{"id":14526,"date":"2018-12-04T07:00:31","date_gmt":"2018-12-04T11:00:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/freelancechristianity\/?p=14526"},"modified":"2018-12-04T09:05:57","modified_gmt":"2018-12-04T13:05:57","slug":"the-taming-of-christmas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/freelancechristianity\/the-taming-of-christmas\/","title":{"rendered":"The Taming of Christmas, and How to Make it Wild Again"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>
Just when you thought you had heard and read it all . . .<\/div>\n
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\u201cIf Jesus was back among us, he\u2019d be a law-abiding gun owner. He\u2019d support the Police. And he\u2019d say \u201cMerry Christmas\u201d not \u201cHappy Holidays.\u201d\u00a0<\/strong><\/div>\n
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This piece of wisdom and insight was shared around this time last year on Twitter by Joe Walsh, a former Illinois congressman turned conservative talk-show host. A number of creative responses were immediately forthcoming, including<\/div>\n
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  • No, he\u2019d say Happy Birthday to Me or Merry Me-Mas<\/em><\/strong><\/li>\n
  • The most stupid thing ever said on Twitter? Take a bow<\/em><\/strong><\/li>\n
  • Like a brown skinned Middle Eastern man in sandals walking about with a gun isn\u2019t going to get riddled with bullets?<\/em><\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n

    The best I could come up for my own response was<\/p>\n

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    • If he was back among us, he\u2019d say \u201cJESUS CHRIST, WALSH!! WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU???<\/em><\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n

      Apparently, Joe Walsh is imagining a Jesus ready to actually fight in the \u201cWar Against Christmas\u201d that certain folks annually claim is being fought by political and social\u00a0liberals such as myself as part of a continuing effort to make atheism the religion of the land.<\/p>\n

      \"\"<\/p>\n

      A salvo in the war against the war on Christmas a few years ago was Sarah Palin\u2019s\u00a0Good Tidings and Great Joy: Protecting the Heart of Christmas.\u00a0<\/em>I didn\u2019t read the book (and won\u2019t), but I\u2019m quite confident that I know the general thrust of her argument, if she bothered to have one.\u00a0Liberal atheist grinches\u00a0are out there trying to steal our cr\u00e8ches, monitor our language so that we will be embarrassed to say \u201cMerry Christmas,\u201d be forced to say something insipid like \u201cHappy Holidays\u201d or \u201cHow are you doing during this lovely Holiday season?\u201d and make it a thought-crime to think about the baby Jesus.<\/p>\n

      I find this paranoia amusing, sad, or maddening depending on my mood. If one\u2019s faith is rattled by such matters, one has larger issues to confront than the possibility that not everyone shares one\u2019s faith. The Incarnation that I anticipate during Advent and celebrate at Christmas is at the center of what I believe concerning God\u2014whether an oversized fake baby with a halo and pious expression gets to lay in a manger while observed by other pious statues and animals on the front lawn of city hall doesn\u2019t have much effect on that belief.<\/p>\n

      This is not to say, however, that I deny that Christmas is under attack. It is, on at least two fronts. One of them is obvious\u2014all you have to do is walk into any store where you can buy something between Halloween and January 1.\u00a0One Saturday in the middle of last month, I needed a package of large paper lawn-and-leaf bags as I cleaned leaves from our tiny yard. Upon entering the Lowe\u2019s a mile away and heading for the place where blowers, bags and rakes were two weeks ago when I bought bags the last time, I was immediately disoriented.<\/p>\n

      Autumn leaf-control tools and accessories had been replaced by mass quantities of the worst that commercial Christmas has to offer. Fake trees, gaudy and tasteless lawn decorations and tree ornaments had taken over the right front quadrant of the store, supported by the ever-offensive strains of Xmas muzak in the background. WHAT THE FUCK!!!??? I thought, as I do every year in November when I am smacked in the face by the Ghost of Capitalist Christmas for the first time in the season. Halloween was just two weeks ago! Thanksgiving isn\u2019t for another ten days! Thanks for making me hate Christmas all over again, Lowe\u2019s!<\/p>\n

