BOOKS, FAITH, WORLD & MORE

WHAT SHALL WE DO WITH CHRISTMAS?
Reviews of Christmas Unwrapped and of Religion and Empire

Daniel Hertzler

Christmas Unwrapped: Consumerism, Christ and Culture, edited by Richard A. Horsley and James Tracy. Trinity Press International, 2001.

Religion and Empire: People, Power and the Life of the Spirit, by Richard A. Horsley. Fortress Press, 2003.

What shall we do with Christmas? A question many of us ponder on occasion. I must confess that there are aspects of the Christmas season which I enjoy. The festive spirit, perhaps. The opportunity to visit a performance of the oratorio "Messiah." People cheerfully wishing me a "Merry Christmas," whatever that might mean. And at the end of December, if there is money left in the account, one can make a special contribution to have it included on the current year’s income tax report.

But when we back away and look at the celebration of Christmas, we find ample evidence for the first thesis of Christmas Unwrapped: that Christmas as celebrated in North America is a secular holiday with religious trappings. The concern of the book is to show what is really going on.

This package of essays takes its departure from an earlier book, The Battle for Christmas: A Cultural History of America’s Most Cherished Holiday, by Stephen Nissenbaum (Knopf, 1996). That book provides evidence from the nineteenth century on how Christmas came to be a family holiday instead of a celebration of banditry. These writers take it from there to show how in the twentieth century the American Christmas became a commercial holiday with a religious overlay.

As described by James Tracy, the domesticated Christmas developed from the work of an elite New York group called the Knickerbockers, who included Washington Irving. Their message was contained in Clement C. Moore’s "‘Twas the Night Before Christmas." The aim of this poem was to change Christmas from a rowdy celebration, when gangs of the lower classes demanded gifts from the upper crust, to a family affair, when parents gave gifts to children. The transformation probably succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.The result, says Tracy, has been the development of consumer capitalism.

While the culture Americans had previously built within an economy hovering near sufficiency was marked by an emphasis on frugality, self-control, and delayed gratification, the culture of consumer capitalism in an age of industrial overproduction is typified by excess, indulgence and immediate gratification. The advertising ethos has been furthered and strengthened by the advent of ever more powerful vehicles for the dissemination of the faith—radio and television. (14).

So there we have it. Christmas is presented to us as a religious holiday, but the religion it actually promotes is consumerism. There is a two-month extended celebration of this faith, from Thanksgiving until the Super Bowl. Is this something we did not already know? Perhaps not, but the "unwrapping" in the book is impressive, and the effect is cumulative.

The book moves through four parts from "The Formative History" to "The Culture," then "Saviors, Messiahs, Biblical and Other," and finally "Theoretical and Theological Reflections." As one finishes each part of the book, it seems the point has been made, but there is more.

The spirit of Christmas, these writers remind us, is the spirit of consumption. Whereas at one time Christmas gifts might have been handmade, today it is expected that they will be bought. "Christmas spending, which an American Express survey put at just over $1500 per person in 1999, is a climax of annual consumption patterns, but is not an exception to them" (100).

All of this is supported by film and theater. Of particular interest are movies such as Holiday Inn, Miracle on Thirty-Fourth Street and It’s a Wonderful Life. Also the musical, White Christmas. It is pointed out that the message of all of these is for people to take their "places" in society as subservient persons and particularly as consumers.

Chapters 6, 7, and 8 are written by Richard Horsley, who has given special attention to the political and economic aspects of the cultures in which Jesus and the early church lived. He knows particularly the commonalities between the religious celebrations of earlier empires and our own Christmas celebration. He points out that when Jesus was born there was already an empire-wide celebration. The savior it was set up to honor was the Roman Caesar. "And it is that festival, honoring the Roman emperor for bringing peace and prosperity to the empire, which bears a remarkable resemblance to the elaborate American Christmas holiday festival" (114).

Horsley says that our modern individualism, voluntarism, and separation of church and state have tended to keep us from recognizing the significance of the emperor cult in Jesus’ time and how the early church presented Jesus as a counter-savior.

It seems ironic that the bishops of the Christian Church that came to worship Jesus as their Lord and Savior—in an effort to displace or replace the worship of Caesar as savior with the worship of Christ—established Christmas as the holy day honoring Jesus’ birth at the time of the winter solstice, which had become the standard season for the imperial festivals. (135)

Even so, Christmas was not a big operation until it happened recently in America. "Only in the twentieth-century did most mainline Christian churches embrace the holiday festival" (136).

While chapter 7 in the book depends on the gospel of Luke for biblical documentation, chapter 8 uses Matthew. Horsley perceives that the story in Matthew 2 is "clearly not about spiritual salvation but about political struggle" (139). With this in mind we get a new view of the coming of the Magi and the slaughter of the innocents at Bethlehem. Horsley reviews the case of Herod "King of the Jews by the Grace of Rome" (142) and notes that "Herod’s Jewish subjects never really acquiesced in his rule" (146).

