False Advertising

I got stopped behind this car at a stoplight one rainy night.

So I ran up to the driver’s side and banged on the window yelling “Tell me about Christ! TELL! ME! ABOUT! CHRIST!”

He drove off—rather quickly, I might add—and not one word about our lord and savior.

Red God, White Walkers, and Green Men: Religion in Game of Thrones

To begin, a joke I heard years ago, that went something like this:

The Pope is awoken one morning by his assistant: “Your Holiness, there are amazing events happening in the world this morning! But [because this is a joke] there’s good news and bad news. Which do you want first?”

The Pope says “I’m an old man, I don’t know if I can handle the bad news, you’d better give me the good news first.”

“Jesus Christ has returned to earth, your Holiness. And he’s calling on the phone and wants to speak with you.”

“My God! That’s amazing! How could any bad news matter when something so wondrous has happened?”

“He’s calling from Salt Lake City.”

Of course, the humor comes from the fact that, in this world, we can’t know which religion—if any—is true. We have our reasons—some might say “rationalizations”—for believing what we do, but it appears to be the case that we won’t know conclusively until after we die (if then).

In fantasy literature, the world often works very differently. Often, we see the gods or God, it’s a given of the world that one or more divine beings exists, has certain characteristics, powers, what have you. Very often in fantasy, this straightforward narrative is one of good and evil: all the good people are on the side of the good God or gods, evil people follow a Satanic figure. It’s baked into the genre’s DNA, where Tolkien has Sauron (the heir to a more direct Satanic parallel, Morgoth) on one side and Gandalf and the wizards standing as the representatives of the gods, who do not interfere directly, with the “good” people.

What I want to examine is religion in George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire novels or—equally—the HBO series Game of Thrones. For my purposes, I think they’re identical, despite some plot differences. Spoiler alert: I'm assuming you've read and watched everything there is to read or watch that's out as of now.

One point of interest from the start is that we have many religions in Martin’s world. We first see the divide between the North of Westeros, which follows “The Old Gods,” and the southern lands, which worship The Seven. Gradually, however, our view expands even further, to include R’hllor, the Red God, the Drowned God of the Iron Men, the Many-Faced God… I think I’m forgetting some, but you get the idea.

Perhaps the most interesting of these, to my view, is the Red God, because R’hllor seems to be the one most clearly throwing around supernatural intervention, an evident sign of power, if not truth. As readers/viewers, we repeatedly see supernatural acts from R’hllor, from the murder of Renly Baratheon to the (repeated) resurrection of Beric Dondarrion and Catelyn Stark (in the books, anyway), and—as many fans hope—perhaps Jon Snow (I just had to throw that in there). The Red God may be able to take credit for killing Joffrey, Balon Greyjoy, and Robb Stark (Melisandre says so), but regardless, we have clear evidence for at least some of the Red God’s, uh, miracles.

That said, these “miracles” are clearly complicated, as we can see by readers’ and viewers’ reactions: Renly’s murder is fairly horrific, but probably nothing compares, in viewers’ minds, to Season 5’s burning-to-death of Shireen. People were, rightfully I think, horrified by Stannis’s willingness and Melisandre’s eagerness to not only kill his daughter, but to do so in such a horrible way.

Here’s the thing that seems often to be overlooked in all this: the religious aspect. I’ve seen, in several instances, that people see Stannis’s decision as one motivated by ambition. Truthfully, I think that misses the point. I think in his mind, this is a righteous—albeit heart-breaking—decision.

Consider, for a moment, the Old Testament story of Abraham and Isaac. Abraham has apparently spoken with God, has seen a miracle (his wife giving birth at a very advanced age), and has promises from God. And then, in the midst of all these good times, God tells Abraham to sacrifice his miracle child to God. Human sacrifice: God asks for it, and we’re supposed to believe that Abraham is a good man because he’s willing to do it (of course, God is apparently a good God because he doesn’t make Abraham go through with it, but that’s kind of splitting hairs, isn’t it?). Maybe I’m overstating things, but I think many Christians are willing to uncomplicated this story and see it as a positive, that Abraham has such faith. Shouldn’t we all be more like Abraham? And to me, this seems like a direct parallel with Stannis (particularly in the HBO version).

