Should people who’ve shed Christian beliefs celebrate Christmas anyway?

THE RELIGION GUY’S RESPONSE:

The quandary above is not posed by The Guy himself but by Keith Giles in a December 5 piece titled “Deconstructing Christmas,” one of his Progressive Christian columns for the multi-faith site patheos.com. Giles departed from his career as the pastor of a conventional church and now participates in an anonymous  “house church” with no salaried staff.

For purposes of this article, what’s pertinent about the writer is his vocation of encouraging people in the process of deconstructing their past Christian faith the way he himself has done, as expressed in his patheos columns, with “Heretic Happy Hour” podcasts, and in his books that include “Jesus Unbound: Liberating the Word of God from the Bible.”

Words in carols

So, what does a deconstructed Christmas look like these days? Giles is well aware from his past that in Christmas, believers are celebrating that the baby Jesus, born in Bethlehem, was God the Son come from heaven whose ultimate death brought salvation to humanity. That’s apparently at the heart of what “progressive” people shed,  the story as woven into those familiar carols that everybody sings (alongside all the Rudolph and Frosty and Santa tunes).

Think Charles Wesley’s 1739 phrases fused with Felix Mendelssohn’s 1840 music: “Veiled in flesh the Godhead see; Hail the incarnate Deity, pleased as man with man to dwell; Jesus our Emmanuel. . . Mild he lays his glory by, born that man no more may die, born to raise the sons of earth, born to give them second birth.”

For Giles, “almost everything about the Christmas story is worth deconstructing” and the result is that “many of us wrestle with celebrating Christmas,” which “can be a difficul time” for those who follow their newly deconstructed religion. Perhaps the family “puts pressure on us to go along with something we no longer believe in.” Or perhaps a progressive still wants to celebrate the day yet will “feel weird doing so” because people know the celebrant has left behind the beliefs involved.

Yes, borrowed from pagans

As for that “everything,” he brings up the well-known facts that we do not know Jesus’ actual birth date, and that Christians timed this festival around the shortest daytime of the year, an idea borrowed from ancient Rome’s celebration devoted to the pagan god Saturn. That’s neither here nor there (except for Jehovah’s Witnesses, who for that reason spurn the holiday).

Looking askance at other details, Giles asserts “there is absolutely zero historical evidence” that King Herod ordered the execution of all boys under age two in the Bethlehem region. Pause here for a second. That means the Gospel of Matthew is discarded as written “evidence.” How come? Nobody applies such automatic rejection to the ancient Greek and Roman annals. Moreover, Herod’s record of brutality provides plausiblity.

It’s not surprising that Giles reassures moderns who can no longer accept that Jesus was born miraculously of the Virgin Mary without a human father. Liberal church figures today also discount the miracle. What we do know is that the earliest Christians believed that to be the case, due to the two separate traditions recorded in Matthew and in Luke’s Gospel.

“Uncomfortable” Christmases

Similarly, Giles writes that progressives may be “uncomfortable” because they no longer believe in “the miraculous appearance of angels in the sky singing to shepherds, or to traveling ‘Wise Men’ who were following a star in the sky” and the like.

So, then, what is Giles’s advice for those who want to be progressive but also Christian in some limited personalized sense  minus Christmas as it has always been understood?

“If there are some elements of Christmas you like, keep them. If there are some elements of Christmas you don’t like, change them. You and I are not bound to observe anything just because tradition says so.” And “feel free” to celebrate “even if you no longer believe a lot of the Christian elements in the Christmas story.”

But “if we would rather not participate in the Christmas ceebration, we have th right not to.” And devout Christians would say Amen to Giles’s contention that “no one should be forced to observe or celebrate something they don’t believe in.”

Meanwhile, The Guy adds his merry Christmas greeting for those who do believe in the Bethlehem story as preserved and transmitted these 2,000 years.