American Christians! Ten-HUT!
The liberal agenda has reignited the War on Christmas! And this time they've gone too far!
The Starbucks Christmas cups are red with no designs!
No snowflakes! No snowmen! No reindeer! No Santa Claus!
No Santa Claus!
It is clear that now is the time to act. We must marshal all 222,000,000 Christians together into an unstoppable fighting force to put Christ back in Christmas! No more of this "happy holidays" crap!
But seriously, the "War on Christmas" conservative Christians talk about is an absurd notion, not because it doesn't exist, but because they're the ones waging it. I'll prove it to you.
The nativity stories of Jesus are allegorical, parabolic, not historical. Although we are accustomed to hearing amalgamated versions of the two stories in our Christmas pageants, the fact is that Matthew and Luke tell two very different stories that are utterly irreconcilable in a historical sense. Luke's narrative is entirely dependent on a census under Quirinius, legate of Syria. Joseph and Mary have to go to Bethlehem because Joseph is supposedly descended from King David.
This notion is utterly ridiculous; can you imagine the upheaval it would have caused if every man had to travel to the city of a distant ancestor to be counted? Beyond that, the census Luke is talking about was taken in 6 CE, about ten years after Jesus was born.
Matthew, as opposed to Luke, has Mary and Joseph living in Bethlehem at the time of his birth, and then they move to Nazareth later. He also includes a fanciful tale of Herod executing all male children under the age of two, forcing Jesus's parents to take him to Egypt. There is no historical record of this ever happening; it is a literary allusion to the story of Moses's birth.
So neither Evangelist got it right. The obvious explanation is that these stories are allegorical, meant to express the author's already-held convictions about Jesus, not record history. Nobody knows precisely when, where, or how Jesus was born, but he was probably born in 5 or 4 BCE in Nazareth.
Now that those pesky details are out of the way (and believe me, I could have gone on for thousands of words on all the reasons the Christmas stories are not historical) we can focus on the important matter, the actual meaning of these stories.
Jesus was born into a Jewish Palestine awash with messianic expectation as a direct result of Roman rule. Around the time of Jesus's death, many Jews broke out in revolt, in both Galilee and Judea, and these revolts were brutally suppressed by Roman legions. Throughout and after Jesus's life, many Jews resented Roman authority. This resentment culminated in 66 CE, when the Jews revolted again, resulting in the sacking of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Second Temple.
Jesus's teachings and ministry were inextricably linked to the clash between a Jewish way of life centered in the radical distributive justice of God and the violent oppression of the Roman Empire and its native collaborators.
While Rome, Herod, and the Jewish aristocracy extracted more and more from the peasant class, forcing people into poverty and using usury to strip peasants of their land (something incredibly offensive to God; see Leviticus 25:23), Jesus preached a Kingdom of God to the poor and downtrodden, where the first were last and the last first.
While Rome existed as a patronage society steeped in an honor-and-shame dichotomy, Jesus healed the unclean and forgave sins with reckless abandon.
While the priests in the Temple claimed a monopoly on access to God, Jesus taught as one with authority, and brought the Kingdom of God wherever it would be received.
While Rome deified Caesar and the way of peace through violent victory in warfare, Jesus explicitly denied Caesar's divinity ("Render unto Caesar...") and stressed that peace was to be found elsewhere, through God's justice, where food was shared equitably and no distinctions of class or rank were observed.
It is no surprise that those who came to believe in and accept Jesus's vision of the Kingdom of God came to see in him a possible means of deliverance from Roman rule, from the rule of violence and oppression. Mere decades after his death they were involved in exegesis that sought to redefine Jewish expectations of the Messiah to fit their Lord; since there was no unified definition of the messiah, it was easy.
Matthew and Luke took the earlier but still post-Easter traditions about the virgin birth in Bethlehem and created narratives around them, incorporating their own literary flourishes and further developing the exegesis. The stories are parable, not biography; apologetics, not history; truth, but not fact.
Do you see it yet? The War on Christmas?
Christmas asserts that a light has been born into the world to free God's people (all people) from the yoke of oppression and violence. Christmas expresses the joy that the Kingdom of God has come to Earth. Christmas puts into narrative form the conviction that no, Caesar is not God; the way of Empire, the way of peace through violence and justice through oppression, is not the way of God.
Our world is a far cry from that vision. The same conservative Christians that bemoan the War on Christmas over something as ridiculous as a paper cup of coffee are the same ones that vote for politicians determined to further disenfranchise the least of these and undermine the Kingdom of God.
You want to fight for Christmas? Cease to do evil, learn to do justice. Defend the orphan, welcome the stranger, plead the case of the widow. Feed the hungry, clothe the naked, shelter the homeless, cure the sick, and advocate for the marginalized.
If you don't want your taxes going towards these things, then maybe you shouldn't celebrate Christmas anymore.