Yet when we see it on screen, I think our very-human reaction is: no. No, we shouldn’t be like Stannis or Abraham. Any God who would demand the sacrifice of one’s own child—or, really, any innocent (and for some of us, just any) human being—is not a good God and should not be obeyed. But here’s the thing: Stannis has—apparently—seen the truth of the Red God’s existence and power. And how many times have we heard the story of Azor Ahai, who created his magic sword by thrusting it into his beloved wife’s breast? I mean, this is the guy that Stannis is supposed to be the rebirth of, and he’s the religion’s hero. While it’s hard not to blame Stannis here, there’s also a clear logic behind what he’s done. In his mind, he is the rightful king (which, assuming you ignore the Targaryens, is basically true), he’s seen the power of the Red God (i.e. this is a god who apparently exists), and he—and we the readers and viewers—have seen the evil forces north of the wall that appear to exist in direct opposition to the Red God (ice vs. fire).

So what really complicates things is not simply that the Red God seems to be a nasty bastard (even if he might be on the side of good), but that Stannis does not, in fact, win. In the story of Azor Ahai, we can, perhaps, overlook the fact that he killed his wife, both because it’s a legend that happened a long time ago and because, well, he saves the world. Would we look differently at Stannis if sacrificing his daughter to the Red God had led to victory, both over the Boltons and, ultimately, over the White Walkers? I think we would have to, horrific as it was to watch Shireen’s death. We might not like to think that the ends justify the means, but I do suspect that we judge Stannis even more harshly because he failed. He committed an inhuman act, and for what? For nothing, apparently.

So where does that leave the R’hllor? What are we to make of this religion? Is it simply that Melisandre, interpreting the Red God’s wishes, got it wrong?  A side note here: the books play out somewhat differently. Melisandre does not travel south with Stannis, Shireen is not burned to death, and we only see the outcome of the battle between Stannis and the Bolton’s through a note from Ramsay Bolton. But we do have textual reasons to believe that Melisandre, there too, got some things fundamentally wrong.

Either way, the question remains: what should we make of this religion. Is R’hllor—are His followers—basically “good”? Or, despite the religion’s claims, are “good” and “evil” actually far less clear-cut in Martin’s world?

 ***

It’s worth taking some time to look at the other religions in Martin’s world, although the Red God has been my focus here.

Let’s start with The Seven. At the end of the day, the religion of The Seven seems to be pretty vanilla, and pretty much a strictly human phenomenon. We see no direct evidence of supernatural forces at work, only very human ones. The religion itself seems very much centered on humans as they are: The Seven themselves are basically archetypes of kinds or classes of people, so you have a different aspect of God to pray to depending on what you’re going through in life or what you need at the moment. It’s fairly comfortable that way. It’s also very responsive, in its form, to society. When times are good and society is stable, the religion supports the status quo (and is supported by it). The monarch and the Septon seem routinely to be hand in glove. As the war for control of Westeros goes on, however, and the conditions for everyday folk gets worse and worse, the religion mirrors this discontent as well as the accompanying distrust of the nobility. The movement to a simpler, more fundamental religion—and also a harsher religion of retribution against the nobility—comes as conditions become increasingly desperate for the common folk.

However, there’s little evidence that the religion of The Seven is true. No miracles, not even a narrative that acknowledges (the way that R’hllor apparently does) the evil and danger of the White Walkers.

