It's In the Code Ep. 31: Remember the Reason for the Season
We’ve likely all heard someone tell us to “remember the reason for the season.” But what exactly does that mean? What are Christians doing when they say that? In this episode, we find that there never has been a single “reason for the season” and decode the demand that we nevertheless “remember” the reason for the season.
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Hello and welcome to It's in the Code, a series that is part of the podcast Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Dan Miller, Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
As always, a pleasure to be with you.
I want to begin, as we do, by thanking all of you who support us and the work that we do.
Those of you who continue emailing ideas and thoughts for this series, please keep those coming.
It can be reached at danielmillerswaj, that is danielmillerswaj at gmail.com.
Always value your input and your ideas and your feedback so much, but also the support in the sense of simply listening, suffering through the ads, those of you who support us financially, all the different ways that people support us, the kind wishes and emails, the follow-ups, all of that.
Thank you all, and we couldn't do it without you.
We are in, really, the second of what I guess will probably be three episodes, kind of Christmas-focused.
It's strange, this time of year, coming into the holiday, I was like, I'm going to, you know, decode some of the language around Christmas that comes out this time of year.
And it's this strange parallel I'm finding to, like, Christmas messages and Christmas series that people produce in churches and things like that.
But last week, I sort of set up for this with a look at this question of who owns Christmas, right?
And I suggested that when American Christians made Christmas a part of mainstream American culture, they essentially forfeited their claim to own the holiday, to dictate to everybody what it has to mean and what it is and whether or not you need to observe it.
and how you have to feel about having Christmas decorations everywhere or lights in your town or a Christmas tree, let alone a nativity scene on a courthouse lawn or whatever, all of those kinds of things.
And what I was really doing was setting up the reflections for today's episode and I think the next episode as well, where we kind of dive into the issues that so many of you reached out about.
I kind of requested a few weeks ago that people reach out with thoughts or ideas for some topics, you know, coming in specifically to the holiday season.
And one of the biggest ones, no surprise, is the notion that we should remember the reason for this season, or the more religiously formulated version of that is keep the Christ in Christmas.
And so I want to dive into that one today.
And I want to do two things.
The first is to consider this question, right, as a real question.
What is the supposed reason for the season?
And the reason I want to pose that question is it's not as obvious as we might think.
And some of the material that I'll talk about in the next few minutes will be familiar to many of you.
It might be new to some of you.
I guarantee it's new to maybe some of the people in your life, whether they're family members or friends or acquaintances or just people that you encounter, who say, we have to keep, you know, remember the reason for the season, keep the Christ in Christmas.
Being able to really pose as a serious question, what is the reason for the season?
Does it mean, has it ever meant, what the people who say that think it has?
So that's the first thing I want to do.
But the second one is to kind of decode that admonition and take a look at what's really going on there.
Because I have had people in my life, at one point it was me in my life, who would say that and say, look, all I'm saying is, you know, I'm just professing my belief as a Christian about the birth of Jesus of Nazareth and commemorating that and what that means and so forth.
When I say, remember the reason for the season, that's all I'm saying, right?
And I'm going to suggest that there's more to it than that.
And that won't surprise anybody that's kind of the point of the series is decoding these statements and these phrases and these slogans and actions and looking at, you know, sometimes the meanings they have that might be a little bit below the surface.
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