Watchnight Parties

This post is being made at 9:00 a.m. CST in the U.S., but in Japan (where I long lived), it is midnight and the beginning of a new year according to the now-standard “Western calendar.”* According to the Japanese calendar, though, this is the beginning of Reiwa 8, the 8^th year of the current emperor on the Chrysanthemum Throne. 

In Japan, the new year is celebrated mostly after midnight. Many Japanese people make a hatsumōde (初詣、“first shrine or temple visit of the New Year”) after midnight on December 31, although many wait until daybreak on January 1, as seeing the sunrise in the new year is considered quite meaningful.

Years in Japan are traditionally viewed as completely separate, with each new year providing a fresh start. Consequently, all duties are supposed to be completed by the end of the year, while bōnenkai (忘年会、“year forgetting parties”) are often held in December with the purpose of leaving the old year’s worries and troubles behind.

In large Japanese cities, most younger Japanese people celebrate New Year’s Eve much the same as young people in USAmerican cities. Traditional (and especially rural) families, though, spend the evening at home for a relaxed family meal, watching TV specials, and participating in rituals to welcome the new year.

So, for most people in Japan, there are not watchnight parties such as most of us older people in the U.S. remember—and perhaps many still participate in, although it has been a very long time since I stayed up until midnight on New Year’s Eve.

Religious watchnight parties first became common in the U.S. among Methodists. In 1727, the Moravian Church was formed in Herrnhut, a village on the estate of Count Nicholas Ludwig von Zinzendorf in Saxony, Germany.

Watchnight services originated in Moravian communities around 1733 in what is now the Czech Republic, where believers held three-hour vigils on New Year's Eve, often preceded by a love feast, to reflect on the year, pray, and prepare for the future. 

John Wesley encountered a Moravian watchnight service on New Year’s Eve 1738, describing a powerful spiritual experience that influenced his ministry. By 1740, he formalized it for Methodists as “Covenant Renewal Services,” featuring singing, prayers, scripture, and communion held on New Year’s Eve as a godly alternative to drunken celebrations.

Consequently, watchnight services spread widely among Methodists in Britain and then in North America as a New Year’s Eve religious observance. As Christianity moved westward, Methodists and Baptists were the primary Protestant denominations, and Baptists didn’t have watchnight services for quite some time, as they were considered too “Methodistic.”

Gradually, though, more and more Baptist churches began to have watchnight services, and as a Baptist boy in the late 1940s and early 1950s, I remember participating in such church gatherings on New Year’s Eve. Then, in my early years as a pastor, and later even in Japan, I led and enjoyed meaningful watchnight services.

Black Christians held a meaningful watchnight service on December 31, 1862.** On that night, enslaved and free African Americans gathered, many in secret, to ring in the new year and await news that the Emancipation Proclamation had taken effect. 

On September 22, President Lincoln had issued an executive order, declaring that enslaved people in the rebelling Confederate States were legally free. However, the decree would not take effect until the clock struck midnight at the start of the new year. Thus, that New Year’s Eve, came to be known as “Watch Night” or “Freedom's Eve.”

According to Perplexity AI, many Black churches today hold watchnight services, reflecting on slavery's history and emancipation. Sermons often recount the 1862 gatherings, framing the night as  “Freedom's Eve” while blending it with broader themes of hope and justice.

Initially meant to welcome emancipation, the watchnight services now encourage reflection on the history of slavery and freedom, as well as reflection on the past year—both its trials and triumphs—while also anticipating what the new year will have in store. It is a continuation of generations of faith that freedom and renewal lie ahead.

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  * In November 1872, the Japanese government decreed that the old calendar, derived from Chinese models, would be replaced by the Gregorian calendar.​ Under that reform, the day after December 2, 1872 (lunisolar), was designated January 1, 1873. Thus, since 1873, the official Japanese New Year has been celebrated on January 1, rather than on the variable late-January/February date of the old lunisolar year.​

** This section is based on “The Historical Legacy of Watch Night” as found at this website: https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/stories/historical-legacy-watch-night. Much of the same content is found in What does Watch Night mean for Black Americans today? It dates back to the Emancipation Proclamation, posted by Religious News Service on January 1, 2024.