Then there’s the Old Gods of the North. These are, admittedly, a bit sketchy still. We know they’re tied to the Children of the Forest, as well as to the men of the North. The story seems to be that the Children of the Forest fought alongside humans against the Others back in the day, so  this old religion seems at least to be on the right side (but then, it’s the Starks’ religion, so of course it is). Like the Starks themselves, the religion seems to be harsh but perhaps not so harsh as R’hllor’s religion—kin-slaying and slavery, for instance, are both bad, while hospitality and guest rights are good. There seems to be magic and power associated with the Old Gods, but we haven’t seen much definitive. Arguably, the direwolf pups that the Starks find are uncanny, there are the dreams that Bran and Rickon have of their father’s death, there’s Jojen Reed and his greensight, and there’s the apparent destiny that Bran has up north of the Wall with the Children of the Forest. But yeah, there’s a lot we don’t know, but it seems promising, doesn’t it?

Then there’s the Many-Faced God, the death-worshipping cult. Well, okay, I suppose it’s a religion, not a mere cult. “Death-worshipping” pretty much says it all. In their closest followers, they require the death of self: they must give up their old life and identity. They deliver death, to those who ask for it and, apparently, those who deserve it. Sometimes. The criteria aren’t really clear, but what is clear is that it’s awfully authoritarian—obedience appears to be prized above all in the religion’s followers. Their metaphysics actually seem to be pretty laissez-faire: our god is actually worshipped by everyone, just by different names. They’re all pretty much the same, even though people are too dumb to realize it. It’s still pretty murky how this religion works, fundamentally, and whether they’re “good,” “evil,” or, as I suspect, fundamentally indifferent. I mean, sure, the victory of the White Walkers and the undead might be right up their alley: if they win, everybody dies. On the other hand, they might have some kind of qualms about un-death. Who knows?

To me, the religion of the Many-Faced God seems, similarly to the religion of The Seven, to be answering to human concerns more than divine ones. Stay with me here and recall that the religion started in the slave pits of Volantis, as a direct response to those conditions. If I’m remembering correctly, it began as a sort of passive response (death as a gift to the oppressed) and morphed into something more like revolution and retribution. Either way, though, to me it speaks more of answering a human need (and obsession) rather than being divinely ordained in some way. Granted, there does seem to be something magical, something supernatural, about what they do. It’s unclear, of course, whether that’s an act of God or “simply” magic. In the HBO version, it should be noted, the magic seems to be inherent in the faces: once the face is prepared, Arya can just steal one and become someone else, no blessing needed.

***

The point of all this, for me, has been to try to get at the metaphysics of the world George R.R. Martin has created. What is its fundamental nature, what is true about this world? As we try to answer this question, it seems to me that the yardstick to use is, likely as not, how well a religion matches up to “the real war.” That is to say, White Walkers and their Wights against living creatures. Do they speak to that narrative, which seems to be fundamental to the world? Or, like the politics that obsess so much of the plot, are they simply human constructions that ignore this most fundamental of realities?

On this basis, I tend to discount The Seven, The Drowned God, and the Many-Faced God. R’hllor, of course, does answer this fundamental reality. Its narrative, in fact, is all about the Red God and his chosen hero standing against the darkness and the cold. So one possibility is that, in fact, these are basically the good guys. This is troubling on a number of levels, isn’t it? The actions of His followers too often seem to leave a bad taste in one’s mouth. Burning people alive? Killing your own wife (or daughter)? That whole business (in the books) with Lady Stoneheart / Catelyn Stark and what she does to Brienne in the name of righteous vengeance? Are we supposed to be okay with that, coming from the “good” God? Or are we supposed to write these things off as simply the failings of imperfect human beings to understand the will of R’hllor?

My suspicion is that neither is the case. These are not “merely” human failings, nor is R’hllor “good.” My suspicion is that what we have is an elemental opposition: fire and ice, light and dark, life and death (sort of). They are not, strictly speaking, “good” and “evil.” They are in conflict, eternal conflict, just as the Red God’s religion declares, but I suspect that the Red God is only incidentally on “our” side. Humans, I would bet, are mere pawns, not important to R’hllor except to the extent that they serve His interests. In that context, by the way, it may not even be that Melisandre is “wrong” about Stannis, so much as it served the Red God’s interests at one point to support him… until it didn’t.

