The truth of this is made especially clear when you see supposedly “conservative Christians” on X angrily condemning “Santa deniers”. As recently as forty years ago I remember especially devout elders at my church sharply pointing out that Santa was not real and that the Santa cult was undermining the religious message of Christmas. Yet today no one is more dedicated to the secular Santa-isation of Christmas than conservatives.
Santa is an anagram of Satan. Santa rewards children who have been good. Jesus saves sinners who are/were totally depraved. (Yes I am a Calvinist). Christmas was under attack in 1960 if not before. My late Father was a Professor of Systematic Theology. Upon moving from Cambridge to a post at an American Theological Seminary I spent my first Christmas in America at the age of 6, where the President of the Theological Seminary came dressed as Santa Claus. But Christmas was stolen by Christians from the Pagans so losing the war on Christmas is Karma for polluting the Gospel with Tinsel and Santa's Claws. I attended a fabulous Christmas Eve Service at Calvary Chapel with two of my Children. My Children grew up without Santa and the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy. But they got Angels and Demons and their Creator God incarnate and they learned. Parents who give Santa to their Children should not be surprised if they produce selfish adults.
Btw I think you're not necessarily right about JK Rowling. In Britain it's common for children to have godparents even if they are not baptised in the Christian faith. So Harry having a godparent doesn't necessarily imply anything religious.
And of course godparenthood is, like the midwinter feast, a fundamentally secular civic custom that has had Christian trappings jerry-rigged onto it. There is no direct theological necessity in Christianity to have a godparent, and any culture could adopt such a mentorship tradition regardless of religion.
Near as I can tell, the message of American Christianity is "be normie, be bourgeois!" and now that religiousity is no longer part of the normie bourgeois package (and on some levelsis a detriment), Christianity is folding like a hideaway bed.
I will quibble with one aspect of this: at least a decent plurality of Christmas songs that are sung in the modern day are explicitly Christian and about the birth of Christ.
Going through my collection of Christmas music, one album is "RCA Living Stereo - Christmas Treasures", which was released in 1993 but intentionally retro. On that album, 12 out of 23 are explicitly Christian. Another is Joy to the World by Acoustic Eidolon, released in 2002 by Boulder hippies; this is 9 out of 13 Christian. Blackmore's Night, "Winter Carols", 2006: 7/12 Christian. The Piano Guys, "A Family Christmas", 2013: 8/12 Christian. This doesn't seem to evince a declining trend over time.
This doesn't track the standard radio-play metric (e.g. https://xkcd.com/988/, which has 1/20 Christian), which may be a better metric for the interests of broader society. But among people who are focused directly on Christmas, Christianity is still a predominant influence.
... but none of the religious songs are played in commercial establishments anymore, at least not in deep-blue Northern Virginia. I remember O Holy Night and the rest still being staples on the Christmas season Muzak as late as 1992!
Sometime around when I turned eleven, my mom decided that Christmas would ONLY be religious, and that all of the other trappings (tree, lights, cookies, special meals, seeing family/friends, presents) were strictly optional and only to be done if she was in the “mood”. The result was that Christmas stopped being reliably enjoyable. Really, it felt like Christmas stopped existing at all. This isn’t because I’m not religious (I am and was), but because it turns out that all of those “secular” rituals are necessary for making the Christmas season feel like anything other than “Thursday, but with more church”.
Unfortunately, the get-religious-Christmas-back types that I’ve known are like my mom and usually decide that “not explicitly Christian” therefore equals “bad”. No, if you want Christmas to be more about Christ than Rudolph, you’re gonna have to do the work to come up with enjoyable home rituals that focus on religious themes; people have to want to do what is being asked of them.
I did like your article btw; this comment isn’t aimed at you so much as the tendencies of the “keep the Christ is Christmas” folks that I’ve seen.
Yes, I agree that the problem isn't with the secular rituals per se, it's that the signifiers have come to subsume the signified, as is so often the case. We do all the fun secular stuff with our kids too, but we also light advent candles, attend vigil mass, etc.
