What the Left Doesn’t Get Right About Christmas
Ever since God became man and was born in a stable in Bethlehem some 2,000 years ago, the season of Christmas has largely been a time of goodwill to all men, a time when the peace of the infant Christ comes and reigns in our hearts. The Catholic Church in France implemented the Pax Dei at the close of the 10th century, barring feuds and violence during Advent and the Christmas season, until the feast of Epiphany, a tradition that spread across Europe over the successive years.
Contrary to Politico’s claim that Christmas is “being repurposed to serve political ends” by the dreaded far-right … those on the more conservative end of the political spectrum tend to adhere to Christianity relatively devoutly.
In 1428, during the Siege of Orléans, French and English forces stopped fighting their Hundred Years’ War to celebrate Christmas together. During the American Civil War, Union and Confederate troops temporarily ceased hostilities following the Battle of Fredericksburg, sharing bonfires and enjoying tobacco and coffee together on Christmas Day. Famously, British, German, and French troops stopped fighting on Christmas Eve in 1914, during World War I, playing football in No Man’s Land and singing carols together in the midst of one of the most brutal slaughters in Western history. In the midst of the Great Depression, construction workers in New York City decorated a small fir tree in Rockefeller Center with handmade decorations.
In recent decades, however, as godless secularism and progressivism have emerged as a cancer infecting even some of the most vital organs of the West, Christmas has become a sort of two-front battleground, as was implicitly admitted by the leftist Politico outlet in a Christmas Eve entry uncharmingly and unoriginally titled, “How the far right stole Christmas.” Author Hannah Roberts wrote:
Seasonal traditions and good cheer are being repurposed to serve political ends.… Far-right parties are claiming the festive season as their own, recasting Christmas as a marker of Christian civilization that is under threat and positioning themselves as its last line of defense against a supposedly hostile, secular left.
The “war on Christmas,” derided by Roberts as a right-wing fearmongering myth, is being fought on two fronts. As Politico explicitly observed, progressivism is attempting to claim Christmas as its own. European pagans made Christmas their own, many centuries ago, but they did so by subjecting themselves to Christ, converting to Christianity, and “baptizing” some of their cultural traditions, offering these customs to God. Progressivism, on the other hand, is attempting the inverse: removing Christ from Christmas altogether. “Far-right” politicians are not “recasting Christmas as a marker of Christian civilization.” Christ’s own name is literally the first half of the word “Christmas,” and the other half comes from the Mass.
Christmas is inherently Christian and is, alongside Easter Sunday, one of the most solemn and significant of all Christian feasts, celebrations, or observances. Progressivism seeks to neuter the day, turning it into some vague, generic season of commercialized gift-buying, meaningless well-wishing, and “good cheer.” In fact, the great value of Christmas is not that it’s the day when God became man — His Incarnation would be nothing more than a neat performance had Christ come to share a few shallow platitudes and talk about being nice before kumbayaing His way back up to Heaven.
No, Christmas is merely the beginning of a story, and that story ends not with some general concept of tolerance or multiculturalism, but with the cross and the empty tomb. Christ came to suffer and die, to shoulder the sins of all humanity — from the first sin of Adam and Eve to the sins we commit every day and even to the last sin ever to be committed, perhaps centuries from now, perhaps tonight — and to allow Himself to be literally crushed to death under that weight, to bleed out while nailed to a tree, mocked and rejected and reviled by those He was born to save.
Ultimately, Christmas is about sacrifice: not the sacrifice of others for the perceived good of oneself, which is one of the chief tenets of the progressive ideology, but the free giving of oneself, even unto death, out of love for another. This is why the progressive ideology cannot “baptize” its traditions and subject itself to Christ, but must claim Christmas as its own by driving Christ out of even the stable, instead commercializing and cluttering the holiday: songs about flying reindeer and talking snowmen, idiotic “instant classics” like Love Actually or The Polar Express, and a seemingly endless series of alcohol-centric work parties, unnecessary sporting events, and nonstop shopping sales. Christmas celebrates the fact that God became man so that we might become sons and daughters of God, while the progressive ideology seeks to usurp the throne of God and replace Him with man as god. Thus, Christ must be driven out of Christmas.
On the other front, progressivism is attempting to hollow out Christmas and wear it like a skin-suit. (In his final Narnia book, The Last Battle, C.S. Lewis features this leftist tactic when the selfish, crafty ape Shift dresses the dim-witted donkey Puzzle as the Christ-figure Aslan in order to manipulate the people of Narnia. Murder, demonic apparitions, and the apocalypse ensue. Take from that what you will.) Evidence of this may be seen in the recent trend of nativity scenes featuring either a missing Christ-child, replaced by a banner or some such proclaiming that “ICE was here,” or images of the Blessed Virgin Mary and St. Joseph being detained by federal immigration agents.
None of these histrionics have anything to do with Christmas or with Christian virtue. Instead, this performative virtue-signaling is simply a means of weaponizing Christian imagery and a general misunderstanding of poorly-taught Christian moral doctrine as a cudgel to browbeat the masses into submission. “Oh my gosh, if ancient Egypt had elected President Donald Trump he might have arrested Mary and Joseph!” some may be gulled into thinking. (Egypt, at the time, was a Roman province, by the way, and Mary and Joseph went there neither illegally nor indefinitely, so the point being made kind of falls apart upon even the most cursory inspection.)
Contrary to Politico’s claim that Christmas is “being repurposed to serve political ends” by the dreaded far-right extremists, those on the more conservative end of the political spectrum tend to adhere to Christianity relatively devoutly. Meanwhile, those on the progressive side try to reshape the world’s most powerful religion to suit their agendas, like transing kids, flooding the West with non-Christian Third-Worlders, and slaughtering unborn babies by the millions. You know, just what Jesus said Christmas is all about.
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