My working hypothesis is that the Old Gods, the ways of the Children of the Forest, represent a third way, a life-centered way. There’s a natural alliance of sorts between followers of the Old Gods and R’hllor, in that they share an enemy, but the religion of the Old Gods seems to strike a different balance: it is harsh, as it needs to be to prepare the living to face both the hardships of life in a world where winter can last decades and to face the ultimate evil (from the perspective of the living), the Others; however, it is also a life-affirming religion that centers on guest-rights and hospitality, on kinship, and against slavery (though, you know, feudalism’s okay).

From a metafictional standpoint, it would be no surprise if, in the end, the way of the Starks turns out to be the “right” way, would it? Despite their flaws, they seem to be “the good guys” in the story, the ones (mostly) that we identify with and hope survive. And, in the end, I suspect they are the ones who will turn out to have been most rooted in the “best” and most true religion. 

Your thoughts on any and all of this would be most welcome. What am I missing here?

The Great Debate: Is there a God?

Tonight, our high school's spiritual life department hosted its annual debate: "Is there a God?" This is at least the third or fourth year now that they've had this debate, though I still haven't been able to attend and see what all the fuss was about. I like to imagine that one of our handful of Hindu students might be sitting there wondering "How about the debate 'are there gods?'" but that's really a digression on my part.

I just like the fact that our spiritual life department--which, after all, is made up of protestant and Catholic ministers--is committed to this event, to raising the question. The debate participants are all teachers, so there's a sense in which no matter what the actual content of the debate is, one of the messages is that there are intelligent, thoughtful, nice people on both sides of the issue--or perhaps I should say all sides because I gather at least one person on the panel answered the question as basically a believing agnostic or a deist. And a related implicit message is that it's possible to disagree about something that's fundamental to one's outlook and to still be civil and even friendly.

Now, that said, I heard some of my students talking about the debate--which, I would reiterate, I have never been able to attend--and one of them was particularly vehement about his dissatisfaction with the debate. As he said, there's nothing new, both sides just made the same arguments they always make. As I probed a bit more, there seemed to be a strong sense in what he was saying that there wasn't a lot of engagement between the two sides. One of the science teachers basically said that the scientific evidence is against God, or makes God an unnecessary hypothesis, or whatever he actually said, and the pro-God response was basically you can't prove God doesn't exist and I feel God's presence. Again, I'm paraphrasing from a 17-year-old's not-totally-coherent account of this debate. So any commentary I'm about to make--and I'm about to make some--is poorly informed. There's a good argument here for avoiding speculation until I have more information, but to meet my Holidailies obligation, I need to get something out and I've already got this much written, so....

My suspicion here is that one of the very strengths I cited earlier--the civil nature of the debate--also defangs both sides to some extent and makes for a less interesting, less convincing debate. You can argue in fairly abstract, non-confrontational terms, but when it comes down to it, the more compelling arguments are also significantly more threatening, in the sense of calling strongly into question a person's deep-held beliefs (and, for that matter, those of the student's parent, you might not appreciate a teacher precipitating a crisis of faith for their son/daughter). Also, if participants were to argue in the strongest terms, students might feel as though a teacher who is arguing the other side from what they believe is unsympathetic or even hostile to them and not just to their belief system. So I suspect it's a challenging line to walk for the participants, to make a case, but to do it in a way that tends more toward interesting than to threatening or uncomfortable.


For my part, I've always had considerable tolerance for strong argument on both sides of this subject, because I've always felt that truth was important. Weird, I know. Hearing the best arguments, the strongest arguments of people on the other side of the issue from me always seemed like an important exercise, because either result seemed positive: either I would be convinced and change my mind, presumably moving closer to the truth--whatever that is--than I was before, or else I would feel that I had refuted the opposing arguments and thus had even better reason than before to believe what I already believed. Of course, this places a lot of trust in my own judgment. The alternative--turning over responsibility for one's beliefs to someone else--seems very problematic to me (even though I could argue in the abstract that it's possible that one could be better off relying on the judgment of someone else). But I have a hard time really believing that argument.

