Week 6: An Evangelical Christmas Carol

“Red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight, Jesus loves the little children of the world.”

            -from “Jesus Loves the Little Children,” by Herbert C. Woolston

“Scrooge became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew, or any other good old city, town, or borough, in the good old world.”

-from A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens

Christmas as an atheist is pretty strange.   Seems I can’t go anywhere without nativity scenes and angels reminding me that “Jesus is the reason for the season.”  I now get a small sense of what it must be like to be a Jew or Muslim living in America during Christmastime.  It’s pretty obnoxious.  Still, as an atheist I appreciate the gift-giving, the family time, the traditions, and the spirit of goodwill, all of which can be entirely secular. 

This week’s Churchgoing Atheist destination was an Evangelical church in a blighted urban neighborhood.  I wanted to see something really different from what I’m used to.  The website suggested I could find speaking in tongues—one of my goals for this project—so I went for it.

Well, there was no speaking in tongues, but in most other ways the Evangelicals lived up to my expectations:

• It was packed to overflowing, even in a neighborhood full of boarded up houses.  Clearly, people need hope. 
• There were no Bibles—because why constrain ourselves with, you know, book-learning and such, when you can just feel the spirit?
• The music was energetic and non-traditional.  Electric keyboards and drums, on a stage at the front, accompanied the songs.
• It was multicultural.  Many African Americans, some Spanish speakers, some speaking Asian languages, and many white people as well.  I admire the inclusiveness.
• Everyone seemed ridiculously happy.  If I’m to pursue this Churchgoing Atheist project, this is something I must come to terms with.  How can I defy and criticize institutions that bring such profound joy to people every day?  (Still, it’s a delusion!  Should happiness trump truth?)

I can’t say, however, that my first Evangelical experience was a typical one because the entire service was devoted to an elaborate Christmas play, which was performed by the many children and youth leaders of the church.  I was at first disappointed that the regular service was replaced by this extended children’s lesson, but as it got going, I became increasingly horrified at what I saw.

Horrified is a strong word.  It was a cute play. It was funny.  It was touching. It championed love and kindness.  It gave many little kids a chance to act and sing for a doting audience.  And since this church is so multicultural, it was like a miniature version of “It’s a Small World,” with children of all shades raising voices together in an act of cultural unity that the world doesn’t see enough of. 

Still, horrified. The original script of this play made fun of intellectuals who study the Bible.  It made fun of Jehovah’s Witnesses, by name, because they don’t celebrate Christmas.  But more offensive to me was its message of nonsense.  It featured a girl who “corrected” the belief that the Christmas story begins with the Virgin Mary.  She described how the prophet Isaiah had prophesied the coming of Jesus (Isaiah 7:14 and 9:6).  That prophecy probably had nothing to do with Jesus, but is pretty easy to apply to Jesus retroactively.  Couldn’t Isaiah have told us Jesus’s name?  Oh yeah, he did: “Emmanuel.”  That’s not “Jesus,” but nobody seems to care.  The nonsense got worse. To express how much earlier the Christmas story began, she referred to the famous opening of the Gospel of John: In the beginning was the Word.  She said that the Christmas story “began in the mind of God.”  How anyone could claim to know the mind of God, I don’t know.  This kind of meaninglessness persisted for some time.

The most memorable part of the play was an abbreviated production of A Christmas Carol.  After this play-within-a-play, the adult actor who played Scrooge had the opportunity to explain to the kids the meaning of the play.  He said that the Holy Spirit had visited Scrooge, and at the end of the play, Scrooge became a good person because he finally found Jesus.

What?  Scrooge found Jesus?  Was I supposed to get that from the ending of A Christmas Carol?

So I thought about this.  It is not outrageous to interpret the story this way.  I could see how Christians might view the spirits that visit Scrooge as the Holy Spirit.  Dickens was a believing Christian, so it’s possible.  And I could see that one might attribute Scrooge’s transformation to a religious conversion of sorts.  Since it takes place at Christmas, perhaps one could make the stretch that he “found Jesus.”  He became a good, charitable person who was filled with the Christmas spirit.  OK. 

But there are some problems with this interpretation.  The first is this: the word Jesus never appears in the book A Christmas Carol.  Not once.  If Dickens intended for us to read Scrooge’s transformation as “finding Jesus,” don’t you think he might have mentioned Jesus?  In order to write a Christmas story without mentioning Jesus, one would have to purposefully try to avoid it.  The absence of any mention of the “savior” is near proof that Dickens was not interested in the religious nature of the holiday.  In fact, “God” is barely mentioned at all—only a handful of times in phrases like “God bless you” and “God knows.”

But perhaps Dickens intended for the message to be implicit?  Doubtful.  Dickens rarely attempted to disguise his message for the reader.  He beats his readers over the head with his social commentary, so that they will make no mistake about the problems Dickens wishes to change.  A Christmas Carol is about kindness, generosity, love, charity, and compassion.  These are virtues that Dickens cherished, and we all should.  Christians have adopted them as “Christian virtues,” but that is an empty phrase.  They are human virtues.  No specific religion—nor even religion in general—has exclusive ownership of these virtues.  Dickens was championing an ethical approach to life (and coupling it with the holiday tradition to sell books), but by omitting Jesus entirely, it seems Dickens was making an attempt to divorce virtuous behavior from Christianity.  Indeed people do not need religion to teach them to be good.

Wait, you ask, wasn’t Dickens a Christian?  I’m no Dickens expert, but I believe he was, as nearly everyone in Victorian England had to be.  But his books are focused on social, political, and moral issues, and there is little sense of any benevolent divinity in them.  Even when he does explicitly refer to religious issues, it is in the context of social justice.  He probably best fits with a religious worldview that understands all religion to have the purpose of social justice.  Many people interpret the Gospels or other religious texts to be valuable primarily because they teach humans how to be good to one another.  For Dickens, salvation was not to be found in heaven, but in the social transformation of this world. 

Consider, for example, the end of Hard Times, when the character with the most Christian virtue, Stephen Blackpool, falls down a mineshaft.  He looks up at the star, and Dickens says it’s like the star that led the wise men to Jesus.  An explicit religious reference.  That star, however, symbolizes no saving Jesus, no merciful God, for Stephen Blackpool dies, and that’s that.  Stephen tells us what that star symbolizes to him: people should be kind to one another.  Stephen’s death illustrates that the heartless capitalist system of Victorian England victimizes good working people, and Dickens uses Stephen’s death to call for compassion and humanity in the industrial world. God is absent from the world of Hard Times, and I believe he is nearly absent from A Christmas Carol as well, or as absent as he can be in a story about Christmas.

I left the Evangelical church and their bizarre Christmas play feeling utterly sorry for those beautiful children.  Their incorrect lesson about Dickens may not matter much in the big picture, but the big picture does matter: churches teach falsehoods.  They present them with confidence and claim that those who don’t buy what they sell are missing something vital.  Churches may have good motives, but those children, all the little children of the world, are being brainwashed.  Why do they need to hear that Jesus loves them?  Why can’t it be enough to say that their parents, family, and friends love them?