Liberating Christmas 2021
Joerg Rieger, Vanderbilt University
December 22, 2021
When Christmas was turned into the celebration of consumption, a few things got lost along the way. No surprise here. Well-meaning responses, from blaming consumers to campaigns to “keep Christ in Christmas,” have not been able to reclaim what was lost. Perhaps returning to some of the peculiarities of the Christmas story might be of help here.
One of the strangest things about Christmas is that God joins humanity as member of a family of day-laboring construction workers, certainly not the most advantageous arrangement for the promotion of generic religious messages. Moreover, what good was a birth on the road, in the precarious situation of a barn, supposed to do for the spirit of Christmas? And why make a spectacular angelic announcement of this birth only to direct it exclusively to shepherds, members of the working class who were tending other people’s sheep in some remote location? Why go through the all the trouble of sending the heavenly choir of angels to them, rather than to emperors, prominent landowners, or high-ranking religious officials (Luke 2:7–10)?
Not only did God become human as a working person in Jesus the Christ; neither did this Jesus use tempting opportunities offered to “move up and out” (Matthew 4:1-10). Instead, Jesus stayed in solidarity with working people until the violent ending of his life. Such a Christ, and a Christmas that celebrated this particular birth, did not make sense to the Romans (who had no trouble granting divine status to certain human beings), and neither did it make sense to the interests of the high-ranking Jewish leadership of the time (Matthew 2:1-12). Predictably, it has never made sense to dominant Christianity either, and so the particulars of Jesus’ birth have been domesticated for centuries.
The symbols of Christmas that are found in most churches this time of year might help undo efforts to domesticate Jesus. Shepherds and sheep, stables and manger scenes, and angels in fields rather than in palaces, temples, or cathedrals, do not have to be reduced to harmless adornments of some otherworldly event. These symbols can remind us of God’s unflinching solidarity with the working majority and a robust liberation from all that keeps it down. Jesus’ family has its roots there. Quite remarkably, even the heavenly host joins in solidarity with working people (Luke 2:9-14), who are not passive spectators but become agents in their own right as they join the angels in spreading the word of liberation to others like them who might listen (Luke 2:17-18).
From the perspective of the working majority—the perennial 99 percent, then as now a diverse crowd of people of different sexual, racial, and ethnic backgrounds, various abilities, and various walks of life—Christmas looks different. This is what helps us reclaim Christmas for all of us, the 1 percent included, because the Christ of the people has come to set us free.
Start with consumerism. Blaming consumers overlooks who is invested in driving and fueling consumerism, and how working people are exploited in order to maintain the existing networks of power. While blaming the victims hardly leads to liberation, viewing things from the perspective of those in need of liberation might. Even the mythical elves in Santa’s workshop—not part of the biblical Christmas stories but deeply woven into popular American Christmas imaginaries—might help us see things from a different perspective and help to put the real Christ back into Christmas, as the God who joins the working majority.
So, from what does Christmas get liberated in this scenario and from what does it liberate us? From the all-too-common mistake of identifying God with the powerful and the mighty, from ignoring the agency of the working majority including the essential workers whom COVID-19 has made us notice, and from the false hopes and the deceptive (American) dreams of the status quo that benefit the few rather than the many. Christmas also liberates us from the narrow boundaries of what is supposed to be religion, freeing not only the mind and the spirit but also hearts and bodies, as well as freeing us from oppressive political structures and extractive economic schemes. Liberating Christmas means finding divinity and humanity changing the world in solidarity, starting in places where the powers that be least expect it.