All right, this entry has been a bit scattered and it's not really ending with much of a bang or with a bow on top, but there it is. I welcome your thoughts on any of the matters raised.

The Church in the Wildwood

There’s a church in the valley by the wildwood,
No lovelier place in the dale,
No spot is so dear to my childhood
As the little brown church in the vale.
-- William S. Pitts

 Okay, the church that we went to Sunday was surrounded by corn-stubble fields made recently into impromptu lakes by two days of continuous rains, not woods—wild or otherwise—and here in northern Ohio, valleys are distant rumors. But still, it’s fair to say that few spots from my childhood are as dear as Zion U.C.C., in Fireside (a spot you probably won’t find on a map). 

Going there at least once a week for the first eighteen plus years of my life, there’s probably nowhere other than my childhood home that I spent more time. Walking into the sanctuary yesterday, much was familiar—the same Christmas banners were hung along the sides (they could easily be 40+ years old, but they look the same as I remember them), the same hymnals are in the same pews (they were upholstered while I was growing up, so I also remember them as bare wood), the same altar, the same lectern and pulpit, the same carpet and the same stain-glass windows.

And quite a few of the same people—familiar old faces lit up when they saw me with my mother and my oldest daughter. There was no one from my generation there, just the parents and grandparents of our generation. Of course, those were some of the adults I most respected as a child and young man. Some from that generation are no longer with us, but it was a delight to see the ones I did.

There were also changes--they've been through a few ministers since I left, there was a new organ down by the lectern where a piano used to be, instead of above the back of the sanctuary, and a grand piano on the other side, by the pulpit, and there were large screens at the front and back of the sanctuary (though there wasn't much of import up there).

I was there to hear your borning cry,
I’ll be there when you are old.
I was there the day you were baptized,
To see your life unfold.
--John C. Ylvisaker

The minister asserted--against all the obvious evidence to the contrary--that “I was there to hear your borning cry” is one of the most beautiful hymns ever written, as she prepared to baptize a father and daughter yesterday. As it happens, the father was a classmate of mine in school, though he just recently started going to my childhood church. His daughter is not quite four months old.

But it was perhaps all the more striking to me that all the people who graduated from high school with me--there were more than a half dozen of us just in my class--and those who graduated in the years before and after mine--my generation is otherwise completely absent.

I realized recently that my family's ties to this church are deep--I'm relatively confident that I've understood the historical record to say that one of my ancestors back in the 1800s played a big role in building the church (or, anyway, the church that became this church--it burned down sometime in the mid-20th Century). Something like five generations--that's a guess, I'm too lazy to look it up this morning. But I don't go there any more. From what I could see, a lot of the older people in the church were people that have known me all their life and been more or less life-long members, and there are some younger families there too, but by and large the younger and middle-aged folks there all seem to be new. Which is great for the congregation--with so many people of my generation leaving our small town, they have to bring in new members to survive, but there's also something that sees it as unfortunate that families that have been part of the church's history for generations have left and been replaced with entirely new people.

Maybe that song, "I was there to hear your borning cry" played into those thoughts, as it speaks to the continuity in one's life and from generation to generation that God, theoretically, provides.  I shouldn't be surprised if it generations some nostalgic feelings in me, some vague desires for a past that's gone--after all, it's the greatest hymn ever written.