Also, I really liked Prester John Andrew’s article “Thus Spoke Santathustra”. He pointed out (amongst many other thought provoking things) that complaining about Christmas getting secularized seems to be the oldest seasonal tradition we have, dating back to when the feast was established in the 4th century.
I think it's possible for a kid/family-focused secular Christmas to comfortably exist side-by-side with a religious Christmas in the homes and churches of Christians. That is in fact what Christmas has always been in my life, and I've loved both sides of it.
I'm glad you had a good Christmas yourself, and perhaps that is what should mean the most to you on this topic. Spreading the Gospel is for all 12 months of the year, not only the month of December. We don't need Christmas to be a sort of permission to talk about our faith.
One of your best articles. The war on Christmas is really just the death of cultural Christianity, which in all fairness was a bit of idol that needed to die. The chastisement we will get and deserve will hopefully build a more authentic Catholic culture.
I really don't know. In the long run I expect the future to be more religious than the present, but there's a lot of uncertainty in the timeline. Today, only about half of kids raised catholic practice as adults. Not a great retention rate.
This article doesn’t seem to distinguish between “a war on Christmas” and the “decline of Christmas” which makes it seem to fit squarely into the “old man yells at sky” category of conservative grievance. It’s not a “war” unless someone is waging it— and the article even concedes its own inability to name the assailants.
If there was a war on Christmas, it was presumably waged by the people who wrote those secular songs, or who owned the studios that made those secular movies, or who ran the pressure groups that campaigned against Christianity in official settings.
If you can find a common denominator between those three groups, you'll have found the assailants who waged war on Christmas.
Feel free to just make your point instead of cloaking it inside a guessing game.
Debates about religion, including atheists denouncing it, is part of the exchange of ideas that is good and natural in a pluralistic society. And if religion, and Christmas, decline as that debate is playing out, that’s just the evolution of society. It’s not a “war.” That’s a victim mentality.
Where's the guessing game? There's no guessing needed, we just need to see if there's a connection between the likes of:
• Irving Berlin (composer of “White Christmas”, originally called Israel Moiseyevich Beilin);
• Johnny Marks (composer of “Rockin' Around The Christmas Tree”, “Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer”, and many more);
• Sarah Silverman and Seth Rogen (stars of the subversive Christmas movie “Santa Inc”);
• Terry Zwigoff, Ethan & Joel Coen, and Bob Weinstein (director, writers, and producer of the subversive Christmas movie “Bad Santa”);
• Danny Elfman (composer and star of the subversive Christmas film “The Nightmare Before Christmas”);
and other such people.
If there's a link, for example a specific group that they tend to be in at disproportionately high rates per capita, then we can work on the basis that that group has probably been deliberately undermining the Christmas tradition, and that there probably is indeed a war between that group and the peoples who have traditionally celebrated Christmas. Personally I can't see a link between names like Israel, Marks, Silverman, Coen, Weinstein, etc, but perhaps you can? Maybe together we can finally solve this puzzle.
Btw, accusations of a “victim mentality” are only reasonable if there's definitely no victimising going on. Sometimes, people really are victims of attacks! One could even go so far as to suggest that anyone engaged in victimhood denialism probably has a subversive agenda of their own.
This is needlessly pedantic. It was a war on American Christians war one a way of life absolutely. As for the assailants there are many you can name, media, Hollywood, novel government secular laws, Warren Court, the Democrat party, Neocons. Basically all of elite culture
You’re equivocating on what “withering away” entails. If a country is actively culturally Christian as 95% of the US population was two generations ago and then apparatchiks from elite culture who are not Christian use power to suppress Christianity through law, culture, and politics then that obviously constitutes a war. The only difference between people who claim it was not a war or who claim it was “withering away” is if they think removing Christian (though arguably more accurately characterized as moralistic therapeutic deist) influence is good or bad, not the actual content of the actions. That’s why those who say it wasn’t a war aren’t being honest, it would be much more honest to simply come out and say we don’t want to base law on superstitious nonsense. That’s exactly what New Atheists did and why they were popular in the early 2000s. Of course Catholicism is true and is not mere superstition and is based on rigorous philosophy, historical revelation, and theology, so the New Atheist utopia is failing but it absolutely was a (political) war no doubt about it
The article also seems to imply that the spike of cultural Christianity that happened during the Cold War represents a baseline for christian values within American society rather than an anomaly in response to our battle with the godless communists. Remember that “in god we trust” and “under god” were put on currency and into the pledge during the Cold War.
