Once upon a time, I used to love Christmas. (Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday, for reasons, but Christmas is the next best.) And, in a way, I still do.
The last decade, however, has been rough, and Christmas has been diminished in its joy for me. Primarily, this is because the Evangelicals (my former tribe) who celebrate it have chosen to make it all about pissing on their territory rather than on celebrating Christ and the unexpected and revolutionary beauty of the incarnation.
I believe that there are two reasons for this. One is political - white Evangelicalism is essentially patriarchy and white supremacy in bible drag these days. It is about white Christian nationalism, political dominance and the right to abuse those outside the tribe. Particularly minorities, LGBTQ people, immigrants, and “uppity” women.
But the other is a theological problem, and I think it is related to the political issue. Ultimately, I believe that politics drive theology more than the other way around, and theology functions in practice to validate and reify politics. But I think it can be helpful to examine the theology too, and perhaps rethink the theology that gives cover for hate and violence.
In my opinion - and indeed my experience - is that Evangelicals view Christmas as merely necessary for the crucifixion - I mean, Jesus had to come to earth somehow, in order to be murdered in a bloody human sacrifice by a bloodthirsty and psychopathic god.
I have previously written about Penal Substitutionary Atonement, and why I believe it is a morally appalling (and thus false) interpretation, and how it leads inevitably to license to abuse our fellow humans. I mean, if god is justified in torturing humans for eternity for their human failings, then what’s a little torture or genocide during our short lives?
One of the problems with seeing Christmas - the incarnation - as merely a way to get Jesus here so the PSA can take place, is that it renders everything before Good Friday as essentially irrelevant.
If all we needed was a human sacrifice of an innocent, why not just kill Jesus at birth? Or, if you believe in ensoulment at fertilization like Evangelicals claim to, couldn’t this sacrifice have been made even through an abortion while Jesus was a blastocyst or something? (And, for that matter, why won’t the death of a fertilized egg work? Surely such an organism is innocent enough…)
If not, surely, then, there was a purpose to Christ’s birth and life before that supposed transactional act. Right?
In practice, this theology allows - indeed encourages - Evangelicals to gloss over everything about Christ’s life and teaching as essentially irrelevant. Skip to the endgame: say the prayer and escape hell. That’s all that really matters.
And certainly all that stuff about “woe to the rich” and “love your neighbor” is just spiritual filler? At least that is how I (and indeed pretty much everyone outside of that tribe) see the overwhelming majority of white Evangelicals living their lives.
No matter what Evangelicals claim to believe, their fruit does not bear it out. By their fruit you shall know them, and that goes for theology as much as for people. You know what a person’s actual beliefs are not by what they say, but by what they do.
But what if there is actually deep meaning in the incarnation?
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Here is an alternative way of telling the story:
For much of human history and around the world, there has been this idea that there is an unbridgeable gap between the Divine and creation. A separation between the gods and the mortals, between the creator and creation.
Conveniently, the religious (and often political) powers interposed themselves in this gap, making themselves into the necessary bridge to the Divine.
Follow our rules, pay us money, obey the “god ordained” humans who claim to speak for the Divine, and you can in some small way have communion with the Divine.
But one day, the Divine crossed that gap. And not like the usual story, by showing up as an adult, in full power and knowledge - but as a helpless infant, knowing only what anyone else knew, vulnerable to every pain and risk and suffering as any other.
Instead of bringing a message of power and authority, raising an army, slaughtering enemies, and establishing an authoritarian kingdom, he preached something very different.
It was an upside down kingdom. The first would be last, the great would be least, the greatest would be the servant of all. In this kingdom, there would be no racial hierarchy, no gender hierarchy, and no economic hierarchy.
In this kingdom, the powerful would be thrown down, the rich stripped of their wealth, and the poor and the sick and the prisoners and the marginalized would be drawn to this good news.
In this kingdom, one’s destiny was determined not by following cultural regulations or believing religious dogma or being in good with the religious establishment, but by how one treated the poor, the hungry, the sick, the incarcerated, the immigrant, the marginalized.
Not everyone was happy about this. Certainly not those in established positions of religious and political authority. Christ called them “whitewashed tombs” and “brood of vipers.”