Christmas Wars and Battles Through the Ages

’Tis the season for crèche display controversies and public-school decoration debates and First Amendment argumentation, when all the ideologues get a little extra outrage or victimization in their stockings. The holiday is observed across the nation with injunctions and festive debates on cable television. Little children wait in line at the mall to have their picture taken with Bill O’Reilly or the Rev. Barry Lynn. (That last part, to my knowledge, is not true, but it should be.) -- Michael Gerson, in a wonderfully thoughtful piece recently in the Washington Post

This can be seen as a "War on Christmas," but as I've said for years now, a more accurate a description comes from the title of Steven Nissenbaum's history of the holiday, The Battle for Christmas. It's not so much that we have a war on Christmas--most of the most liberal atheists I know celebrate Christmas in some form or another. Instead, as Gerson notes, "Ultimately all of these disputes resolve into an argument about power: Who has the ability to define and enforce the boundaries of the acceptable?" And this isn't new. Over the centuries, we've had a lively debate about what Christmas is and isn't. And yes, through the years some people have wanted not to celebrate it at all (but mostly those people were Christians--more on that later).

The date December 25 was taken for Christmas back in the 4th century, not because anyone had evidence that this was the silentest, holiest night, but because those crafty 4th-century Christians wanted to annex the pagan winter festival. From the Roman Saturnalia onward Christmas was--and remained for many centuries--a time of drinking and debauchery. In 16th-century England, this Christmas celebration was a festival of misrule, in which people boozed it up, and the poor went door to door essentially demanding "trick or treat"--give us good food or money or gifts or we'll wreck $#!+. Think of carols like "We wish you a merry Christmas" and all its demands for figgy pudding and its assurance "we won't go until we get some," as well as all the wassailing songs and their demands. "Here we come a-wassailing," for instance, first reminds the listener that "We are not daily beggars / That beg from door to door, / But we are neighbors' children / Whom you have seen before"--and then they go on to ask for money, cheese, some of the Christmas loaf, and (of course!) some wassail. And in "Wassail, wassail," after they spend innumerable verses building up the master of the house, they get to the point, asking for drink and to be let in by the fire:

Come, butler, come fill us a bowl of the best
Then we hope that your soul in heaven may rest,
But if you do draw us a bowl of the small
Then down shall go butler, bowl and all!

Blessings are given to those who give, curses to those who are stingy or unobliging.


There's even a certain logic to this kind of thing, when we recall the way that the birth and life of Jesus inverted the social order--a "king," as he was styled, or even an aspect of God, born into an animal stall and ministering to the poor, the wretched, the outcast. A celebration that reversed the social hierarchy might be appropriate enough to celebrate the birth of Jesus.



The holiday as a festival of misrule was basically accepted by the upper classes, too, as a sort of pressure valve for the lower classes. The social hierarchy is inverted once a year: no big deal. The wealthy would get angry with particular wassailer or particular acts (the common folk could get pretty rowdy and destructive if their demands weren't met!), but overall the drinking and singing and demands for food and drink and gifts were tolerated.

For exactly this reason, Christmas had a hard time making its way across the pond, no matter how appropriate it may have been in its own way. The Puritans outlawed Christmas on the basis of its nature as a holiday of drinking and debauchery, as well as on the argument that the Bible doesn't indicate when Jesus's birthday was, thus God has no interest in having us celebrate it. Nonetheless, people rather like an excuse to drink and revel, especially in the bleak midwinter, so it continued on the edges of legality in New England and had a bit more success in other parts of the country.

Even hundreds of years ago, we had a battle over how--or even whether--Christmas should be celebrated, and arguably the most devout Christians were the ones fighting a "war on Christmas." However, since even the most puritanical of Puritans couldn't end Christmas, it ultimately ended up tamed by a rather unlikely force.

