SWAJ Rewind: It's In the Code, Ep 30: Who Owns Christmas?
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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 and social thought at 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'm going to spend the next, you know, at least three episodes or so, this week, next couple weeks, sort of circulating around those episodes.
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?
Christmas.
Who gets to make the call on what Christmas is?
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, and 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, I 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, again, this was 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.
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 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 this 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.
We've probably all had the weird experience where something happens in our email system, and we're writing a bunch of emails, and none of them send.
They just sit in drafts for some reason, and it doesn't send out.
A few weeks ago, I had an issue where for a day or two, it turns out my phone wasn't sending any of my texts.
They suddenly came through in this big text dump two days later.
We've all had the experience of auto-filling fields in our email, putting the wrong name in, and then we send it to the wrong person immediately.
This is what the so-called postal principle is, is that as soon as we start communicating in these ways, as soon as we start doing these things, as soon as we want to send something to somebody else, there's the possibility that it gets lost.
And the point about communication was this.
It was that no matter what our intentions are, no matter how clear we try to be Once whatever we say is out, and we've had this experience in real concrete communications too, as soon as you open your mouth and the words are out, they're out of your control.
We've all had the experience of saying something or to go to the email example or the text example, we hit send, and as soon as we do, we're like, oh my God, that was a mistake.
Like, I should not have said that.
I shouldn't have sent that.
Whatever.
But we know...
That it's out of our control.
It is now beyond us.
We've had that experience.
So what does that have to do with Christmas?
What does that do with the Christians who weaponize it?
Well, the same general idea that we can talk about with communication or sending gifts in the mail or whatever, it works with cultural elements as well.
So think of a piece of art.
Think of films.
Think of TV shows.
Think of songs.
Think of all of these pieces of pop culture That get interpreted in all kinds of different ways, or whose cultural meanings change over time, and they're not simply tied to the people that produce them, right?
We can think of all the criticisms of, say, the series Friends Now for being super white and homophobic and heteronormative and so forth.
People creating the series didn't sit down to try to be white and homophobic and heteronormative, but We're good to go.
Take on a life of their own.
The people who produce them, who authorize them, who made them, who send them out of the culture, as soon as they send them, they forfeit control of them.
The only way to really have control over something artistic or creative would be to not release it into the world.
That's the idea.
So here's how it relates to Christmas.
When American Christians succeeded, Over time, over decades and centuries, when they succeeded in making Christmas, a religious holiday, a part of mainstream American culture, they forfeited their ownership of it.
Just like the people who make those films or those art pieces or whatever, and they send them out into the world and they lose control over them, they lose their authority over them.
That's what happened to the American Christians who made Christmas So let's think about how that works.
Over time, Christmas takes shape as a Christian holiday commemorating the birth of Jesus of Nazareth.
And I say over time, just going to note briefly, it wasn't there from the beginning.
For Christians who believe that the Christian Gospels in the New Testament are true, they don't say that Jesus was born in December.
He would have been born in spring.
Groups like the Puritans in North America actually forbade Christmas observance and so forth.
So that would be its own separate thing.
Maybe we'll touch on this a little bit in an upcoming episode.
But the kind of myth of Christmas, the myth of this sort of originary Christian practice, Christmas wasn't there.
Christmas does eventually take root in Western Christianity as a religious holiday, and as anyone can see, this time of year, it becomes a distinctive part of American Christianity, right?
Of mainstream American Christianity.
This, of course, is what so many people who don't observe Christmas and don't identify as Christians, this is what frustrates them, is that this Christian holiday becomes a part of mainstream American culture.
As everyone who listens to this podcast knows, Christianity, especially Protestantism, over time, again, gains its own kind of hegemonic normative status within the U.S. It becomes the kind of default religious orientation of this country for centuries.
And one of the cultural aims of American Protestants over that time, as the nation's dominant religious group, was to make its own ethics, its own mores, its own norms, its own holidays a part of mainstream American culture.
That, of course, is part of this long-standing idea that America is somehow a Christian nation, is precisely the idea that these elements of Christian religious culture become parts of mainstream American culture.
And as everybody can plainly see this time of year, they succeeded.
All you have to think about is how many pop Christmas songs on the radio are religious songs, how many nativity scenes you see places, how many sort of on and on and on and on and on.
Christmas became as stereotypically and generically American as the proverbial apple pie and baseball, right?
That just became a part of Americana.
So there's a sense in which that marks the cultural success of American Christianity.
It succeeded in mainstreaming a religious holiday.
It marks a huge gain in a kind of Christian attempt to control or define culture.
It seems to mark, in a certain sense, a high point of this notion of America as a Christian nation.
But here's the twist.
That success also marks the point at which American Christians begin to lose control over Christmas, right?
Just like as soon as I go to the post office and I'm going to mail a birthday package, say, to my mom or my nephews or whomever, as soon as I hand it over and send it away, I lose control.
I forfeit control of exactly where it goes and when it arrives and so forth." American Christians lost control of Christmas the moment they set it loose within broader American culture.
When they took Christmas observance and they said, "Okay, we're not satisfied with it being just a religious observance." It's not enough that we find it in our Bibles.
It's not enough to preach about it in our sermons.
It's not enough to have our church services and our vigils and our pageants.
No, it has to become a public cultural element.
