Christmas in a Post-Christian Age
religion ·Originally published on my tumblr.
About a year ago, a friend of mine from college wrote a very moving essay about his coming to grips with his atheism during the Christmas season, having been raised as an evangelical Christian. (Sadly, the post has been lost to linkrot.) I found it moving, not only because of my friendship with him but because of my own reckoning with Christianity and the holiday season. I myself cannot claim to have any serious connection to the Christian religion anymore, and I was raised in a far more liberal faith (the Religious Society of Friends) than he was. Yet, the conversion of Christmas into a largely secular holiday is bothersome to me, because I believe, as Ross Douthat does, that the holiday is now mainly equated with crass materialism and culture war. Indeed, Christianity in the US today is less a religion than it is a mark of tribal identity, a way of distinguishing insiders from outsiders. Even though I don’t consider myself Christian, I’d rather have a Christmas that was explicitly religious and honored as such than one hung up on certain cultural forms that have accumulated over the years.
On the other hand, it’s true that Christmas has always been problematic in this way, as it’s the Christian holiday that is most intermingled with pagan elements. When Cromwell and the Puritans took over England in the 1650s, one of the first things they did was ban the traditional celebrations of Christmas, as they took away from reflection on the birth of Jesus. So distressing over the secularization of Christmas has a long history, though thankfully it’s being addressed today in a far less violent manner.