Putting Christ back in Christianity

During the holiday season one occasionally hears people say, “We need to put Christ back in Xmas,” bemoaning how our increasingly secular society has drifted away from the religious meaning of Christmas. They have a point certainly, given how we engage in an orgy of shopping beginning even before Halloween and reaching the apex of consumer madness on Black Friday, none of which has anything to do with the birth of Jesus. It is ironic that people object to the use of the term Xmas because theologians and religious leaders have used that word for Christmas for hundreds of years. The X comes from the Greek letter X, chi, which is the first letter of Χριστος, the word for Christ in Koine Greek, the original language of the New Testament.

My point is not etymological, however. I think that rather than worrying about putting Christ back in the word Christmas, it would be a better idea to put Christ back into Christianity itself. By that I mean that those who claim to be Christians should act in ways that reflect the teachings of Jesus, for example to follow the universal message from the Sermon on the Mount, “Treat others as you would have them treat you.” The rest of the Sermon lays out some specifics: blessed are the meek, the merciful, the pure in heart, they that mourn, and so on.

Although I am not a Christian, I don’t want to appear to be criticizing Christians in general because many are kind people who strive to live in a way that reflects the message of Jesus. Rather, I am calling out the Pseudo-Christians, the hypocrites and grifters who intentionally do harm to others while hiding their actions under a whitewash of upstanding morality based on their faith. Eric Hoffer captured that attitude when he wrote, “To know a person’s religion, we need not listen to his profession of faith but must find his brand of intolerance.”

In “The Devil’s Dictionary,” that old rascal and cynic Ambrose Bierce defined that sort of Christian in this way: “One who believes that the New Testament is a divinely inspired book admirably suited to the spiritual needs of his neighbor. One who follows the teachings of Christ in so far as they are not inconsistent with a life of sin.”

News stories abound about these Pseudo-Christians. Several recent accounts have been about people using their Christian beliefs as a reason to discriminate against gays and lesbians—the bakers who refused to make wedding cakes for gays and the court clerks who denied marriage licenses to them. When I hear people citing the Bible in support of their opposition to gay rights, I’m reminded that the same twisted thinking was used a century and a half ago to justify slavery. Confederate president Jefferson Davis was a devout Episcopalian. Leonidas Polk (for whom Fort Polk was named) was not only an Episcopalian bishop but also a famous Confederate general, for whom Fort Polk was named.

The Southern Baptist denomination is another example. It was founded in 1845 by slaveholders who split from Northern Baptists to defend and preserve the enslavement of Black people. The founders of the Southern Baptist Convention believed that slavery was compatible with Christianity, and the denomination supported the Confederacy during the Civil War in order to protect slavery. Afterward, the Convention supported Jim Crow laws and opposed racial integration policies through much of the 20^th century. In reaction to the Brown Supreme Court decision and the passage of the Civil Rights Act, individual Southern Baptist congregations and other evangelical churches in the South founded private academies to avoid school integration. The hypocrisy continues today. For example the United Methodist Church recently went through a schism, with about a quarter of congregations leaving the denomination over the issue of LGBTQ inclusion, including issues like gay marriage and ordination. Similar ruptures have occurred in other denominations, including Episcopal, Congregational, Lutheran, and Presbyterian.

A similar sort of oily hypocrisy is especially common among “conservative” politicians and religious leaders. They use the term “traditional values” as code for opposition to integration, Critical Race Theory, gay rights, DEI, etc. Anyone who reads newspapers regularly is familiar with their bloviating and grandstanding. A perennial example of this sort of showboating is the sorry group of politicians and their ecclesiastical allies who keep pushing to put the Ten Commandments in court houses, state capitols, and other public places (ah, yes, Roy Moore of the Alabama Supreme Court). A similar form of this madness has festered up as a law recently passed by Republicans in the Texas state legislature to mandate Bible readings in public schools. Gad.

Kurt Vonnegut offered a wise comment on this sort of religious demagoguery. In his collection of essays, A Man without a Country, he writes, “For some reason, the most vocal Christians among us never mention the Beatitudes. But often, with tears in their eyes, they demand that the Ten Commandments be posted in public buildings. And of course, that’s Moses, not Jesus. I haven’t heard one of them demand that the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, be posted anywhere. ‘Blessed are the merciful’ in a courtroom? “Blessed are the peacemakers’ in the Pentagon? Give me a break!”

Christian hypocrites are an easy target, as are their ilk from other faiths. The bigger threat, however, comes from religious fanatics who know the Truth and whose absolutist tribalism causes them to harm others who have different religious identities. All religious sects produce extremists like that—including Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, etc., transforming the Golden Rule into some kind of poison. In this country we are threatened by the ascendancy of our own religious absolutists to which some commentators give the apt name of Christian Taliban. Under the Trump administration they have crawled out like cockroaches into public view from their dark crevices of hate and are trying to impose on the entire country their odious ideas of Christian nationalism.

A quote often attributed to Sinclair Lewis seems timelier than ever, “When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in flag and bearing a cross.”