The Meaning of Christmas in a Post-Christian World

Yesterday, Ross Douthat decided to respond to Christopher Hitchens' bah-humbug Christmas taunt. First a slice of Hitchens:

... Suppose we put the question like this: Imagine that conclusive archaeological and textual evidence emerged to prove that the whole story of the birth, life, and death of Jesus of Nazareth was either a delusion or a fabrication? Suppose the mother had admitted shyly that, in fact, she had fallen pregnant for predictable reasons? Suppose we found the post-Calvary body?

Serious Christians, of the sort I have been debating lately, would have no choice but to consider such news as absolutely calamitous. The light of the world would have gone out; the hope of humanity would have been extinguished.... If all the official stories of monotheism, from Moses to Mormonism, were to be utterly and finally discredited, we would be exactly where we are now. All the agonizing questions that we face, from the idea of the good life and our duties to each other to the concept of justice and the enigma of existence itself, would be just as difficult and also just as fascinating.

Douthat disputes that claim by first deconstructing the ethical reduction of the Christian Gospel.

The Christian story is not, for instance, a theological or philosophical treatise. It's not a set of commands or insights about our moral duties. Nor is it a road map to the good life. It has implications for all of those questions, obviously; certainly, Jesus of Nazareth wasn't exactly silent on "the concept of justice" during his lifetime, and Christians have been deriving theologies, philosophies and codes of conduct from his example ever since. But fundamentally, the Christian story is evidence for a particular idea about the universe: It recounts a series of events that, if real, tells us something profound about the nature of God, and His relationship to His creatures, that we couldn't have been expected to understand or accept in precisely the same way without the Gospel narratives.

Douthat argues convincingly that atheists couldn't pose the question in quite the same way before the claim of the Incarnation. What kind of demand could we make on such a distant God?

Consider, for instance, the way in which the dominance of the Christian story has actually sharpened one of the best arrows in the anti-theist's quiver. In Western society, especially, the oft-heard claim that the world is too cruel a place for a good omnipotence to have created derives a great deal of its power, whether implicitly or explicitly, from the person of Christ himself. The God of the New Testament seems more immediate, more personal, and more invested in his creation than He had heretofore revealed Himself to be. But this arguably makes Him seem more culpable for the world's suffering as well. Paradoxically, the God who addresses Job out of the whirlwind is far less vulnerable to complaints about the world's injustice than the God who suffers on the Cross - or the human God who cries in the manger. For many Christians, Christ's suffering provides a partial answer to the problem of theodicy. But for many atheists and agnostics, it only sharpens the question: How can a God who loves mankind enough to die for us allow us to suffer as much as we do?

Whether or not this argument would convince Hitchens, it is a common fallacy to discount the social and historical influences on our thinking. Once in grad school, a fellow student absurdly claimed that if she had lived in the 16th century, she would have been a harlot, because she would not have been able to accept the constraints on women then.

For a glimpse of pre-Christian life, the miniseries Rome is enlightening, if we can't glean it from certain societies in our world today. We can fall back that far again, but it can never be as hopeless as before.

"Chosen" people

Deacon Scott Dodge's recent remarks about Abraham Lincoln (Inherent complexity defies reduction) and the problem of abortion are very helpful. While he does not make any parallels between Lincoln's pre-presidential stance on slavery and that of Barack Obama on abortion, my own discovery (through Deacon Scott's work) that Lincoln's stance evolved, shines new light on questions I have been grappling with. And let me be very clear: Deacon Scott has been consistent (on his own blog and here) in his repudiation and condemnation of Obama, Biden, and Pelosi when it comes to abortion.

For some time, I have wanted to know why, in the end, politicians are "pro-choice," particularly when a majority of voters polled have responded on multiple occasions that they are pro-life, and when "47% of all Democrats agree, 'abortion destroys a human life and is manslaughter'" (Democrats for Life, by Kristen Day). The political process is supposed to guarantee that when a majority of Americans are opposed to a particular policy or law, politicians will shy away from supporting it, right?

It is tempting to think that money is the culprit, and perhaps it is. I tried to do some research on-line to discover just how much money Obama receives from pro-abortion organizations, but I wasn't able turn up any easy-to-find figures. This work will have to fall to someone more competent in this area.

Meanwhile, the problem of Abraham Lincoln's "nuanced" position on slavery, as documented by Deacon Scott, offers a fresh angle of approach to my own question. Lincoln, it can be presumed, did not practice politics within the same money-saturated political climate we find today. So, why did he, at one time, support slavery, albeit within limits? The answer to this question could go further toward answering the question that concerns me: How is it possible for a candidate to be personally opposed to something while exercising his or her political power to make the "regrettable" more likely to happen more often, even while those who have elected him or her have expressed their opposition?

Abraham Lincoln's position on slavery evolved over time. It may be that his personal opinion about slavery never changed. Perhaps he began with the belief that the overthrow of that loathsome institution would be impossible, given the cultural and economic situation of the country. Then, when he saw possibilities open up, he reached toward them.

It may be that Obama likewise supports the practice of abortion because he believes it is a regrettable given in our society. His voting and public statements, however, don't leave much room to hope that this is the case.

But, even more likely is the possibility that Abraham Lincoln was a man of his time and culture, that slavery was an evil he, like his compatriots, had grown accustomed to. When a great evil is legal and widely practiced in a given country, it is easy for citizens to make room for it, even if they recognize its evil. Rationalization (it may be wrong, but how else could our economy/culture/all that's good in us survive?) and relativism (not right for me, but for others...) sometimes seem to us the more intelligent, "nuanced," and urbane responses to social ills.

