Thanks in part to [a] bunker mentality, American Christianity has become . . . a “weak culture” — one that mobilizes but doesn’t convert, alienates rather than seduces, and looks backward toward a lost past instead of forward to a vibrant future. In spite of their numerical strength and reserves of social capital, . . . the Christian churches are mainly influential only in the “peripheral areas” of our common life. In the commanding heights of culture, Christianity punches way below its weight. [Cute phrase, huh?]
[T]his month’s ubiquitous carols and crèches notwithstanding, believing Christians are no longer what they once were — an overwhelming majority in a self-consciously Christian nation. The question is whether they can become a creative and attractive minority in a different sort of culture, where they’re competing not only with rival faiths but with a host of pseudo-Christian spiritualities, and where the idea of a single religious truth seems increasingly passé.
Or to put it another way, Christians need to find a way to thrive in a society that looks less and less like any sort of Christendom — and more and more like the diverse and complicated Roman Empire where their religion had its beginning, 2,000 years ago this week.
Exactly. I agree completely. Perhaps you guys would like to get started on that, well, now. Now would be good.
(Douthat says, as per usual, a lot of whiny, silly stuff with which not even an easily-confused four-year old would agree. For example, he snivels that Christmas is the season "when American Christians can feel most embattled. Their piety is overshadowed by materialist ticky-tack. Their great feast is compromised by Christmukkwanzaa multiculturalism." Really? Your piety can't stand up to sales of stuff? The same sales of stuff that, if they aren't accompanied by the sales clerk wishing you a "Merry Christmas" send you into a temper tantrum? So stop watching tv and stay out of the malls; go to church instead. Stay home and pray the rosary. And your "great feast" (by which I imagine you mean Christmas Mass) is "compromised" because other people are celebrating other holidays at approximately the same time? Really? If so, your "great feast" must celebrate a rather anemic god. Maybe you shouldn't have gone around appropriating other people's holidays if you've got such delicate feefees. Then you could have had one all your own. But, hey, as noted, it's not every century that I find something Douthat says not only correct, but quotable, so let's not quibble.)
Hat tip to Chas Clifton for the info on the lunar eclipse.
SOLDOTNA - An Alaska store owner says a wooden cross wrapped to the store sign in Soldotna was an unwelcome act of vandalism that goes against her pagan and spiritual beliefs. The Peninsula Clarion reported 45-year-old Rondell Gonzalez arrived Thursday at her store, the Pye' Wackets on the Kenai Spur Highway, and found a makeshift cross about 7 feet tall attached to her business sign with plastic food wrap. Gonzalez says she believes in spiritualism rather than organized religion. She also said her father fought and died in Vietnam for religious and personal freedoms. Her store specializes in wellness and self-help books, candles, oils and crystals. Soldotna police say it may be the first vandalism of a religious nature in Soldotna.
So loving and full of light, these xians.
I'll just point out that I can't think of any story in even recent memory involving, for example, pentagrams painted on the outside of a Christian bookstore.
For an odd group of xian Dominionists, however, no December can be allowed to pass without an attempt to blur the lines and create a sense of persecution among their faithful. The problem is, sadly, not limited to America.
Will you be wearing a crucifix to work this morning? Have you pinned your "Not Ashamed" badge to your lapel to show the world you're proud to be a Christian? Have you noticed the concerted campaign of anti-Christian bias all over the nation? No, I hadn't either – but that may be more evidence of the attack on religion that's secretly under way, like the Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Or so some leading churchmen would have you believe.
The "Not Ashamed" campaign is the work of Christian Concern, a pressure group whose most vocal spokesman is the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Carey. He has been sketching out an alarming, totalitarian scenario in which Christmas cards are "censored" because some don't feature mangers and oxen, school Nativity plays are "watered down" because they dramatise festive mice and squabbling baubles as well as baby Jesus, and Christmas lights have become rubbishy "winter lights" with no angels anywhere.
"Christmas has become something of which some are ashamed," Carey thunders. "A new climate hostile to our country's tradition and history is developing." Gosh, how nostalgic the ex-Archbish makes me feel. I'm pitched back years to when, as a tiny child, I listened to our local priest, Fr Smith, smiting the pulpit and declaring to his Battersea flock that the "real meaning" of Christmas had been lost in a haze of Morecambe & Wise TV specials and the American way of calling Yuletide "the holidays".
. . .
Not even Lord Carey's own people believe in his awful warnings about anti-Christian discrimination, the censorship, the undermining. The heads of the Christian think-tank Ekklesia say they can find no evidence to back up the "Not Ashamed" campaign, although "we have found consistent evidence, however, of Christians misleading people and exaggerating what is really going on, as well as treating other Christians, those of other faith and those of no faith in discriminatory ways".
John Walsh proposes a possible reason that the xian Dominionists are so worried:
The sad truth, Lord Carey, is that people aren't hostile to religion or passionately devout about it; just increasingly indifferent. They may send religious cards, sing carols, attend Mass, inspect the crib, as they've always done – but more as a style choice than an expression of devotion. They haven't been nobbled by Christianophobes. They just don't feel any atavistic twitch of veneration any more.
When the philosopher AC Grayling was introduced on a recent radio show as "a devout atheist", he corrected his host: "That's like calling me a devout non-stamp collector." What bothers Christian Concern, and the like, is that many people just aren't disposed to collect the stamps any more.
And I can't say that I believe that acting like a petulant child who can't understand the concept of overlapping holidays is one likely to make many people likely to WANT to start collecting your stamps, but, you know, whatever works. Me, I like the quoted bit of Dickens, describing the way I like to think of the secular holiday:
"a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time: the only time I know of in the long calendar of the year when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely..."