Changing some slogans and currency were a response to communism, sure. But very silly to insist that the past wasn't far more religious than the present.
It's not just Christmas - Easter is about chocolate and bunny rabbits and Halloween is less scary than the evening news. Obviously Halloween is not a religious festival but it surely ought to be problematic for devout Christians
Halloween was/is All Hallow’s Eve in the Catholic Church- the evening before All Saints Day. It most definitely started out as a religious holiday that, like Christmas, morphed into what it is today.
Ironically in the Pee Wee Playhouse Christmas Special, which Paul Reubens said in his documentary he deliberately made gay coded with singing Marines, Cher and Little Richard, answers the question "What is the meaning of Christmas?" with the answer "the birth of Jesus".
IMO this gets at the cause of the the rise of Orthodox Christianity in America. Quite a few Americans take their religion seriously and they find in Orthodoxy an attractive transplant Christian culture that has not been hollowed out. The Orthodox fast from rich foods for 40 days leading up to Christmas, and celebrate the nativity of Christ through Epiphany 12 days later.
I have an awkward foot in both worlds. First, I celebrate Christmas with my wife and Orthodox friends and its an intense liturgical season. My church serves daily liturgy during the fast, and while my family only goes to a few of the extra services that we can make, the extra effort on the part of the church to make it a time of prayer hallows the time. We always attend the feast of St. Nicholas and the feasts of St. Hannah and the patriarchs (our respective names' days). The evening liturgy on Christmas Eve focuses on the mystery of the incarnation and it is filled with a sense of religious awe.
It's not that we don't enjoy the trappings of secular Christmas. We do. We'll put on the Bing Crosby album in the car and enjoy lights and such. But it's a distinct second fiddle to Church advent.
But we celebrate Christmas Day with my in-laws and the secular Christmas traditions dominate. They are Christians - Bible believing American evangelicals, and quite serious and pious. But evangelical culture lacks a sense of sacredness. The climax of our time together is opening presents (something not so magical for a 40+ man with a full-time job). We put on a Christmas movie like Home Alone or The Grinch, eat rich food, and go home. It's pleasant enough. But it feels like a let down from the Christmas celebration I shared with my church family in the weeks before. They simply don't have a cultural script for creating sacred time and space, and indeed are instinctively suspicious of it.
It remains to be seen if Orthodoxy will hallow America or if America will Americanize Orthodoxy. Likely some of both. Certainly Orthodoxy and Catholicism have similar DNA, but Catholicism has had more centuries for modernity to wear on it while Orthodoxy has been tucked away and preserved.
The mass Christian culture is dead. But sacred subcultures are attainable, if rare.
If any other "religious" holiday, was secularized in this way, the atheist Left would clutch pearls.
Of course, the secularization of Christmas was only Step One. Step Two was the Voldemort treatment, as expressed in "Happy Holidays". Even the secular Christmas can't be named out loud.
Yeah, Evangelical here. Our Christmas/Easter services (also the service after the Charlie Kirk got killed) are still brimming, but I could believe mainlines have stopped bothering
The truth of this is made especially clear when you see supposedly “conservative Christians” on X angrily condemning “Santa deniers”. As recently as forty years ago I remember especially devout elders at my church sharply pointing out that Santa was not real and that the Santa cult was undermining the religious message of Christmas. Yet today no one is more dedicated to the secular Santa-isation of Christmas than conservatives.
