The Story of a Puritan, a Princess, a Poet, and a Painter
Photo I took while living in a suburb of Houston, famous for its Christmas lights display.
I got a chance to chat with Skye Jethani about “Christmas in America” on his Holy Post podcast, which he co-hosts with Phil Vischer (creator of VeggieTales).
We focused on the essay that I’d written for Christianity Today a few years back, titled “Why Putting Christ Back in Christmas Is Not Enough.”
In it I make the case that what we experience as “hyper-normal” Christmas in this country is a recent invention in history and it bears little resemblance to the stories that Matthew and Luke tell.
Owing to the influence of a puritan, a princess, a poet and plenty of painters, this idea of Christmas causes us to fight the wrong fights and to want to preserve traditions which ought to be replaced by the holy-terrifying, holy-fantastical nativity narratives of the first and third gospels.
What happens, I ask, when the Protestant church in the 17th century evacuates its worship of the celebration of Christ’s birth? A liturgical vacuum is created that non-ecclesial entities willingly fill.
The market shapes a society’s emotional desires and financial expectations about the holy day, the ideal family replaces the holy family, and the work of visual artists shape its imagination, while musicians and writers fill the empty space with their own stories about the “magic” of Christmas.
As an instance of civil religion, “Christmas in America” always aims to sanitize the Nativity story—to make it safe for public consumption.
It robs Luke’s story of its sting by removing its scandalous elements—its songs of protest, its tales of sorrow, its “undesirable” protagonists, its multi-cultural scope.
In placing a crèche next to a blow-up Frosty or Elsa on the front lawn, it absorbs Matthew’s strange tale into a tale of generic good cheer.
And thinking we can throw in a dash of the baby Jesus into the tale of “Christmas in America,” without a mutation of the God-Man baby is naïve, and not a small bit dangerous.
And while “Christmas in America” is not all bad by any means (I love me some Mariah Carey), it involves inertias that resist the more demanding, and far more fulfilling, story of God Incarnate.
My convo with Skye aired today and you can listen to it here.
Another pic from my old neighborhood.
Still another pic.
And one last one.
