- Dietrich Bonhoeffer
The Christmas Wars Are Over, And Christmas Won
If there is indeed a “War on Christmas,” those on the anti-Christmas side of the war have lost — big time.
Nancy Bauer/Shutterstock
The television
pundits, conservative politicians, and talk-radio loudmouths who believe
there is a “War on Christmas” should look around, withdraw their
troops, and quit screaming. Because if there is a war on Christmas,
Christmas has won.
As Christmas
approaches, tens of thousands of churches around the country are
planning Christmas services and expecting packed pews. Their choirs are
rehearsing Christmas music; and church members have taken the Nativity
scene figures out of storage and put them on church lawns. Children
costumed as kings and shepherds are learning to sing “Away in the
Manger.”
Christmas cards with manger
scenes are speeding around the country through the U.S. Postal Service
or in the form of online animated greetings that play “Silent Night” and
show the wise men following the star to Bethlehem.
No
phalanx of anti-Christmas warriors are marching on those churches. No
one is going to jail those choir members (not even the screechy sopranos
or the off-key tenors); no government agency is going to say “Get that
manger scene off your lawn! And make that sign read ‘Holiday services’!”
Christians
both conservative and liberal used to lament the commercialization of
Christmas and the fact that retailers, ad agencies, and corporations had
hijacked one of the most important Christian festivals in order to make
more money. Well, it remains a free country, and we Christians can’t
take them to court for doing that.
As
a pastor, I often told people that we get to celebrate two Christmas
holidays. One is the big-time whoop-de-do holiday of shopping,
Santa-at-the-mall, Frosty the Snowman, and television specials where
singers in sexy costumes croon “Blue Christmas” before covering up a bit
to finish with “O Holy Night.” That Christmas is fun, and — let’s face
it — you just can’t avoid it unless you hide in a cave for the months of
November and December.
Then we
Christians get to celebrate a second kind of Christmas, “our” Christmas.
We will go to church. Even those of us who don’t always go to church
will go to church. We will sing Christmas carols about Jesus which, we
have to admit, may not be appropriate for multireligious public school
classrooms. We will stand in front of the manger scenes in our homes and
churches and be in awe of their spiritual significance. These displays
won’t be cluttered with the figures of Frosty or Rudolph added to the
“holiday” display at City Hall so that the scene becomes “cultural”
rather than “religious.”
In this
Christmas — the one that really matters — there is no war on Christmas.
This is the Christmas of those who celebrate the birth of Jesus, the
Christmas of people of faith, the Christmas that gets along just fine
without forcing non-Christian children in public schools to sing carols
proclaiming a faith that is not theirs.
There
is no war on this Christmas. And for people who want to — in the words
of an old slogan — “keep Christ in Christmas,” it is the only Christmas
that really matters.
Charles Austin is
a retired pastor of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and a
former religion reporter with Religion News Service, The New York Times,
and The Record of Hackensack, N.J. Via RNS.
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