Christmas & Christendom

Liberal Baptist ethicist David Gushee opined in his latest column against conservative Christians supposedly obsessed over the “war on Christmas” while he personally observed this year an increasingly less Christian Christmas. The latter, evinced to him by an almost complete lack of Nativity reference in New York store fronts, and more “holiday” talk from merchants, he attributes to a growing population of post-Christian people plus adherents of non-Christian religions. Here’s his conclusion:

So this “War on Christmas” thing is not really about Christmas at all. It’s about Christians figuring out how to accept declining cultural power while still bearing witness to our faith in a country that, overall, no longer accepts the privileging of Christians and Christianity in the public square. 

This evening I reflected on Gushee’s comments as I walked down Chicago’s magnificent Michigan Avenue, fully decked out for Christmas, and concluding with dessert at the Drake Hotel, whose Christmas decor was lavish. True, I didn’t see many or perhaps any store fronts devoted to Nativity imagery. But would I have in Chicago 50 or 60 years ago? I don’t recall much if any Christian imagery in the Christmas time commercial decorations during my 1970s childhood in the Washington, D.C. area.  I do recall my Northern Virginia elementary school’s Christmas assembly avoiding religious music, although such music, like Handel’s Messiah, was acceptable in my high school in the early 1980s. Maybe at that point it was thought we were mature enough to handle religious messages on our own.

As to Christmas in popular culture, I grew up watching old films from the 1940s and 1950s that spoke to Christmas with almost no direct reference to Christianity, like White Christmas and Miracle on 34th Street.  It’s a Wonderful Life is the holiday classic, but despite featuring an angel, it doesn’t mention Christ. Most children’s Christmas tv specials produced in the 1960s and 1970s, except Charlie Brown and The Little Drummer Boy, had little specific Christian content, like Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer, The Grinch and Frosty the Snowman. The same was also true for 1950s and 1960s sitcoms, which I endlessly watched as a child as reruns in the 1970s. The families on Father Knows Best, Leave it to Beaver, and I Love Lucy were almost never shown going to church or making religious references, at Christmas or any other time. I do recall particular episodes of Andy Griffith and the Brady Bunch featuring the brief singing of specifically Christian Christmas songs.

As to greetings in stores of “Merry Christmas” versus “Happy Holidays,” I personally experienced the former in almost every store experience of the last several weeks in the Washington, D.C. area. Many, perhaps most, of the clerks were foreign born. But my evidence here, as Gushee admits of his in New York and Atlanta on this point, is entirely anecdotal.

As to Gushee’s point that Christmas has become less specifically Christian because of growing non-Christian religions, it’s notable that only 4 or 5% identify with non-Christian religion in the U.S. This number is not much higher than 80 years ago. The big change is that back then virtually all non-Christian religionists were Jewish. Today Jews comprise half or less of non-Christian religionists, with the rest being mostly Muslim, Hindu and Buddhist.

The big demographic change, as Gushee notes, is the celebrated rise of the religiously unaffiliated in America, who now account for about 20% or more. Self-identified Christians have declined to 70-75%, though this number seems way too high to consign Christianity to a marginal cultural status.

Liberal Christians like Gushee sometimes seem overly anxious to dethrone Christianity from a supposedly previously highly exalted status of privilege in American culture. Many conservative Christians, from a more worried perspective, also too quickly accept this narrative of Christian America turned secular.

But America was never as Christian as some now imagine nor is it now as secular as some currently assume, at Christmas or any other time. There maybe more continuity in American spirituality and holiday cultural habits than is commonly portrayed. The Christmas decorations of Chicago’s Michigan Avenue, which do cheerfully exude Christian theology about the Nativity without citing specifics, probably and hopefully will be as familiar 50 years hence as they are now or were 50 years ago.