Santa is an anagram of Satan. Santa rewards children who have been good. Jesus saves sinners who are/were totally depraved. (Yes I am a Calvinist). Christmas was under attack in 1960 if not before. My late Father was a Professor of Systematic Theology. Upon moving from Cambridge to a post at an American Theological Seminary I spent my first Christmas in America at the age of 6, where the President of the Theological Seminary came dressed as Santa Claus. But Christmas was stolen by Christians from the Pagans so losing the war on Christmas is Karma for polluting the Gospel with Tinsel and Santa's Claws. I attended a fabulous Christmas Eve Service at Calvary Chapel with two of my Children. My Children grew up without Santa and the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy. But they got Angels and Demons and their Creator God incarnate and they learned. Parents who give Santa to their Children should not be surprised if they produce selfish adults.
A Charlie Brown Christmas is explicitly about the birth of Jesus. It came out in 1965, 22 years before the Muppet Christmas.
Wonder how much Charles Schulz had to do with that
I’ve heard that it barely made it in over the network’s objections
I love that sad strange little movie
Btw I think you're not necessarily right about JK Rowling. In Britain it's common for children to have godparents even if they are not baptised in the Christian faith. So Harry having a godparent doesn't necessarily imply anything religious.
And of course godparenthood is, like the midwinter feast, a fundamentally secular civic custom that has had Christian trappings jerry-rigged onto it. There is no direct theological necessity in Christianity to have a godparent, and any culture could adopt such a mentorship tradition regardless of religion.
Near as I can tell, the message of American Christianity is "be normie, be bourgeois!" and now that religiousity is no longer part of the normie bourgeois package (and on some levelsis a detriment), Christianity is folding like a hideaway bed.
I will quibble with one aspect of this: at least a decent plurality of Christmas songs that are sung in the modern day are explicitly Christian and about the birth of Christ.
Going through my collection of Christmas music, one album is "RCA Living Stereo - Christmas Treasures", which was released in 1993 but intentionally retro. On that album, 12 out of 23 are explicitly Christian. Another is Joy to the World by Acoustic Eidolon, released in 2002 by Boulder hippies; this is 9 out of 13 Christian. Blackmore's Night, "Winter Carols", 2006: 7/12 Christian. The Piano Guys, "A Family Christmas", 2013: 8/12 Christian. This doesn't seem to evince a declining trend over time.
This doesn't track the standard radio-play metric (e.g. https://xkcd.com/988/, which has 1/20 Christian), which may be a better metric for the interests of broader society. But among people who are focused directly on Christmas, Christianity is still a predominant influence.
... but none of the religious songs are played in commercial establishments anymore, at least not in deep-blue Northern Virginia. I remember O Holy Night and the rest still being staples on the Christmas season Muzak as late as 1992!
Sometime around when I turned eleven, my mom decided that Christmas would ONLY be religious, and that all of the other trappings (tree, lights, cookies, special meals, seeing family/friends, presents) were strictly optional and only to be done if she was in the “mood”. The result was that Christmas stopped being reliably enjoyable. Really, it felt like Christmas stopped existing at all. This isn’t because I’m not religious (I am and was), but because it turns out that all of those “secular” rituals are necessary for making the Christmas season feel like anything other than “Thursday, but with more church”.
Unfortunately, the get-religious-Christmas-back types that I’ve known are like my mom and usually decide that “not explicitly Christian” therefore equals “bad”. No, if you want Christmas to be more about Christ than Rudolph, you’re gonna have to do the work to come up with enjoyable home rituals that focus on religious themes; people have to want to do what is being asked of them.
I did like your article btw; this comment isn’t aimed at you so much as the tendencies of the “keep the Christ is Christmas” folks that I’ve seen.
Yes, I agree that the problem isn't with the secular rituals per se, it's that the signifiers have come to subsume the signified, as is so often the case. We do all the fun secular stuff with our kids too, but we also light advent candles, attend vigil mass, etc.
Also, I really liked Prester John Andrew’s article “Thus Spoke Santathustra”. He pointed out (amongst many other thought provoking things) that complaining about Christmas getting secularized seems to be the oldest seasonal tradition we have, dating back to when the feast was established in the 4th century.
https://presterjohnsrevenge.substack.com/p/thus-spoke-santathustra-the-end-of
They would not have welcomed a Muppet Christ, either.
The Muppet Passion is one Sora prompt away
Statler and Waldorf better be the two thieves crucified alongside Christ.
