. . . for my contribution to politicizing Christmas.
People exist in this world who believe that certain other people have been waging a war on Christmas. People exist in this world who believed — and maybe still believe — that the 2016 election of Donald Trump was a win for Christmas in this (nonexistent, in my opinion) war.
Consider these 2022 Christmas “tweets” (still a stupid thing to think of as a meaningful pronouncement). Really think about them, setting aside our tendency to valorize our own or demonize the other.
Now honestly, which seems most in keeping with the Christmas spirit? Which the most respectful of the season and its origins? Can the Christmas spirit, given its source in Christ, be shared through sarcasm and bitterness?
I recently completed my annual reading of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, first published on 19 December 1843, one hundred seventy-nine years ago. In “Stave Three: The Second of the Three Spirits,” telling the story of Scrooge’s time with the Ghost of Christmas Present, Scrooge connects Christmas with Sundays (“‘seventh day'”), when the shops are closed and thereby the poor are deprived of a meal. Speaking for himself and the whole family of Christmases past, the Ghost of Christmas Present says,
“There are some upon this earth of yours, . . . who lay claim to know us, and who do their deeds of passion, pride, ill-will, hatred, envy, bigotry, and selfishness in our name, who are as strange to us and all our kith and kin, as if they had never lived.”
What the Ghost of Christmas Present suggests here is that there are those who claim Christ/Christianity/Christmas whose lives and deeds in this world are carried on as if Christ/Christianity/Christmas are names only, dead things that “‘never lived.'”
And now I’ll stray off into a couple of related asides. . . .
Almost one hundred years after Dickens, Joseph Campbell wrote a passage in his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces that, from the moment I read it, put me in mind of Donald Trump and his “kith and kin”:
The inflated ego of the tyrant is a curse to himself and his world—no matter how his affairs may seem to prosper. Self-terrorized, fear-haunted, alert at every hand to meet and battle back the anticipated aggressions of his environment, which are primarily the reflections of the uncontrollable impulses to acquisition within himself, the giant of self-achieved independence is the world’s messenger of disaster, even though, in his mind, he may entertain himself with humane intentions.
Christians are Easter people, not Christmas people (and certainly not 4th-of-July people). For Christians, Christmas has no meaning without Easter.
Now, here’s a very recent bit of aggressive ignorance from one of Trump’s kith and kin. Congresswoman Lauren Boebert dismissed the Cross and the sacrifice upon which true Christianity is based, suggesting that Jesus wouldn’t have had to die if he’d had enough AR-15s “to keep his government from killing him.” Yes, she really said that.
I used to love hearing my cousin Darwin Reeves sing a 20th-century hymn titled “Ten Thousand Angels,” written in 1958 by Ray Overholt. The chorus goes, in part, like this:
He could have called ten thousand angels
To destroy the world and set Him free.
He could have called ten thousand angels,
But He died alone, for you and me.
An important verse of the song goes like this:
To the howling mob He yielded; He did not for mercy cry.
The cross of shame He took alone.
And when He cried, “It’s finished,” He gave Himself to die;
Salvation’s wondrous plan was done.
This is based on Matthew 26:53, in which Jesus says as he is arrested in the Garden of Gethsemene, “Do you think I cannot call on my Father, and he will at once put at my disposal more than twelve legions of angels?”
But according to Boebert, Jesus should have been like Neo and asked for “guns, lots of guns”:
I hope that true Christians — not Xians — will call out Boebert (and her kith and kin) for such crass abuse of their faith and such overt kissing of the gun lobby’s “butt.”
I had some other stuff, but I think I’ll save it for my next 4th Tuesday Political post.
In the meantime, Merry Christmas to all — and all means all, y’all — and a healthy and happy New Year!
A graduate of Auburn University, 