So here’s a call for celebrating Christmas as a reminder of how much religious and secular people have to teach each other — and how developments across our intellectual and spiritual barricades helped humanity move forward.
The religious claim of Christmas is radical and, I’d argue, helped push humankind in more egalitarian and self-confident directions. The orthodox account holds that God sent his only Son to redeem humanity, that God became man and walked among us. He shared our joys and sorrows and was eventually killed for His efforts.
Believers should not be offended if nonbelievers are skeptical. But nonbelievers, in turn, might ponder how these Christian affirmations overturned popular understandings of hierarchy. Think of it as the democratization of God. The Almighty is suddenly not “up there” judging and ruling and doing the other things gods do, but instead “down here” experiencing what it’s like to be part of His Creation.
This is a powerful rebuke to earthly rulers who hold themselves far above their people, have no interest in their daily struggles and claim special privileges as a right. If God could walk with farmworkers, carpenters and fishermen, how can a merely human potentate lord it over everyone else?
This revolutionary idea emerged within the traditions of prophetic Judaism — Jesus’ language often paralleled the words of the prophets, particularly about justice for the left-out — and the place of the prophets in the readings for Advent season leading into Christmas is striking. In the Catholic tradition, this text from Isaiah is a centerpiece for the Third Sunday of Advent:
“The Lord has anointed me; he has sent me to bring glad tidings to the poor, to heal the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives and release to the prisoners.”
The secular could see this as an eloquent expression of a universal human yearning for deliverance, with little bearing on the validity of religious faith. But they should notice that religion often is animated by the cries of the oppressed.
The case for Christianity’s democratizing power needs to be tempered by an acknowledgment that the faith was also used to bolster hierarchical structures — see: “the divine right of kings.”
That tension runs through the two accounts of the first Christmas in scripture. Matthew stresses Jesus’ noble lineage and the presence of the aristocratic wise men at his birth. Luke’s is the story of a Savior born in a manger because there was no room at the inn, and he is visited not by well-born folks but by humble shepherds.
Yes, you might say that there was a struggle over equality within the tradition right from the start, and we wrestle with it still. But here is where we should be grateful for the fruitfulness of dialogue between secular advocates of freedom and religious thinkers who understood the arc of their tradition as bending toward the equal dignity of every person.
“Dialogue” has a nice ring that papers over what were, at times, fierce arguments. But secular liberals pushed religious people to recognize the value of free institutions to faith itself, even as religious people reminded nonbelievers of the democratic thrust of their own traditions.
At their best, the dueling sides operated within the “intellectual solidarity” that Jesuit thinker David Hollenbach recommends. It’s a term I love because it implies a certain humility (we all have a lot to learn from each other), a shared quest to get as close to the truth as we can and an acknowledgment that doing so is a communal project.
Okay, maybe I’m getting soupy and sentimental at Christmastime. (It’s a weakness I have.) I’d agree we cannot wish away the deep and fundamental conflicts of this moment or the need to battle for democratic values. But if we can’t ponder a different sort of world and a different way of dealing with each other at this time of year, when will we?
Thus my two Christmas wishes: that we remember how transformative the first Christmas was to understandings of the divine; and that we try for at least a day (or a week, maybe?) to follow the advice of my historian friend James T. Kloppenberg. Channeling St. Paul, he wrote that democracy’s health depends on our ability “to see through one another’s eyes, to think with one another’s minds, and to treat each other with charity.” We might even get used to it.
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