Who “owns” Christmas? When Christians tell non-Christians that they need to “remember the reason for the season,” or accuse them of engaging in a “war on Christmas,” do they have a right to do so? Is Christmas “theirs” just because it originated as a Christian religious holiday? In this episode, Dan argues that American Christians made Christmas a mainstream part of American culture, a dimension of general Americana, and that as a result they no longer have a claim on the holiday or the right to dictate to others how it should be observed (or not).
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Hello and welcome to an episode of It's in the Code, a series that is part of the podcast Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Dan Miller.
I'm a professor of religion at Social Thought Landmark College.
As always, pleased to join all of you.
I want to thank Brad for helping with some content in the last episode as I was continuing to get over something, some sort of non-COVID illness that I haven't had in like You know, three years like many of us, but I'm back up and running.
Voice is still a little weird, still using cough drops and so forth, so I hope everybody will bear with me on that.
I want to dive right in to today's topic, and I reached out and put out the call basically for people to let me know about sort of thoughts about Topics related to the holidays, and you answered the call, and not surprisingly, the vast majority of people.
The two big things were the kind of, remember the reason for the season, and Christians opposed to the so-called war on Christmas.
Those are the ones that won out, and I want to spend the next, you know, at least three episodes or so, this week, next couple weeks, Sort of circulating around those.
And what I want to do today is lay out what I think is sort of a background issue to those, to the notions of remember the reason for the season or, you know, keep Christ in Christmas and the war on Christmas and all of that sort of thing.
And the topic I want to sort of think about today is, and this is going to sound a little bit weird, but it's the question of who owns Christmas?
Who gets to make the call on what Christmas is?
The language of a war on Christmas and the admonition to all of us that we need to, quote, remember the reason for the season or keep Christ in Christmas or whatever, They both presuppose that Christmas belongs to Christians.
And many of you may be listening to that and say, well, you know, Dan, you know, you probably know this, but Christmas is in fact a religious holiday.
It kind of does belong to the Christians.
But I want to challenge that.
Because I think that underlying the assumption of those kind of claims is this idea that they own Christmas, they get to tell us what it is, and get to be indignant and upset when we either don't agree with them, or we do Christmas in some other way, or we just abandon Christmas entirely, or whatever.
Whatever that is.
But I want to challenge that idea today.
And today's is not so much an exercise in decoding, as it is sort of an exercise in cultural analysis, sort of setting the stage for the next couple episodes.
So, I want to start with an illustration.
I want you to bear with me, because it's going to be one of those things where I'm going to circle around a bit.
I'm going to come back, and I promise I'll bring it back to Christmas.
Okay?
But I want to start with an illustration.
And it's basically, I'm building on an illustration that one of my favorite philosophers, for those who keep score of such things, it was a philosopher named Jacques Derrida, Came up with a long time ago.
And Derrida's work looked a lot at communication and he developed what he called the postal principle.
And basically, and again, this writing a long time ago, this is before email and a lot of electronic commerce and things like that.
But I'll come back to that.
And he used a simple illustration to make an important point.
And the point that he wanted to make was That the possibility of miscommunication is built into communication.
That as soon as we decide to communicate with somebody, as soon as we try to communicate, There's an inherent possibility that that communication will break down.
There's a possibility that we will be misheard or misinterpreted.
There's a possibility that the person we're talking with might react in bad faith and not take us the way that we want to be taken.
They could take something out of context.
They could use what we say against us.
Any number of ways that miscommunication is sort of built into communication.
And to illustrate this, he used the idea of the mail or the post, right?
And basically he said, every time you drop a letter in a box, right, you go to the mailbox, you drop a letter, there's a chance that it'll get lost.
There's a chance it'll go to the wrong recipient.
And we can update that for now.
Uh, we're coming into the holidays and we spent like three weeks trying to track down an item that was lost in the UPS system.
Every day it said it was going to be delivered that day.
It didn't come that day and eventually get it straightened out, but it was, it was sort of lost free flowing in their system.
A few years ago, I bought an item for the house.
I was doing some remodeling work in the bathroom and it's just like vanity top, whatever.
It disappeared in the system.
To this day, nobody knows kind of where it went.
It just fell out of the system.
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