Recent debates about leaving Jesus out, or else getting him out, of the Christmas season look somewhat curious from the vantage-point of Rome. In what remains a culturally Catholic country, and at a time when Saint Peter’s is decked out with a Christmas tree, Christmas lights, and a manger scene in the central Piazza, this curiously Protestant concern with images seems a bit, well, a bit out of place.
The thing is, in Rome, Jesus isn’t in Christmas, at least not until the morning of the 25th. Manger scenes in Rome don’t have a Baby Jesus; the cradle is left empty until Christmas morning. So there’s no question of getting Jesus out, much less taking him out, of Christmas.
He’s not here yet.
There is a lot of theology packed into that not-so-simple symbolic reality. It’s got something to do with the doctrine of the Incarnation, and something to do with that fact that Christmas isn’t like Easter, where there’s a whole story and a whole (holy) week of events to commemorate.
Maybe the best way to illustrate the difference is to reflect on when and where Protestants take Jesus out of the picture—literally. Pretty much the first thing you notice when you compare a Protestant church with a Catholic one is that Jesus is not depicted on the Cross in most Protestant churches. There is just a Cross, an empty Cross, on the wall. The broken, bleeding body, so prominent in most Catholic cruciforms, looks quite jarring when you come to it from the perspective of this Protestant emptiness.
So, Roman Catholics leave the Baby Jesus out of the manger, whereas American Protestants seem especially obsessed with that symbol of primal innocence. And American Protestants leave the Crucified Christ off of the Cross, which must mean something too…
Consider what constituted the real heart of the religious reforms central to the Protestant Reformation. No holy water, no incense, no painting, no statues, no saints, no relics, no monasteries, no Real Presence at the Eucharist… in short, no materiality, no bodily matter, no things getting mixed up in religion. Religion was supposed to be spiritual, dis-embodied. Ironically enough, the reason Luther thought it was fine for priests to marry was once again that body stuff simply didn’t matter, so celibacy didn’t matter, either.
There’s something to the idea that, if you are going to sideline materiality this way, then you’re likely to compensate for it with materialism. And this is what America has made of Christmas.
But there’s more to the story, I think. Notice how the terms of religious debate have shifted in the United States. We argue about the place of images—where we’re allowed to put them, and where not—because we have lost our feeling for images as images. We’re not very visually literate, by and large, just visually bombarded. And so we drop the arguments over the truth of religious images, or the symbolic value of these images, and content ourselves with arguments about their place.
That’s why the debate about putting Jesus in Christmas or keeping him out rings a bit hollow; Christmas is celebrated on December 25th (or January 6th, or 7th, depending on your kind of Orthodoxy).
It does not begin the day after Thanksgiving. At least that much is clear in Rome.