      I\u2019m convinced that this is more than simple capitalism run amuck. There\u2019s something sinister lurking behind the scenes. Everything we see and hear at the end of each calendar year is designed to convince us that we need to buy a bunch of stuff we can\u2019t afford in order to prove our affection for people in our lives, all overseen by a fat guy with a white beard in a red suit.What more insidious undermining of an adult, vigorous, intelligent faith could there be\u2014the divine turned into a fat guy with a beard who can be bribed by good behavior into fulfilling even the most trivial desires?<\/p>\n

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      A jolly elf who effectively seduces millions of people every year into believing\u00a0that and behaving as if\u00a0the best place to celebrate Christmas is in one of our contemporary cathedrals of worship\u2014the shopping mall. Get thee behind me, Santa. The war on Christmas has been underway for a long time, waged not by liberal, politically correct atheists seeking to undermine traditional values, but rather by the insidious and inexorable pressure to trivialize and commodify everything. The heart of Christmas is no more present in lawn ornaments, \u201cPut Christ Back Into Christmas\u201d slogans, and \u201cMerry Christmas\u201d lapel buttons than it is in the extravaganza of holiday paraphernalia that screams at me every time I drive down the street or walk into a store between Halloween and New Year\u2019s Day. The heart of Christmas is in the silent mystery of the Incarnation, in the strange and beautiful ways in which the divine chooses to enter our world in human form on a daily basis. There are many ways to connect and resonate with the heart of Christmas\u2014Santa is not one of them.<\/p>\n

      But there is another front in the war on Christmas, this one self-inflicted by those of us who claim to be Christian. In a recent interview with Krista Tippett on NPR\u2019s\u00a0On Being<\/em>, Jesuit author and spiritual advisor James Martin spoke of how we have sanitized the Christmas story into something appropriate for polite conversation, cr\u00e8ches, cards, and movies.<\/p>\n

      I think it\u2019s been tamed. It\u2019s not only been commodified and commercialized; it\u2019s been tamed. It\u2019s a nice, pretty story about two nice, good-looking people, usually white, who had a pretty baby in a manger. But in a sense, it\u2019s a terrifying story in terms of what they had to undergo. And it\u2019s also\u2014I have to say\u2014it is a shocking story. It\u2019s not just a baby. It is God being born in human form. And it\u2019s just as shocking as the resurrection. And I think we\u2019ve tamed it. And in a sense, it doesn\u2019t demand our belief. We can just kind of look on it, and say, \u201cWell, that\u2019s cute\u201d . . . And I actually have to say, I am really getting to the point where I\u2019m starting to loathe the Christmas season.<\/strong><\/p>\n

      As I had the opportunity this semester to discuss some of the seminal texts of the Christian faith with my freshman students, I reminded them that at the heart of the Christmas story is an outrageously ridiculous, but beautifully attractive, idea: God chose to become human. God continues to engage with the world through humans. We have surrounded ourselves with all sorts of distractions in order to avoid grappling with a most basic truth: God loves us. That changes everything. And it doesn\u2019t make me want to go to the mall or to church.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

      Just when you thought you had heard and read it all . . . \u201cIf Jesus was back among us, he\u2019d be a law-abiding gun owner. He\u2019d support the Police. And he\u2019d say \u201cMerry Christmas\u201d not \u201cHappy Holidays.\u201d\u00a0 This piece of wisdom and insight was shared around this time last year on Twitter by Joe […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2938,"featured_media":14550,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[591,9,11,21,22,35,40,47,48,52,57,68,73,75,94,103],"tags":[114,169,170,221,242,594,289,388,463],"class_list":["post-14526","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-advent","category-belief","category-bible","category-christianity","category-christmas","category-faith","category-god","category-hope","category-human-nature","category-incarnation","category-jesus","category-mystery","category-philosophy","category-politics","category-teaching","category-wonder","tag-advent","tag-christianity","tag-christmas-2","tag-faith","tag-god","tag-james-martin","tag-jesus","tag-politics","tag-teaching"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Taming of Christmas, and How to Make it Wild Again<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"James Martin on how Christians have tamed Christmas: "It is a shocking story. 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