Let's put cynicism aside and assume that Obama means it when he says,

“I'm in this race for the same reason that I fought for jobs for the jobless and hope for the hopeless on the streets of Chicago; for the same reason I fought for justice and equality as a civil rights lawyer; for the same reason that I fought for Illinois families for over a decade… That's why I'm running, Democrats — to keep the American Dream alive for those who still hunger for opportunity, who still thirst for equality.”

— Barack Obama, Speech in Des Moines, IA, November 10, 2007

Statements like this one reveal Obama's real concern for his fellow human beings, particularly those who are weak or disenfranchized. So, why doesn't he fight, with the same passion, for the lives of those who are weakest and least capable of ensuring their own opportunity and equality? Perhaps he, like Lincoln, believes that while abortion may be evil, the alternative could be worse.

Or he has bought into a mentality that goes largely unarticulated, but which says that unless babies are wanted, let's say chosen, by their parents, then their lives do not carry the same value as the lives of others who are "chosen" by their parents. This line of thinking assumes that it is in the act of being "chosen" by one's parents that a person acquires value.

Of course, this notion, that human value derives from having been chosen, comes to us from the Judeo-Christian tradition. The difference is that for the Jew and for the Christian, human beings are valuable because each has been chosen by God. But in this new understanding of "being chosen," the people who choose are mere humans. The "pro-choice" stance is first of all a rejection of God as the One who gives each one of us value; it is an attempt to emancipate oneself from having been chosen by a power beyond us.

Freedom Is for Worship

In our contemporary conception of freedom, we include religious freedom as a subset of our constellation of rights. As the idea has been secularized, it's not so clear that the freedom to worship is the original freedom, particularly for those without material means, because it establishes our origin above society. Other freedoms derive from this one.

In Exodus, the demand for liberation is initially a request for time off to attend a religious retreat. This exercise of freedom requires at least a pause from daily necessity (vacation!) and is designated for worship of God.

After that, Moses and Aaron went to Pharaoh and said, "Thus says the LORD, the God of Israel: Let my people go, that they may celebrate a feast to me in the desert."

Pharaoh answered, "Who is the LORD, that I should heed his plea to let Israel go? I do not know the LORD; even if I did, I would not let Israel go."

They replied, "The God of the Hebrews has sent us word. Let us go a three days' journey in the desert, that we may offer sacrifice to the LORD, our God; otherwise he will punish us with pestilence or the sword."

The king of Egypt answered them, "What do you mean, Moses and Aaron, by taking the people away from their work? Off to your labor! (Exodus 5:1-4)

For the Greeks, freedom came from the prosperity of slave-owners who were freed from personally performing the labor required for the maintenance of one's family. Participation in the polis was considered the act of free men. Later, Greek philosophers located freedom in a personal realm, as a cultivation of soul which preferred to be far from the public light. Hannah Arendt points out the contradiction between these two forms of freedom.

This freedom which we take for granted in all political theory and which even those who praise tyranny must still take into account is the very opposite of "inner freedom," the inward space into which men may escape from external coercion and feel free. This inner feeling remains without outer manifestations and hence is by definition politically irrelevant. Whatever its legitimacy may be, and however eloquently it may have been described in late antiquity, it is historically a late phenomenon, and it was originally the result of an estrangement from the world in which worldly experiences were transformed into experiences within one's own self. ("What Is Freedom?")

Freedom as a philosophical concept did not arise until Christianity, also according to Arendt. "[I]t was the experience of religious conversion--of Paul first and then of Augustine--which gave rise to it." Freedom is linked with its expression, that is, in the "gift of action".

[D]o we not rightly measure the extent of freedom in any given community by the free scope it grants to apparently nonpolitical activities, free economic enterprise or freedom of teaching, of religion, of cultural and intellectual activities? (ibid.)

Human action, as a fruit of freedom from external coercion, now encounters a personal obstacle, the division in the will described by St. Paul.

Historically, men first discovered the will when they experienced its impotence and not its power, when they said with Paul: "For to will is present with me; but how to perform that which is good I find not."

Despite this handicap to freedom, action is the hallmark of humanity and an innovation in the history of creation according to St. Augustine, as Arendt explains:

In the City of God Augustine, as [is] only natural, speaks more from the background of specifically Roman experiences than in any of his other writings, and freedom is conceived there not as an inner human disposition but as a character of human existence in the world. Man does not possess freedom so much as he, or better his coming into the world, is equated with the appearance of freedom in the universe; man is free because he is a beginning and was so created after the universe had already come into existence: [Initium] ut esset, creatus est homo, ante quem nemo fuit. In the birth of each man this initial beginning is reaffirmed, because in each instance something new comes into an already existing world which will continue to exist after each individual's death. Because he is a beginning, man can begin; to be human and to be free are one and the same. God created man in order to introduce into the world the faculty of beginning: freedom.

The concept of freedom was forged in the crucible by the first Christians, who gave their lives for belief, and they associated themselves with the seven Maccabee brothers slain earlier for fidelity to the Jewish law. In their case, interior freedom came up against exterior coercion. Even as these Christians, noble and slave, were persecuted, they maintained, as did their Master, that the rulers were given authority from above. But they followed a higher authority which did not admit of the deification of rulers, and this origin is the source of their action, or affirmation of belief.

This expression of interior freedom was a serious challenge to the power of the state. Donata of Africa said at trial: "I honor the emperor because he is emperor, but worship can be given only to God." (Church and State in Early Christianity, Hugo Rahner) A millenium later, St. Thomas More would paraphrase in words from the scaffold: "The King's good servant, but God's first." This courage of action came from a conviction stronger even than the natural desire for self-preservation; it comes from a connection with an origin which is the source of all that is human.

[to be continued]