“Go Tell It on the Mountain”

As Christmas Day is now less than a week away, let’s think about the Christmas song “Go Tell It on the Mountain.” That beloved song was originally an African American spiritual that was adapted into a Christmas carol by a man with the unusual surname Work. 

John Wesley Work II was long connected with the Jubilee Singers of Fisk University. That school was established in 1866 for the purpose of educating freed slaves. It was named after Clinton B. Fisk (1828~90), a Union general and a key figure in Reconstruction. In 1871, the school was facing a financial crisis, so the school choir, known as Fisk Jubilee Singers, toured the U.S., raising funds.

Graduating from Fisk University as valedictorian in 1895, John W. Work II (1871~1925) later taught at his alma mater and directed the Jubilee Singers. A book with their songs was published in 1907, and it contained the first printed appearance of “Go Tell It on the Mountain.”

It was more than 50 years later that Work’s carol was published in a major hymn book: in 1958, it was included in The Pilgrim Hymnal, issued by the United Church of Christ. And, surprisingly, the next major denominational hymnal to include it was the Southern Baptist Convention’s 1975 edition of The Baptist Hymnal.

The third stanza of “Go Tell It on the Mountain” says, "Down in a lowly manger / The humble Christ was born, / And God sent us salvation / That blessed Christmas morn." 

When the “humble Christ” was born, he was placed “in a [lowly] manger, because there was no place for them in the inn” (Luke 2:7, NRSV). A while later, an angel appeared to Joseph, telling him to “take the child and his mother and escape to Egypt …. for Herod is going to search for the child to kill him” (Matthew 2:13, NIV). The Christ child was clearly poor and oppressed.

This verse of the Christmas carol also resonates with the adult Jesus’ language, which often paralleled the words of the prophets about justice for left-out and oppressed people. The reading for the Third Sunday of Advent says, “The Lord … has anointed me.  He has sent me to bring good news to the poor, to bind up the brokenhearted ….” (Isaiah 61:1, CEB).

Jesus cited those words from Isaiah in his “first sermon,” as recorded in Luke 4:18-19. And then when the imprisoned John the Baptist sent two of his disciples to Jesus, asking him if he was the Messiah or should he look for someone else, Jesus concluded what they should tell John with these words, “Good news is preached to the poor” (Luke 7:22).

What message are we telling on the mountain today? Is it a message about the “humble Christ” and about bringing “good news to the poor”?

In our country today for so many who are economically poor, Christmas is too often a time of financial stress as Christmas gifts are often bought with credit cards that charge high rates of interest. *¹

On the other hand, for those who are economically well off, Christmas presents usually include luxury goods in addition to (or in place of) “necessary goods.” The former term is defined as “non-essential items that signal wealth and social status.” The latter, of course, refers to the broad category of daily “necessities.”*²

One of the richest men in the world is Bernard Arnault, the chairman and CEO of LVMH, the world’s largest luxury goods conglomerate. Arnault (b. 1949), a Frenchman, was ranked #1 in wealth by Forbes in the spring of 2024, and Forbes now lists him (with his family) at #7. And I assume that he/they add/s significant monetary earnings during the Christmas season.

Multitudes of people celebrate Christmas; far fewer celebrate the birth of the humble Christ, whose ministry was as an itinerate messenger of God, a man with “no place to lay his head” (Luke 9:58), who was executed by the complicity of religious and political leaders. Humble Christ, indeed!

The Christmas carol in question also says, “God sent us salvation.” Of course, conservative evangelicals interpret that salvation as being the promise of eternal life in Heaven after death. But the humble Christ didn’t talk much about that. Salvation was more about being freed from unjust social structures, such as Work saw when arranging “Go Tell It on the Mountain.”*³

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*¹ AI says that if $300 is charged on a typical credit card in December, by making only minimum monthly payments, it would take until the following December to pay off the charges of $336, including the payment of 12% interest. Of course, some of us use credit cards, but pay all the charges each month, so rather than paying interest, we get from 1~3% refund for what we have charged. This is just a small way by which the “rich” get richer while the poor get poorer.

