Sheltering the hope of delight

Over the past year, there has been a great deal of mud-slinging and hand-wringing about so-called “Christian nationalism” in America. For many who use the term as a term of opprobrium, it evokes images of protestors storming the Capitol last January waving Christian flags, or church services doubling as Republican Party get-out-the-vote rallies. But let me suggest to you a more meaningful metric of “Christian nationalism”—does a society (and its public institutions) celebrate Christmas? After all, Christmas is one of the two greatest holidays of the Christian year, a celebration of the central mystery and unique teaching of the Christian faith: that God became man. Christmas is mainly celebrated in societies that know or have known the transforming effect of the gospel.

By this measure, on the face of it at least, America remains a startlingly Christian nation. Despite the so-called “War on Christmas,” polls suggest that around 92 percent of Americans still celebrate Christmas, dwarfing five percent for Hanukkah and three percent for Kwanzaa. In light of such numbers, the new orthodoxy—that Christmas is just one of a galaxy of end-of-year American holidays—is a bit of joke. Clearly, judged by one of the most important elements of culture—the way we organize our calendar—America is a nation still living in the long shadow of its Christian past.

We are nonetheless a strangely schizophrenic nation. For some reason, we are extremely keen to deny in our public institutions what we nonetheless pervasively do in private. Even as nearly all celebrate Christmas, our businesses insist on replacing “merry Christmas” with “happy holidays” and our courts try to scrub any public property clean of explicit Christmas symbols (although the general public is more conservative in its views on these trends).

The fact is that nations function much better when they have shared traditions and symbols to anchor their common lives; even if those symbols cannot speak for everyone, it is better that they speak with a clear voice for something than refusing to speak up for anything at all. For nature abhors a vacuum, and sinful natures will generally fill that vacuum with garbage. Thus, the absence of a truly public commemoration of Christmas, while it has not killed the holiday, has helped transform it almost beyond recognition.

After all, while 90 percent of Americans may still celebrate Christmas, only half of these, even by their own admission, celebrate it as a “primarily religious” holiday. And the reality is surely bleaker than that. For most Americans, Christmas has become little more than a month-long celebration of shopping trips, cocktail parties, sentimental music, and peppermint mochas. Many Americans will now go an entire December without once hearing Handel’s Messiah, but few can go a day without hearing some B-list pop star attempting to breathe fresh life into the unbearably decadent lyrics of “Santa Baby.”

This cultural impoverishment of Christmas is not merely an assault on the senses, but has profound consequences. No longer do we celebrate an infinite God subjected to the limits of humanity, but rather a humanity liberated from all limits—until the credit card bill comes due each January. The result is that we have replaced joy—the heart of the Christmas holiday—with a much shallower and more ephemeral substitute: happiness. As one of the least contemptible of modern Christmas songs, “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year,” declares: “with those holiday greetings and gay happy meetings when friends come to call, it’s the hap-happiest season of all: there’ll be parties for hosting, marshmallows for toasting, and caroling out in the snow.”

But what does such a message of frothy good cheer have to say to the countless families in Kentucky gazing upon the storm-shattered remnants of their lives this Christmas season? Or the millions facing the empty seat at Christmas dinner of someone lost to Covid? Consumeristic happiness can temporarily numb, but cannot dispel the grief of this vale of tears we live in; a stomach full of mulled wine may distract from the hole in our hearts, but not for long. The joy that the Christian Christmas calls us to is something quite different, as C.S. Lewis has well described. It is precisely the consciousness of a desire that nothing on earth can satisfy, the confession of utter dependency, the delight of being let in on a secret from beyond this world.

In this sense, a nation that celebrates Christmas, even amid confusion, shelters the hope of that delight.