In the mid-to-late Nineteenth Century, retail stores were just starting to take off. Standardized manufacturing was just getting going on a large scale, and retail stores were outlets for all these material goods. The problem? The so-called Protestant Work Ethic was firmly entrenched in America. That is, people worked hard, saved their money, and didn't buy crap they didn't need. Retailers knew this would never do, so they are the ones who took the largest steps toward inventing--yes, inventing--the Christmas holiday as we know it. They made Santa Claus big (okay, years of cookies and whole milk did that) and they marketed Christmas as a time of love and good-will and--you probably guessed it--gift giving. They employed writers to create the stories that presented this kind of Christmas. They made people nostalgic for a type of Christmas that hadn't even existed before: a warm, cheery, wholesome holiday--and it became precisely that. The St. Nicholas mythos got drawn into it (St. Nick got pulled to Christmas from his normal place at--duh--the feast of St. Nicholas in early December). And some of our ideas were just flat-out made up. In the process, Christmas went from being a public holiday to a private one, from one celebrated in the streets with the community to one celebrated at home with the family. From a drunken revel for adults it became a child-centered holiday of gift giving.

I didn't get much further in the book, but I reckon it likely that, once commercial forces had sanitized Christmas and made it good and pure, Christianity decided it was high time to get back in the Christmas game, and they set about re-holy-daying it. That is, they claimed it for their own now that it was a wholesome time. And who can blame them? It's a nice little holiday.

But, of course, retailers did their job too well. We've gone from the protestant work ethic to the consumerist spend ethic, and whether we work enough or not, by Visa we can spend! We don't just spend the money we have, we spend the money we will have, which is just a more positive way of saying the money we haven't. As the culture has changed and become more materialistic, so too has the holiday become ever more materialistic. Religion, naturally enough, fights against this tendency (we're reminded that "Jesus is the reason for the season," i.e. not Santa Claus or gift-giving). So, too, do more secular types who nonetheless see something negative in crass materialism.

Secular though I may be, I have at least that much spiritualism that I mistrust unchecked materialism--even as I enjoy the hell out of a limited degree of it. Because yes, I like stuff, just like most Americans do. But--I think like most Americans here too--not to the exclusion of all else, and not beyond a certain point. There's a limit to how much stuff any person needs, and there are a lot of things more important than stuff. As long as we don't lose sight of those philosophical touchstones, gift-giving during this season is a wonderful, wonderful thing. Gift-giving is--to steal a phrase--an outward and visible sign of an inward condition. It's most meaningful when it comes from the heart and speaks to the heart, when it's freely given and not expected as a duty.

For me, Christmas isn't a religious holiday, though they're welcome to keep claiming it. It's a social institution that's evolved through many different forms and ultimately is--or will be--whatever we make of it. Although the name and its origins and history put a distinctly Christian stamp on it, our brief look at its history shows us what an uneasy time religion has had throughout the centuries in trying to claim it. That's why I say it's a social institution: it has shaped our culture and been shaped by our culture, and anyone who participates in that culture, it seems to me, has a claim on that tradition in whatever form they choose to stake that claim. Further, though it's not precisely true to say that America "is a Christian nation," it's certainly a nation in which Christianity has been essential in its history, and as a result even many in America who are secular in their outlook could be considered "secular Christians" or at least influenced by the culture of Christianity.

There was a festival at the winter solstice before Christianity claimed it by naming it Christmas, and I'd wager that in many places there was such a celebration long before Jesus was born. We need a holiday at this time of year, which is probably why many religious traditions--as well as non-religious traditions--have a holiday at this time of year. I suspect that even if something happened that caused everyone to cease believing in Jesus, we'd probably still celebrate Christmas, because it's just the sort of thing we want.

Never has that been more true for me than now, when I have two little girls: the magic of Christmas has become for many of us the magic of childhood, as we adults are fueled by their excitement. And really, both of our mythologies speak to this reverence for childhood, whether it's the story of Santa Claus bringing toys to good little girls and boys or the story of a child born in humble circumstances and destined to change the world.
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In the interest of full disclosure, I should say two things: 1) this is based almost exclusively on Nissenbaum's The Battle For Christmas and 2) I've published versions of this in four previous years on this and my former blog.

On the Genealogy of Morals

Fair warning, this is going to be a bit rambling and inconclusive. Enter at your own risk. 

