The Battle for Christmas

In recent years there has been considerable talk about the war on Christmas. But conflict at Christmastime is nothing new. “The Battle for Christmas” was the title of my Christmas sermon for Dec. 21, 1997. The title was taken from historian Stephen Nissenbaum’s 1997 book by that name. 

The First Battle of Christmas

My 12/21/97 sermon, which I just happened to run across a printed copy of recently, was based on Matthew 2:1~18, the Bible passage that ends with the terrible “massacre of the innocents.” Since the first part of my blog post a year ago was about that tragic event, I’ll not say more about that now.

The Puritans’ Battle against Christmas

Much of the book by Nissenbaum (b. 1941) is about the history of how Christmas was celebrated in what became the United States. He explains that among the Puritans for a long time there was considerable opposition to the celebrating of Christmas.

In fact, in 1659 the Massachusetts General Court declared the celebration of Christmas to be a criminal offense. It was not until the middle of the nineteenth century that Christmas became a legal holiday in New England—or in most of the other states.

Early winter was most likely not the time of Jesus’ birth, so that was one reason Christmas was opposed. It was not until the fourth century that the Church decided to observe Christmas on December 25—and that date was chosen because of the long-standing celebration of the winter solstice.

So, as Nissenbaum says, the Puritans were correct when they pointed out that to a large degree “Christmas was nothing but a pagan festival covered with a Christian veneer” (p. 4).

But the Puritans had another reason for suppressing Christmas: it

involved behavior that most of us would find offensive and even shocking today—rowdy public displays of excessive eating and drinking, the mockery of established authority, aggressive begging (often involving the threat of doing harm), and even the invasion of wealthy homes (p. 5).

Nissenbaum also states, “There were always people for whom Christmas was a time of pious devotion rather than carnival but such people were always in the minority. It may not be going too far to say that Christmas has always been an extremely difficult holiday to Christianize” (p. 8).

The Contemporary Battle for Christmas

In the 2010s, “the war on Christmas” became a widely-used phrase to criticize those who wanted to recognize the plurality of the people who live in the U.S.

Acknowledging that a sizeable portion of the populace were not Christians, those who wished to be “politically correct” encouraged saying “Happy Holidays” or “Season’s Greetings” rather than “Merry Christmas.”

Many conservative evangelical Christians were incensed and verbally attacked the “liberals” for being atheists, or Communists, or whatever. Thankfully, that “war” seems to have largely, but not completely, subsided.

I was surprised to see the initial results of a 12/15 Washington Times poll on “How concerned are you about a ‘War on Christmas?’” By this morning (12/20) 72% had responded, “Very, it’s a genuine problem.”

(The Washington Times is the conservative newspaper founded by Sun Myung Moon in 1982. It is mostly read by people who think that D.C.’s major newspaper should be called “The Washington Compost,” as, for example, rightwing talk radio host Mark Levin has regularly referred to it.)

But the contemporary battle for Christmas is a real one, and it has been active during my whole lifetime. After all these years, I remember the sermon I heard at the First Baptist Church in Bolivar, Missouri, when I was a freshman in college.

Referring to that first battle of Christmas as recorded in Matthew 2, Pastor Clayton Baker talked about the three “Herods” that are still trying to kill the Christ of Christmas. He called them the “Herod of Hurried Hours,” the “Herod of Hollow Hallelujahs,” and the “Herod of Hurtful Hypocrisies.”

If you reflect on those three points of Rev. Baker’s sermon, you can grasp some of the problem, that is, keeping Jesus Christ as the focal point of Christmas.

The following meme expresses well a large part of what winning the battle for Christmas really means.