Horsley observes that despite extended and repeated repression by the powers of the empire "and the providential care of God, Jesus survived to launch a movement of renewal as the Messiah and the new Moses. . . . The movement that finds expression in the gospel of Matthew . . . ," contends Horsley, "persisted in its attempt to structure life in communities that stood up against and provided an alternative to the Roman imperial order" (159).

If we think the point is already made, we are constrained to review one more section in the book. In part four, Horsley first compares devotees of consumer capitalism, the religion of Christmas, with the status of peasants in ancient Mesopotamia. Then Max A. Myers contrasts the grace of Santa Claus with Christian grace, and Paula M. Cooey discusses the irony of a public nativity scene that became an issue of religion in a public square.

Horsley proposes that in ancient Mesopotamia, the peasants were expected to serve the gods. Meanwhile in modern America "The Force that now determines our lives is capital, and the holidays constitute the religious festival of historically unprecedented scope in which we serve the Force with the value of our labor in fantastic rituals of abundance and consumption" (184).

Myers points out that the grace of Santa Claus is not compatible with Christian grace. "The gifts that Santa Claus brings are signs of ultimate favor, but they are merited as are the gifts of coals or switches for the bad. . . ." In contrast, "In Christianity . . . all of existence has a character of a gift and tends toward the most harmonious and just good for all" (195).

Cooey begins her discussion with reference to a suit over a public nativity scene. The suit went all the way to the Supreme Court, where the majority ruled that the nativity scene was not an endorsement of Christianity. Instead it was held to be a secular statement. Cooey says that "At present, Christmas practices tend to exemplify by default, if not by intention, loyalty to a national religion that authorizes an empire rather than one whose birth and death challenge the building of empires. . . ."

Cooey goes on, "For all of us, whether religious or not, can there be the cultivation of a critical, penultimate yet deep loyalty to one’s country that acknowledges the authority of prior and different royalties to transcendent realities" (215)? And, we might add, can we as Christians celebrate Christmas as Christians?

The little paperback by Richard Horsley makes the same point as the book above, but it does it in fewer pages and provides additional material on the relation between religion and empire. It goes as far back as classical Buddhism and illustrates "how, in various ways, imperial relations determine not only political-economic life, but also the conditions and possibilities of cultural identity and religious expression" (5).

In part two, "Religion in Resistance to Empire," Horsley describes the examples of Judaism and Christianity, then moves on to Iran and the modern revival of Islam. He discusses at some length the role of the United States as the "Great Satan." Without thinking about it, we may conclude that this label is simply a negative title, but as Horsley points out "In popular Islam the ‘Great Satan’ plays the role of a tempter who draws men away from obedience to God and into sin and destruction" (68).

With this perspective we receive an additional insight regarding why modern Iran has been negative to the United States. "Iranians revolted against the Shah, but they identified United States as the ultimate source of the corruption—a role it played well" (69).

In his final chapters, Horsley reviews "The Roman Emperor Cult" and "Christmas, the Festival of Consumer Capitalism," in which he covers ground similar to what he does in the larger book. As a final prophetic word, he observes that

Either book will do. Grab whichever one is most readily available.

I was impressed some years ago by Bill McKibben’s little book Hundred Dollar Holiday (Simon and Schuster, 1998), which proposes that we keep our Christmas giving to that limit. My wife and I have not found ourselves able to keep it down to that, but last year we happened on the scheme of buying a water buffalo for Heifer International in the names of our grandchildren along with modest cash gifts to them. One granddaughter had already preceded us in this method of gift giving. Another went to India and made it a point to see a water buffalo.

As I was writing this review, the Salvation Army was asking if we could do an extra day of bell ringing in July. In its own way, Salvation Army bell ringing is part of an alternative celebration, but it rides on the train of the Christmas orgy.

So how does a church make a statement in favor of Jesus and against empire? Give to the Salvation Army? Buy a Christmas tree with a fund-raising appeal for the poor and disenfranchised? Maybe.

But as Christmas Unwrapped says over and over, Christmas itself is a clever scheme imposed upon us for selfish commercial purposes. As Horsley points out, the Forces which oppressed the Mesopotamian peasants have morphed into Consumer Capitalism. We are invited to do obeisance by engaging in an orgy of buying followed by a year-along payment of the bill at 18-percent interest. As Christians, we are invited to support a vision more exalted and enlightened than this.

—Daniel Hertzler, Scottdale, Pennsylvania, a longtime editor and writer, contributes a monthly column to the Daily Courier (Connellsville, Pa.).