One of the perpetual complaints against Christianity is that it is a life-denying, puritanical system. In the Victorian era, poet Algernon Swinburne referred to Christ as the "pale Galilean" from whose breath "the world has grown grey." In our own time, films and television shows such as The Handmaid's Tale portray Christians as robotic control freaks. Meanwhile, elite commentators contend that the only reason Christians oppose same-sex "marriage" and transgendered toddlers is that they are full of hate.
One way to rebut the charge is to point to the fact that traditional Christmas carols – the ones that retell the central Christian story – are generally full of joy and gladness. They are decidedly not "grey" or "life-denying." What, exactly, one might ask, are the life-denying elements in Joy to the World and Ding Dong! Merrily on High?
But before getting to the carols, it's instructive to note that Christianity's two main competitors for the souls of men – secularism and Islam – actually are on the grey and grim side of the continuum. That's easy enough to see in Islam. With its burqas, alcohol ban, and rigid rules of behavior, Islam actually is a puritanical religion. But so, in its own way, is secularism. Today's universities, which are almost totally controlled by secularists, have elaborate behavior and speech codes which effectively take the spontaneity out of relationships and even out of simple conversation. You have to tread carefully in the secular world because it is seeded with hidden booby traps. Try reciting one of Swinburne's poems to a group of fellow student and you might end up in diversity hell. You never know what will offend the new puritans until it's too late.
Christians are supposedly life-denying, but Islam and secularism are patently cultures of death. Again, this is more obvious in Islam. Jihadists like to say that they will win out over non-Muslims because "you love life, but we love death." But, in many senses, secularism is also a death cult. Although secularists aren't generally keen on martyring themselves, they don't have any principled objection to sacrificing babies (through abortion) and old people (euthanasia) in order to make life more convenient for themselves. And this dismissive attitude toward human life has gained wide acceptance. In a photo taken when they still looked like choir boys, the Beatles posed with the dismembered parts of life-like baby dolls for the album cover Yesterday and Today.
For a supposedly life-affirming philosophy, secularism tends to have a distinct apathy toward new life, and toward marriage, which is the usual way of bringing new life into the world. Hollywood, which is secularism's dream weaver, is far more interested in babes than in babies.
Islam frowns on abortion, but not for the same reason as Christians. There is no well-developed theology of the value and dignity of each human life in Islam. Instead, Islam seems to have a more utilitarian view of life. One can't help forming the impression that for many Muslim leaders, raising babies is just another way of raising an army.
At first glance, Islamic attitudes toward women seem poles apart from Western secular views, but on closer inspection the Islamic view of women is not that far removed from the Hollywood view that women are little more than sex objects. The difference is that Islam conditions Muslim men to prefer babes in paradise to babes on earth. Some are so well-conditioned in this respect that they are quite happy to exchange earthly wife and kids for heavenly maidens should the occasion present itself. In any event, the exalted view of women and motherhood that one finds in the Christian carols is largely missing from both Islam and secularism.
Degraded views of life and death, birth, and babies come from a low estimate of human value. Christmas is a celebration of that moment of enlightenment when the full value of human life became apparent. In retrospect, it was far more enlightening than the European Enlightenment which arrived 18 centuries later and which would have been impossible except for the light provided by the first.
The Incarnation revealed God to man, but also, as St. John Paul II observed, it revealed man to himself. The birth of Christ revealed that the worth of men and women was far greater than anything that had hitherto been presumed. The birth of Christ also put family life in a whole new light. God entered the world not as a full-grown autonomous individual, but as a member of a family.
The birth of Christ changed everything. It added layer upon layer of meaning to the human condition. Human life was of inestimable value. Death was no longer to be feared because this child was born to vanquish death and open the way to life everlasting. That life, moreover, was to be more than the pleasant continuation of this life envisaged by some pagan religions, and, later, by Islam. It was a new kind of life – one that transforms us into the likeness of Christ, and makes us worthy of communion with God.
The wonder of all this is difficult to grasp intellectually. Indeed, the birth of any child seems miraculous. And no amount of biological science comes close to explaining it. When one considers that the particular child who was born on Christmas day in Bethlehem set the planets in motion, the miracle is compounded beyond all understanding.
The proper response to the miracle of Christmas is a mix of wonder and joy. And few things convey that mix as effectively as the traditional Christmas carols.
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