Liberating Christmas 2023

Liberating Christmas 2023

Joerg Rieger, Vanderbilt University

“Don’t let yourself be thrown off course”—“Lass dich nicht aus der Bahn werfen.” These were the words my father said to me in his Swabian-German dialect when we said goodbye for the last time. He passed away this summer, on another continent. In places where Christianity is the religion of the majority, this may sound like an odd piece of advice. If faith and religion are part of the dominant status quo, why would there be a danger of being thrown off course?

The spirit of Christmas can be understood in two very different ways. One version of the spirit of Christmas yearns for the days when Christianity was even more dominant than it is now and set the course for everyone. This version is manifest in common complaints that the Christmas season has lost its Christian focus. Here, Christianity, Christmas, and Christ are somehow tied up with American culture of the 1940s or 1950s, when “girls were girls and men were men,” as the theme song of the popular TV show All in the Family went. Variations of this version identify Christ with the course of dominant Western culture and find themselves at home anywhere on the conservative-liberal spectrum, even bending gender and socio-economic norms when it suits the dominant status quo.

A different version of the spirit of Christmas recognizes that Christianity finds itself on a course contrary to the powers that be. The origins of Christianity tell a story of the Christian faith not fitting in and being challenged. For good reasons, in the Roman Empire the early Christians were considered atheists. The bone of contention was their understanding of Christ. For the Romans, the problem was not that Christians considered a human being to be divine, as emperors could be declared divine as well. Neither was the problem that Christians practiced another religion, as the Romans were religiously quite tolerant. The problem was that this particular human being—a politically dangerous person (the cross was for political rebels)—did not match the commonly accepted attributes of divinity that identified God with the emperors, such as unilateral top-down power, immutability, and impassibility. Christ’s working-class background certainly did not help either.

These two versions of the spirit of Christmas are incompatible. Either Christ is the representative of the dominant status quo and its metamorphoses, or Christ presents the ultimate challenge to the status quo and an alternative to it. Either Christmas is the manifestation of dominant theistic assumptions, according to which Christ resembles the rulers of the age, emperors of the past, presidents and corporate CEOs of the present. Or Christmas is the manifestation of a resistance to theism, which calls into question these dominant powers and ultimately amounts to what the Romans considered to be atheism. Note that atheism here does not have to mean the rejection of all gods but the rejection of those gods that resemble the powerful and mighty, which might be considered part of the genius of Christianity.

What are the earliest traditions of Christmas telling us? What does it mean for the spirit of Christmas that Christ was born not among the ruling elites but among the common people, at the bottom rung of the class hierarchy (Luke 2:1-7)? What does it mean for the spirit of Christmas that Christ was recognized not by religious and political elites but by working people like the shepherds (Luke 2:8-20) and by mysterious wise men who resisted the interests of Herod, the ruler supported by Rome (Matthew 2:1-12)? What does it mean for the spirit of Christmas that Herod was so concerned about Christ’s birth that he ordered genocide by having a whole generation of infants obliterated (Matthew 2:13-18)?

Based on these ancient traditions, liberating Christmas means embarking on a different course. This course moves away from the dominant course of gaining top-down power over all the empires of the world, and it implies the refusal to worship its representative, Satan, as Jesus did in his final temptation (Matt 4:8-10). Liberating Christmas means rejecting the dominant theisms that have taken hold of Christianity and other religions, and to embrace the fundamental critique of theism at the heart of Christianity. Such an alternative course is powerful, and efforts to throw off course those who pursue it should not come as a surprise. Jesus experienced such efforts from beginning to the very end (Mark 15:21-32)—they are like the bookends that hold Christianity together.

In sum, liberating Christmas means to reintroduce Christianity and Christmas to a Christ who pursues a course that is different from the course of the dominant powers in politics, economics, and even religion, contrasting the power of the few and the power of the many. The spirit of Christmas is not about Christianity vs. the secular world, Christianity vs. atheism, or Christianity vs. other religions. Instead, the spirit of Christmas is about rejecting the confusion of Christianity and Christ with the dominant powers of the age and reclaiming the alternative ways of Christianity of God in Christ turning around the spirit of empire by walking among the common people. This liberation of Christmas is, therefore, also the liberation of Christianity and of religion, which is so sorely needed today.

For those of us pursuing the liberation of Christmas in these ways, pushback should not come as a surprise. Let’s take to heart my father’s parting advice “don’t let yourself be thrown off course.”