Certainly not the rich, who were told to give their wealth away so that the poor could live.
Certainly not those who made religion a way of profit - their tables were overturned and their money scattered to the winds.
G.K. Chesterton once said that “every heresy has been an effort to narrow the church.” I believe we still see that today in our modern heresies that seek to exclude people from the church. And by excluding them from the church, I mean excluding them from what they see as access to the Divine. (And, politically, access to full participation in society.)
In our time, this is primarily focused on LGBTQ people, but also on excluding women from leadership, excluding the theological ideas of pretty much everyone except white theologians of the 19th Century (most of which defended slavery or even enslaved other humans themselves), and steadfastly resisting any modern knowledge from the Enlightenment on down.
These people stand to lose from a kingdom in which the marginalized are elevated and people are more important than theology. Indeed, where truth is not tied to theological dogma - as determined by the religious and political elites - but to reality and love.
In fact, those who stood to lose from an egalitarian and mutual society - the kingdom of god - were so furious that they murdered Jesus. And they did it by riling up a mob, much like a certain wicked ruler today riles up mobs by whipping them into frenzied slogans like “lock her up” and “mass deportations now” and “build that wall.”
And the very best part of all of this? This kingdom wasn’t some “pie in the sky when you die”: it was among us. Now. Right here. In our own time and in our own lives. We were to live it.
William James (whose philosophy has been influential on my way of thinking) raised an issue that I have been unable to stop thinking about: if you believe in a rigid dualism - that creator and creation are completely separate - then you inevitably create an unbridgeable gap. No matter how you slice it, no matter what religious words you use to obscure it, the gap remains, because the created can never become one with the creator without destroying the dualism.
If instead, you truly believe that the Divine is the very matrix in which we exist - indeed in which the universe exists, then the gap is indeed one we create by refusing to live in the deeper reality. The kingdom of god is here with us right here and right now because the Divine is in everything - including those humans we prefer to marginalize. “In him we live and move and have our being…”
This is the true good news: we can live in the kingdom here and now - and so can anyone who chooses to do so. But the kingdom isn’t a hierarchy, it isn’t rules, it isn’t white American middle-class culture, it isn’t organized religion; it is a web of mutuality, a kind of mycelium, so to speak, that is really the unseen reality of our connectedness and need for each other.
This is why the marginalized are entering the kingdom of god ahead of those who profess to speak for the Almighty with words of condemnation for the less privileged.
In thinking this year about why Christmas is beautiful, I keep coming back to that.
Why do we give gifts? It isn’t because of some bloody human sacrifice to a pathological god. It is because we celebrate generosity. It is because we recognize our connectedness and wish to give and give back. It is because it is a welcome respite from our toxic culture of selfishness, materialism, and transactional “relationships.”
It is getting in touch, at least for a season, with the true nature of the universe, which isn’t “nature red in tooth and claw” but one of visible and invisible interconnections and interdependence.
That is the beauty of the incarnation. Not a god descended to an ivory tower to dictate to humanity. Instead, the powerful reality that we suffer together, and that if we thrive, we do so together, and in harmony with the divine.
If we truly see the incarnation - and indeed the teachings and example of Christ - as fundamental to our understanding of the divine, then we have to live in harmony with that.
A fundamental outgrowth of that is that we have to see the spark of the divine in others, particularly the marginalized. “Inasmuch as you did it for them, you did it for me…”
This is the miracle of Christmas. God isn’t “somewhere out there.” We do not need human mediators to tell us how to find Them. The Divine is here. With us. Right now. In everything and everyone we see around us.
We don’t have to live in accordance with the values of the world: hierarchy, love of wealth, privilege, and power. The kingdom is here. With us. Right now. All we have to do is choose to live in it and in accordance with its reality.
This Christmas, in a time of renewed hate and bigotry, I will be celebrating the beauty of the incarnation. The Divine became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld grace and truth. We were given the promise of abundant life, and good news to all people of good will, and particularly those typically excluded by those who would interpose themselves and their dogma between the Divine and the rest of us.
The kingdom of god is among us, if we will only see it, and choose to participate.
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