As God intended.
I think it's possible for a kid/family-focused secular Christmas to comfortably exist side-by-side with a religious Christmas in the homes and churches of Christians. That is in fact what Christmas has always been in my life, and I've loved both sides of it.
I'm glad you had a good Christmas yourself, and perhaps that is what should mean the most to you on this topic. Spreading the Gospel is for all 12 months of the year, not only the month of December. We don't need Christmas to be a sort of permission to talk about our faith.
One of your best articles. The war on Christmas is really just the death of cultural Christianity, which in all fairness was a bit of idol that needed to die. The chastisement we will get and deserve will hopefully build a more authentic Catholic culture.
I really don't know. In the long run I expect the future to be more religious than the present, but there's a lot of uncertainty in the timeline. Today, only about half of kids raised catholic practice as adults. Not a great retention rate.
This article doesn’t seem to distinguish between “a war on Christmas” and the “decline of Christmas” which makes it seem to fit squarely into the “old man yells at sky” category of conservative grievance. It’s not a “war” unless someone is waging it— and the article even concedes its own inability to name the assailants.
If there was a war on Christmas, it was presumably waged by the people who wrote those secular songs, or who owned the studios that made those secular movies, or who ran the pressure groups that campaigned against Christianity in official settings.
If you can find a common denominator between those three groups, you'll have found the assailants who waged war on Christmas.
Uh oh.
Feel free to just make your point instead of cloaking it inside a guessing game.
Debates about religion, including atheists denouncing it, is part of the exchange of ideas that is good and natural in a pluralistic society. And if religion, and Christmas, decline as that debate is playing out, that’s just the evolution of society. It’s not a “war.” That’s a victim mentality.
Where's the guessing game? There's no guessing needed, we just need to see if there's a connection between the likes of:
• Irving Berlin (composer of “White Christmas”, originally called Israel Moiseyevich Beilin);
• Johnny Marks (composer of “Rockin' Around The Christmas Tree”, “Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer”, and many more);
• Sarah Silverman and Seth Rogen (stars of the subversive Christmas movie “Santa Inc”);
• Terry Zwigoff, Ethan & Joel Coen, and Bob Weinstein (director, writers, and producer of the subversive Christmas movie “Bad Santa”);
• Danny Elfman (composer and star of the subversive Christmas film “The Nightmare Before Christmas”);
and other such people.
If there's a link, for example a specific group that they tend to be in at disproportionately high rates per capita, then we can work on the basis that that group has probably been deliberately undermining the Christmas tradition, and that there probably is indeed a war between that group and the peoples who have traditionally celebrated Christmas. Personally I can't see a link between names like Israel, Marks, Silverman, Coen, Weinstein, etc, but perhaps you can? Maybe together we can finally solve this puzzle.
Btw, accusations of a “victim mentality” are only reasonable if there's definitely no victimising going on. Sometimes, people really are victims of attacks! One could even go so far as to suggest that anyone engaged in victimhood denialism probably has a subversive agenda of their own.
🥱
This is needlessly pedantic. It was a war on American Christians war one a way of life absolutely. As for the assailants there are many you can name, media, Hollywood, novel government secular laws, Warren Court, the Democrat party, Neocons. Basically all of elite culture
“Christmas withering away” and “Christmas being defeated” is not a pedantic distinction
You’re equivocating on what “withering away” entails. If a country is actively culturally Christian as 95% of the US population was two generations ago and then apparatchiks from elite culture who are not Christian use power to suppress Christianity through law, culture, and politics then that obviously constitutes a war. The only difference between people who claim it was not a war or who claim it was “withering away” is if they think removing Christian (though arguably more accurately characterized as moralistic therapeutic deist) influence is good or bad, not the actual content of the actions. That’s why those who say it wasn’t a war aren’t being honest, it would be much more honest to simply come out and say we don’t want to base law on superstitious nonsense. That’s exactly what New Atheists did and why they were popular in the early 2000s. Of course Catholicism is true and is not mere superstition and is based on rigorous philosophy, historical revelation, and theology, so the New Atheist utopia is failing but it absolutely was a (political) war no doubt about it
I’m not sure what your point is.