*² For example, many people now wear “sneakers” (or what we old-timers used to call tennis shoes). They could accurately be called necessary goods. But the retail price for the expensive sneakers is from $1,250–$2,000, and they would surely fall in the luxury goods category.

*³ James Baldwin’s debut novel, released in 1953, was titled Go Tell It on the Mountain, and according to Perplexity AI, Baldwin’s novel reflects the “Black hope that God’s saving act breaks into slavery, segregation, and humiliation.”

WWHS? (What Would Hannah Say?)

Hannah Arendt, the noted historian and philosopher, died 50 years ago, on December 4, 1975. Since totalitarianism was one of the main themes of her academic work, I am considering what Arendt might say about current U.S. political leaders, and especially about the Secretary of Defense.  

Hannah Arendt (c. 1951)

Hannah Arendt was born in Germany in 1906, the only child of secular Jews. She was exiled from Nazi Germany in 1933, came to the U.S. in 1941, and became a U.S. citizen ten years later. Although she did not like to be called a philosopher, she is widely considered to be one of the most influential political philosophers of the 20^th century.

Arendt analyzed the political catastrophes that occurred in the first half of the 1900s, especially totalitarianism, state violence, and the collapse of political responsibility. Her ideas remain influential because they examine the conditions that allow political evil to arise, not just the outcomes of such evil.

Of her eight published books, her most influential one is The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), which is a study of how propaganda, ideology, and mass resentment can destroy the shared world needed for democratic life. (I have previously written about her 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem, in which she discussed “the banality of evil.”)*

Arendt warned that democracies can erode gradually: through defactualization, misuses of power, and the replacement of judgment by ideology. Fifty years after her death, her work remains a powerful lens for examining political actions—especially those involving state violence and the degradation of human dignity.

I am not projecting what Arendt might say to Pete Hegseth (Trump’s Secretary of Defense, whom he now calls the Secretary of War), but drawing on what she wrote in her 1951 book (mentioned above), I am suggesting how what she said then elucidates problems with what Hegseth has done and said in recent months.**

Many of Secretary Hegseth’s ideas/actions seem to align with what Arendt wrote in her book on totalitarianism. For example, “Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.”

Regarding Hegseth, I am not calling him a crackpot or fool, but he seems to exemplify the kind of attitude Arendt described. It can be argued that he was elevated to his Cabinet position chiefly because of demonstrable loyalty to Trump’s ideas and opposition to his (Trump’s) enemies.​

Trump’s choice of Hegseth also fits a broader pattern of the President appointing figures whose public role is to advance a polarizing ideological position to attack critics, even when they lack the conventional qualifications for the post they hold.​

Arendt also wrote in her 1951 book, “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction … and the distinction between true and false … no longer exist.”

What Hegseth has said regarding the killing of two unarmed men clinging to the wreckage of a boat illegally struck by a U.S. missile on September 2 certainly seems to be an example of what Arendt was articulating.

Hegseth minimized/denied the documented elements of the strike. He reframed unarmed survivors as legitimate targets, and he treated legal and moral distinctions (combatants vs. shipwrecked survivors) as irrelevant or expendable. This is a deplorable stance for a Secretary of Defense/War.

What Hegseth has said and done may well lead to his removal from office. As an opponent of totalitarianism, as all Americans should be, I think if Hannah Arendt were still alive, she would say, “the sooner, the better!”

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  * My 12/5/2014 blog post was titled “The Banality of Evil.”

** I also wrote about Hegseth in my blog article posted on November 20 (see here). That was in connection with his emphasis on “the warrior ethos.” I don’t intend to be unduly hard on Hegseth, but when he was first nominated for a Cabinet position by the current POTUS, he struck me as the weakest of several already questionable choices, and I assumed he would not be confirmed. However, the Senate confirmed him as Secretary of Defense on January 24 by a 51-50 vote, with Vice President Vance casting the tie-breaking vote. (Three Republicans joined all the Democrats in opposition.)

Note: I was assisted by ChatGPT and Perplexity AI in the research for and writing of this piece.