Thursday, December 12, 2013

On not putting Christ back into Christmas

This is definitely worth a read. Bruce Kaye writes about Christmas on the ABC Religion and Ethics website: "Why Christians should leave Christmas to commercialism: a modest proposal." One of the key themes of Kaye's thesis is that since Christmas started off by Christians colonising a pre-existing pagan festivial, why not let the festival be de-Christianised. A couple of highlights from the article.

I can't help but feel, however, that there is a curious irony about attempts by Christian people and churches to try and "put Christ back into Christmas," when the whole motivation behind the celebration of Christmas was the attempt to take over an existing non-Christian festival in order to serve a Christian purpose.
 My proposal is for Christians to shift their festival focus to the real centre of the Christian year - namely, Easter. Lent could be restored to a observance that marked out the Christian celebration of their faith as a preparation for Easter. Christians and their churches would become known in the public arena as those who observe the Lenten discipline in anticipation of a joyous celebration of Jesus's crucifixion and resurrection.

Read the full article here.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Interesting. I've been doing just this for the past two years. Working in retail just destroys ones belief that any sort of magic occurs during Christmas. Except perhaps the non-existent money people use to purchase useless crap.