My point is that society can just become less religious, and therefore the nature of Christmas changes, without any sort “war” being waged.
The article also seems to imply that the spike of cultural Christianity that happened during the Cold War represents a baseline for christian values within American society rather than an anomaly in response to our battle with the godless communists. Remember that “in god we trust” and “under god” were put on currency and into the pledge during the Cold War.
Changing some slogans and currency were a response to communism, sure. But very silly to insist that the past wasn't far more religious than the present.
I see no such insistence in my comments.
Curious about your reaction to my top post— can it be a war if you don’t know that there’s an enemy?
Curious to see your reaction to my reply to you about the common denominator.
It's not just Christmas - Easter is about chocolate and bunny rabbits and Halloween is less scary than the evening news. Obviously Halloween is not a religious festival but it surely ought to be problematic for devout Christians
Halloween was/is All Hallow’s Eve in the Catholic Church- the evening before All Saints Day. It most definitely started out as a religious holiday that, like Christmas, morphed into what it is today.
Ironically in the Pee Wee Playhouse Christmas Special, which Paul Reubens said in his documentary he deliberately made gay coded with singing Marines, Cher and Little Richard, answers the question "What is the meaning of Christmas?" with the answer "the birth of Jesus".
This is actually hilarious
IMO this gets at the cause of the the rise of Orthodox Christianity in America. Quite a few Americans take their religion seriously and they find in Orthodoxy an attractive transplant Christian culture that has not been hollowed out. The Orthodox fast from rich foods for 40 days leading up to Christmas, and celebrate the nativity of Christ through Epiphany 12 days later.
I have an awkward foot in both worlds. First, I celebrate Christmas with my wife and Orthodox friends and its an intense liturgical season. My church serves daily liturgy during the fast, and while my family only goes to a few of the extra services that we can make, the extra effort on the part of the church to make it a time of prayer hallows the time. We always attend the feast of St. Nicholas and the feasts of St. Hannah and the patriarchs (our respective names' days). The evening liturgy on Christmas Eve focuses on the mystery of the incarnation and it is filled with a sense of religious awe.
It's not that we don't enjoy the trappings of secular Christmas. We do. We'll put on the Bing Crosby album in the car and enjoy lights and such. But it's a distinct second fiddle to Church advent.
But we celebrate Christmas Day with my in-laws and the secular Christmas traditions dominate. They are Christians - Bible believing American evangelicals, and quite serious and pious. But evangelical culture lacks a sense of sacredness. The climax of our time together is opening presents (something not so magical for a 40+ man with a full-time job). We put on a Christmas movie like Home Alone or The Grinch, eat rich food, and go home. It's pleasant enough. But it feels like a let down from the Christmas celebration I shared with my church family in the weeks before. They simply don't have a cultural script for creating sacred time and space, and indeed are instinctively suspicious of it.
It remains to be seen if Orthodoxy will hallow America or if America will Americanize Orthodoxy. Likely some of both. Certainly Orthodoxy and Catholicism have similar DNA, but Catholicism has had more centuries for modernity to wear on it while Orthodoxy has been tucked away and preserved.
The mass Christian culture is dead. But sacred subcultures are attainable, if rare.
Thanks for the thoughtful response.
The profoundest insight I got is that Harry Potter, since he has a godfather, must have been baptised.
Considering that the name "Christ" only appears in the word "Christmas" in this series, it should not be too surprising.
If any other "religious" holiday, was secularized in this way, the atheist Left would clutch pearls.
Of course, the secularization of Christmas was only Step One. Step Two was the Voldemort treatment, as expressed in "Happy Holidays". Even the secular Christmas can't be named out loud.
Nice one! It seems among Protestants, the Christmas/Easter only church attenders have already mostly disappeared.
I see those megachurch Christmas productions and I wonder. I guess maybe you're drawing a line between the evangelicals and the mainstream though.
Yeah, Evangelical here. Our Christmas/Easter services (also the service after the Charlie Kirk got killed) are still brimming, but I could believe mainlines have stopped bothering