Michael Coren is an Anglican priest, journalist and author of the memoir Heaping Coals.
It’s that time of year again, when certain Christian activists complain that we’ve taken Christ out of Christmas and that there’s a war on the holiday. As a priest, I’d love it if we all observed Advent and then the birth of Christ. But in all honesty, has religiosity genuinely been expunged from the season, and are most people particularly concerned?
Churches will be busy and crowded on Christmas Eve but while it’s uncomfortable to admit, many of those who fill the pews on Dec. 24 won’t be seen again for quite a while. Christmas has become, for some, a cultural or familial tradition rather than an act of devotion. While predictions of dying churches are usually overblown, and there’s growth in all sorts of places, we no longer live in a society where Christianity is the dominant social theme. To pretend otherwise is pointless, and to obsess about it is nostalgia rather than piety.
The other reality is that the Christmas we know has seldom been especially Christ-filled. Our version has been enormously influenced by Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, published in 1843. The timing is crucial, because the society he saw was shifting from the rural to the urban, and the economic and social revolutions of the 1830s and 1840s led to increased working hours, pressure on families and the destruction of traditional communities. He wanted to make a statement of literary defiance.
But Dickens wasn’t motivated by Christianity, and frequently mocked it in his writing. As a child he sometimes attended a Baptist chapel, and had some interest in Unitarianism as an adult, but he was as much a critic as a supporter of the church. He wasn’t interested in the specifically Christian qualities of Christmas, but in making it a time for altruism and empathy. To Dickens, the problem was that we’d lost our humanity, not our faith.
Then there’s Santa Claus, the quintessence of contemporary Christmas. St. Nicholas has ancient and Christian origins but the modern incarnation is much more recent. In 1822, American poet Clement Clarke Moore wrote A Visit from St. Nicholas (also known as The Night Before Christmas). A “little old driver, so lively and quick” was able to climb down chimneys. Forty years later, the cartoonist Thomas Nast gave Santa human characteristics and placed his home firmly in the North Pole. It took until the early 1930s for Coca-Cola to give the world a new Father Christmas, and that’s where the fat, white-bearded old fellow dressed in red and white began.
It makes the whole Christ in Christmas argument somewhat tenuous, and even more so when we consider the contribution that Hollywood has made to our perception of it all. Nobody can accuse the film industry of championing Christianity and, ironically, some of the most vociferous critics of their movies are the loudest to call for the return of Christ in Christmas. Yet it’s difficult to watch It’s a Wonderful Life, for example, and not feel a tingling sense of the meaning of the season. That’s why the movie is the subject of Christmas Eve sermons the world over – and Jesus is never mentioned by any of the film’s characters!
The reason the demand to put Christ in Christmas receives limited support isn’t that people are hostile to Christianity, but that they just don’t feel the need for it. That stings. But the positive conclusion, the Christian spin if you like, is that within the undeniable commercialism and endless TV specials, the secular world experiences an invincible message of kindness and largesse, one that may not be exclusively Christian but nevertheless holds sublimely close to the Christian command to love God and love others as you love yourself. It may not be orthodox religion but it’s not a bad partner, especially in a cynical age.
The critics bemoan the scarcity of religiously themed greeting cards or the absence of creches in public places – go to church, you’ll find them there – but these are mere tokens. Perhaps if we Christians acted more as if Christ was in us, we wouldn’t have to worry so much about him being in Christmas. My Jewish dad always worked late Christmas Eve so as to be able to afford to take the following day off. He’d stop driving his cab close to midnight and spend a few minutes in a church. I once asked him why. “It makes me feel as if there’s still goodness and hope,” he said. You see, the message of Christ is still in Christmas.