So, I'm already seeing holiday displays at most local retailers. When you build your economy not on the needs of the planet and the true nurturing of humans but on getting people to buy (often on credit) increasingly larger and larger amounts of plastic stuff created in 3rd World sweat-shops, well, it's important to start in as soon as possible on the selling. But this post isn't about the economy.
This post is about the upcoming battle in the "War for Xmas." No, not the "War v. Xmas," that's a fundie lie; there never was and there is no such thing. Let's act like grown-ups for a moment, grown-ups possessed of some simple reasoning abilities and a basic understanding of how language works.
Right around the Winter Solstice, quite a number of different religions have a holiday of some form or another. In my religion, the Winter Solstice (Yule, as we sometimes call it) is the holiday. For Christians, the religious holiday is Christmas, a day (conveniently) located just a few days after the Winter Solstice, when they celebrate the birth of Jesus. Zorastrians celebrate Deygan. In Mali, they celebrate Goru, the arrival of their god, Amma. More: here. Those are religious holidays with, often, deep religious meaning for those who keep them.
And, at the same time, here in America, a secular holiday occurs around the period from December 25th through January 31st. It's not at all religious; in fact it's quite material and commercial. It's about enjoying winter sports such as ice skating or building snow men, about getting together with friends and family, about exchanging gifts, about decorating our houses and town squares (and, yes, our stores), about having a big feast, and, more and more, about watching sports events on tv. This secular holiday is celebrated by people of all different religions and by those who do not belong to any religion and who do not celebrate any religious holiday. I celebrate Yule on the Winter Solstice with the women in my circle and, a few days later, I celebrate the secular holiday with G/Son and his extended family. I get a lot of spiritual strength from doing the work of a Witch -- helping to turn the Wheel -- with my sisters. And, I get a lot of enjoyment out of seeing family, watching G/Son enjoy the decorated tree and his presents, catching up via cards with old acquaintances, and being able to pause for a moment before the new calendar year (my liturgical year starts on Samhein, October 31st, the occasion of yet another secular holiday). But I don't imagine that I need to force family members to be willing to celebrate the darkness, as my circle does, nor does, for example, my DiL's mother imagine that she must make me pray to Jesus. So what's the problem?
The problem comes from the fact that the secular holiday often, due to historical developments, goes by the name "Christmas," which is also the name of the Christian religious holiday. (And from the fact that there is a growing xian Dominionist movement in America.)
Now, you know, sensible grown ups can figure this out and deal with it.
We use the word "bank" to describe the place where we deposit our savings and to describe the the sloped ground that borders a stream. And, yet, no one expects the bank president to get upset when people use the word bank to discuss the place where they like to stand and fish, nor do we insist that all bank buildings contain a stream. We use the word "dear" to describe someone we love and the word "deer" to describe a forest animal, but no one insists that you love the deer in the forest or that your beloved is, in fact, a forest animal.
So it's time for the Christians to stop pretending that they can't understand the difference between a secular wintertime holiday and their own religious holiday simply because the same word is used for both of them. Frankly, I'd be quite happy to see a different term develop for the secular holiday, which is what I think has been happening for a number of years with the word "Holidays." (And, again, we don't insist, when someone in mid-December wishes us a "Happy Holiday" that they must mean the Fourth of July, just because the Fourth of July is a holiday). But that's precisely the thing that drives the xian Dominionists batshit insane: How dare the store employee wish them a "Happy Holiday" when they make their purchase! She should have said, "Merry Christmas!" "After all," they say, deliberately conflating their religious holiday with the secular holiday, "Jesus is the REASON for the [holiday] season!"
Really? Really?
Let's forget the fact that the sales clerk is mouthing something she's been told to say and that, honest, having done this job, the only thing that woman really wishes is that she were home, off her feet, and not dealing with grumpy shoppers. She doesn't know you and she's got zero interest in your religion, your secular holiday, or anything else about you. If she were told that one of her job duties was to wish you a "Merry Christmas," she wouldn't care a whit about how your religious holiday went and she'd do it even if she wishes that the baby Jesus had never been born. If she were told to wish you a "Joyous Goru," she really wouldn't care whether Amma arrived, or not. Let's forget the fact that a god whose power is threatened by what a store clerk says or by a secular holiday isn't much of a god. Let's forget how weird it is that you insist that your religious holiday be honored by commercial establishments. And, let's forget the fact that no matter how many times you say differently, America is not a "xian nation."
Let's just talk about acting like adults and recognizing that forcing your religion down everyone else's throat is not, shall we say, the best way to win converts. Let's talk about the fact that it is entirely possible for me to not believe in a friend's religion nor his religious holiday but to, still, in good will, wish him a happy secular holiday and to hope that his religious holiday is full of meaning for him. Let's talk about the fact that it's pretty hypocritical to dump on liberals for being "too politically correct" and then run around policing how people wish each other an enjoyable secular holiday.
Time are tough. A lot of people are out of work, can't afford needed medical care, have lost their homes, are watching their planet die and their kids face a grim future. We could all use a few days of friends, family, whatever feast we can scrape together, a few gifts for the kids, an excuse to build a snowman or watch the Nutcracker (Hecate's least favorite ballet, ever, but, still). Could the xian Dominionists for once drop the pretense that just because two words sound alike they must mean the same thing? Because, honest, you're not fooling anyone; you're just making yourself look absolutely ridiculous.