It has to become part of mainstream American culture.
When Christmas goes public, so to speak, They lose control of it.
By making Christmas into a culturally mainstream phenomenon, they released it into secular culture, the same way that the people that make films and TV shows and songs release it into public culture and no longer can control what is done with it, the use that is made of it, how it's interpreted.
That's exactly what happened.
So Christmas, like any other cultural phenomenon, it becomes a kind of cultural artifact that anybody can take up, or not take up, and do whatever they want with it.
Which means that as the culture has shifted away from those broadly Protestant Christian norms, as society has become more pluralistic and more secular, So did that society's articulations of Christmas.
They also became more pluralistic, more secular, and in some cases just non-existent.
Again, increasing parts of the population who simply don't want anything to do with Christmas.
So as broader American culture has shifted away from the dominance of or even deference to Christianity, we get the defensive backlash of those Christians.
That's when you get the language of, well, hey, remember the reason for the season.
Keep Christ in Christmas.
You get the angry denunciations of a war on Christmas.
And again, we're going to tackle these in the next couple episodes.
that's when you get that pushback.
And I have even had, I kid you not, I have had conversations with kind of activist Christians who basically will say that when non-Christians or secularists or whomever, when they have anything to do with Christmas, and they don't, I guess, keep Christ in Christmas, They don't remember the reason for the season and so forth.
That it's a kind of cultural appropriation, that they are doing something nefarious and taking up Christian culture and misusing it.
But here's the problem for them.
They made their Christian culture mainstream.
When they did that, when they made, over decades and centuries, made it so that Christmas became, again, just a part of Americana.
As American as apple pie and baseball and whatever else, it means that Christmas then belonged to all of us.
It became everybody's culture, Christian or not, and you can't quote-unquote appropriate your own culture.
So the irony here is that as American Christians sought to create a common Christian American culture, They forfeited their ownership of Christmas.
It's no longer theirs.
By mainstreaming it, they guaranteed that Christmas is something that belongs to everybody who wants to take it up and do whatever the hell they want to do with it.
So when they get angry, when you get the angry denunciations, keep Christ in Christmas, remember the reason for the season, there's a war on Christmas, and so forth, the irony is that they are shouting into a tornado that they created.
They are the ones who, exactly by, again, mainstreaming their tradition, ultimately forfeited their right to determine what we do with it.
Let's go back to the illustration of delivering a package.
If I have a birthday package for a loved one, if I really want to ensure that that package makes it to them, there's no chance of anything going wrong, I'd have to hand deliver it.
I'd have to make the drive cross-country or fly or do whatever I would do, and I'd have to hand deliver it myself.
If Christians really want to safeguard Christmas as they understand it, the only way to do that is to keep it a part of their private Christian worship and observance.
They've got to keep it out of the public eye.
They have to keep it out of the hands of non-Christians.
They have to keep it in their churches.
They have to keep it in their scriptures.
They have to keep it in their sermons.
And lots of Christians do that, and I don't begrudge them that at all.
But when Christians rail against secularization and the abandonment or transformation of Christmas, they are railing against something that they themselves brought about.
They gave Christmas to American culture.
They are the ones who wanted it to be mainstreamed.
They can't complain once that mainstream culture does something with it that they didn't expect.
So we need to wrap all this up.
I know it's, as I say, kind of a set of cultural reflections or cultural analysis in the next couple episodes.
I want to tie that in then to these notions of remembering the reason for the season or keeping the Christ in Christmas and the war on Christmas and so forth.
But I think this is so much a part of it, and that's what I want to contest.
That question of who owns Christmas, the answer is nobody owns it.
It has become a public commodity, a public resource that people can make use of if they want.
And obviously not all Americans observe or otherwise participate in Christmas, and that is fine.
I'm not here to argue that they should.
But I am here to argue that for those who do, no matter how they participate in that, they've got an equal right to it.
For those for whom Christmas is a religious observance, I don't begrudge them for that.
But for those for whom Christmas is just a time to get together with friends or family, or they're just into the Christmas tree, or they just like a time when you've got an excuse to buy gifts for people, or just They like the nostalgia of thinking about snow and sleigh bells and so forth.
There's no religious connotation at all, or maybe it's just purely commercial, whatever it is.
Then guess what?
I also don't begrudge them that because they are doing what they will with a common cultural resource.
So, the question of who owns Christmas?
The answer is nobody, and the answer is certainly not American Christians.
American Christians forfeited their right to tell all of us what we have to do with the holidays and at the holidays the moment that they made those holidays mainstream.
We're going to pick up on that theme in the next episode, dive into the remember the reason for the season, keep the Christ in Christmas, and then probably wind up the next episode with the whole war on Christmas rhetoric.
But again, I hope this at least gives you a sense of how I think about this and why I get so frustrated with that Christian way of thinking that presumes an ownership over something that they gave up a long time ago.
As always, thank you all for listening.
Can't do it without your support.
Those of you who support us financially, those of you who support us simply by suffering through the commercials, those of you who keep the ideas coming, please do keep them coming.
If you've got other holiday ideas or other ideas for the series, please let me know, danielmillerswaj at gmail.com, danielmillerswaj at gmail.com.
That's the way to reach me.
As always, I apologize that I can't respond to as many emails as I would like, but I do the best that I can and really do value the insights from all of you.