It seems to me, in my—granted—limited study of the matter, that in genealogy, we tend to focus on genetic lineage: who begat whom, on down through the generations. This genetic transmission can be hard enough to track, but even more interesting to me is the memetic transmission down the generations--the beliefs, ideas, cultural practices of families. It’s amazing to think that the beliefs, the habits, of some of my ancestors may have persisted through the years, in ways that I’m not even aware. Some of it, maybe most of it, has been lost (same thing with genes, though), but it seems reasonable to think that the way my mother raised me was influenced by the way her parents raised her, and they were influenced by their parents, and on and on back through the years. No doubt about it though: beliefs, practices, and ideas are harder to track than names and places, unless one had an ancestor or ancestors who were writers (in one form or another). Maybe a public figure, maybe just private correspondence. But as far as I know, there’s none of that in my family--I mean, I'm sure there were private correspondences, but they haven't been saved and come down to us.

One meme complex that is somewhat easier to track through the ages than others is religious belief, if only because religions are complexes of memes that we put names on and that manage to get recorded in the historical record. As I’ve seen even in my limited research, religious affiliation is  something that gets written down. Casper Sherck, my first ancestor in America, came to this country along with other Anabaptists because they were persecuted in Europe, and obviously a religious belief that is held onto despite persecution must be important. Casper Sherck III was a minister who started the Church of the Brethren--to not only be a minister but also to be part of a new religious movement? That suggests that the ideas were pretty important to him. And I see in a history of the county where I grew up--and where my ancestors lived for over 100 years--that one relative gave money for the building of a church (which I think is actually the church I grew up going to), while another ancestor is noted as "an active member" of that same church.These are elements of a person's intellectual life that got recorded in ways that few other memes did.

We can't assume, of course, that anyone in the past was either necessarily or perfectly orthodox in his or her belief just because he or she went to a particular church. Just look at people today: identifying the church someone attends doesn’t necessarily tell us everything we would want to know about the person--or even about that person's religious beliefs. I think there’s a part of me that would like to assume that people were more homogenous within a particular belief system, either because the religions were better at enforcing orthodoxy back then or because people just weren’t as cross-culturally contaminated as we are today, but to do so would be to ignore the independent-mindedness that human beings so often display. We’re all sheep in some ways, but we’re all bulls or donkeys or some kind of stubborn critter in other ways. 

Still, I do suspect that religious affiliation may tell us more about people in the past than it would today, particularly for those of our ancestors who came to America specifically for religious reasons. These religious beliefs would seem to be central to a family's identity, at least in the first generations.

Even separate from my own ancestors, this got me thinking about the way that religions--and their adherents--must have come into contact with on another back in the 1700s in certain parts of America (of course, we're pretty much talking about different Protestant denominations, back then). There were certain places where a particular religious group was basically able to establish a state religion, like Massachusetts with the Puritans, who basically outlawed groups like the Quakers, and as we move through the American Revolution, I was just hearing yesterday how Massachusetts and at least one of the other original states had what amounted to a state religion at the time (I think it was Congregationalism in both of them, but I could be wrong). But in other places, this wasn't the case. I ran across a book--I couldn't read it, but I saw that it exists--about religious pluralism in Lancaster County, PA in the 1700s--which is basically where my Sherck ancestors were at that time. 

And I think it's easy to see how, in that kind of religious context, my ancestor who was a minister could end up part of the religious upheaval that ended up in a new denomination. In close proximity, you have all of these people who are ultra-serious about their religious beliefs, and none of them can force their beliefs on anyone else, so you'd imagine there's a lot of religious dialog. And sometimes, people who are serious about religion, can change their minds because they're ultimately more interested in seeking the Truth (as they understand it) than in adhering to the tenets of their religion (which, I suppose, both makes my point and undermines it--makes it because it shows the importance of religion in these people's lives, but also suggests that we can't expect doctrinal conformity).