at their seder table. That, to me, is one of the great things about America. Only mean minds and poor spirits see tolerance as a mandate to take away, rather than add to. Why is it so difficult to recognize, without hesitation or apology, the fullness of Christmas, and in turn, the key role Christianity has played in the shaping of our common culture?

As distasteful as is the readiness of many Christians to take offense over slights, real or perceived to Christmas, it can't be denied that this is an epiphenomenon of Christianity's decline in the West. By what perverse logic are Christians to be happy about this? And not only Christians. On the cold walk home after Lessons and Carols, I thought about the difference the birth of Jesus of Nazareth made for the world. Earlier this year, a friend passed along a surprising book, "Paul Among the People," by a liberal Christian and classics scholar named Sarah Ruden. In the book, Ruden paints a portrait of the pre-Christian Greco-Roman world that was a place of real suffering and oppression for women and the poor. The teachings Jesus brought into the world, and that the Apostle Paul popularized, were truly liberating. We have come to take the liberal democratic world, and the culture it has produced, as a given, and bizarrely we see Christianity as the enemy of what we cherish, instead of its very foundation. Can America, as a polity and as a culture, hold on to its goodness and decency without the God of the Bible? It's a question that our children, and their children, will likely live to see answered. Those who wish to drive Christmas from the public square should give thought to what else they exile, unawares.

Richmond Ramsey is the pseudonym of a corporate executive who really wanted to be a dentist.

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