…And to All a Good Night
By Edwin S. Gaustad
[Dr. Gaustad is Professor Emeritus, History and Religious Studies, The University of California, Riverside.]
The Christmas season is a time for joy to the world, and good will among men–and women. Sometimes. Certainly not in Jerusalem, rarely in the courts or the public schools of the United States, and generally not in the mixed memories of what tradition may suggest or require. All these perplexities and confrontations, and we have not even yet arrived at the new millennium with its intensified demands and expectations.
Let us begin with what more or less sacred tradition seems to require of us in America. And where better to begin than with the Puritans and their strong religious commitment? How did they celebrate Christmas? They didn`t. Christmas was part of that papal calendar, along with the Feast of the Epiphany, Ash Wednesday, Ascension Day, All Saints Day, and what-have-you, that the Puritans were at pains to reject. December 25 could come and go, with Puritans not so much as nodding their heads in the direction of a special holiday, and certainly not one of revelry, indulgence, and wild abandon. As a scandalized Cotton Mather asked his congregation in 1712, "Can you in your Conscience think, that our Holy Saviour is honored by Mad Mirth, by long Eating, by hard Drinking, by lewd Gaming, by rude Revelling; by a Mass fit for none but a Saturn, or a Bacchus, or the Night of a Mahometan Ramadam?" And the sober, disciplined, temperate members of Mather`s church would solemnly shake their heads at the thought of such a defilement of the memory of the newborn Christ.
Sunday, the Puritan Sabbath, should of course be observed: not with games or sports or frivolous recreation, but in the reverent contemplation of the power, the justice, and the mercy of an everlasting God. Every Sabbath commemorated the resurrection of Jesus, not just a particular one in the springtime. Every Sabbath required self-examination and fresh resolve, not just those when the Lord`s Supper was observed. Every Sabbath demanded self-denial, not just those associated with a papal lenten season. And every Sabbath was dedicated–self-consciously, earnestly, sacrificially–to the greater glory of God.
The Quakers were even harder on the ecclesiastical calendar. All time and all places were holy unto God, and one erred in creating special sacred sites and dates. Indeed, the very names of the days of the week betrayed their pagan origins. One, therefore, should avoid using them, and peak rather of the "first day of the fourth month," or the "fifth day of the ninth month." Sacraments? Who needs them, or-more to the point–who commands them? All righteous activity is a channel of God`s grace; all life must be given to redeeming the time and sanctifying the world. Idleness and "the holiday spirit" are foreign to doing justly, loving mercy, and walking humbly before a sovereign God.
So where did all the bustle and bazaar quality of today`s Christmas cacophony come from? Leigh E. Schmidt, in his excellent book Consumer Rites: The Buying and Selling of American Holidays (Princeton, 1995), describes the steady and not always edifying evolution of the Christmas-New Year holidays in American culture. In the 1820s and 1830s, the gift-giving associated with the beginning of the New Year gradually shifted to Christmas where family values could compete with the noisy rowdiness of New Year celebrations. And the Wise Men had, after all, brought gifts. Much Protestant resistance to observing Christmas as a festivity gradually wore away, though for decades many struggled to keep some uniquely Christian flavor in the growing commercialization and emphasis on holiday shopping.
In Philadelphia, the Presbyterian John Wanamaker and his ever enlarging department store, represented this service to two masters. In his new emporium, opened in 1911, Wanamaker took every advantage of the commercial possibilities that the birthday of Christ represented. "He kept up a formidable flow," Schmidt writes, "of store souvenirs, gift catalogues, newspaper advertisements, trade cards, window decorations, musical concerts, Santa Claus stunts, and other holiday entertainment." At the same time, Wanamaker gave over his Grand Court in the new store, with its enormous pipe organ, to religious hymns and devotional messages. People came to the Philadelphia sanctuary to shop but they stayed to pray, with as many as fourteen thousand persons crowded into the Grand Court during the Christmas season. There they sang not only "Hark! the Herald Angels Sing" but also the much more explicitly evangelical "All Hail the Power of Jesus` Name." It was like going to church –for some, even better. One female shopper/worshipper reported that the whole Wanamaker experience "made me feel that Christ my Lord and Savior was in the midst of it all."
Increasing commercial development and ever more extravagant catalogue allurements led to an inevitable backlash by mid-century as many called for putting "Christ back into Christmas." But by the end of the twentieth century, Christmas remained an assortment of contradictions: self-denial versus self-indulgence, recommitment to discipleship versus reassertion of "me-ism," religion as transcendence of culture versus religion as its victim. "Jingle Bells" and "Come all Ye Faithful" do not always produce a single and pleasing harmony.
In the public schools, many teachers and administrators dread seeing December roll around. For the season of good will often turns out to be the season of misunderstanding, injured feelings, and parental complaints. But haven`t "well always celebrated Christmas in the public schools? Yes and no. In the first place, we have not "always" had a public school system. And when Horace Mann set the pattern in Massachusetts in the late 1830s, he did so in a state that had only recently (1833) disestablished its own Congregational Churches. Naturally, therefore, a pervasive if more or less nonsectarian Protestantism flavored his schools–as well as those in other states created after his model. Second, this pervading Protestantism–including the celebration of Christmas–did not go unchallenged in the nineteenth century: for example, in New York City and in Cincinnati, Ohio. But if it took a long time to disestablish Congregationalism in New England, it took even longer to disestablish Protestantism in the public schools. Indeed, that task has not yet been accomplished everywhere.
When Archbishop John Hughes in New York City looked at the public schools in the 1840s, he saw students hearing the King James Version of the Bible ritually read to them, heard them singing Protestant hymns, and learned of their version of history in which the Roman Catholic Church often emerged as the Antichrist, sometimes in language extraordinarily colorful and graphic. Since public monies supported these (Protestant) schools, he reasoned that public monies should also support the Catholic schools. His request firmly denied, Catholics went on to create their own separate school system that they called parochial schools. Protestants already had their school system that they called public schools. Or so it seemed to large numbers of citizens in the nineteenth century.
That heavy hand of tradition stayed in place through much of the twentieth century, with the flash points of controversy evident in Bible reading, classroom prayers, and–of course–Christmas. To be sure, Christmas is undeniably there–there in the national calendar, in the school calendar, in the shopping mall, on the Internet, and (with much ado) on the White House lawn and in Rockefeller Center. Is it fair for the public schools to bear all the burden of explaining, justifying the omnipresence of Christmas in American culture? Of course, it isn`t fair. But it also is inescapable since compulsory attendance laws (not universal until the twentieth century) insert the public school agenda into nearly every home, Christian and non-Christian, religious and non-religious. So, what to do about Christmas?
The "Teahouse of August Moon" drama shows us what not to do. There, the exasperated colonel, in the post World War II era, explodes that he is going to make the Okinawans lovers of democracy if he has to kill every one of them to do it. He serves as a marvelous negative role model. School children of all faiths and ages cannot be made to love, or even appreciate, Christmas if carols, stories, and scriptures are crammed down their constricted throats just because this is what "everybody" believes and "everybody" does. In this matter, at least, the public schools cannot afford to be parochial; they cannot afford to turn the season of potential good will into an exercise in subtle evangelization or not-so-subtle indoctrination. Neither ethical nor educational responsibility can permit this to happen.
The public schools must recognize, first of all, that churches and homes still exist, still bear their major responsibilities, still possess rich opportunities for teaching as well as for celebrating. Second, the public schools must see their first and primary task as an educational one, being always careful to distinguish between learning on the one hand and worshipping on the other. The line between the two is not that fine. If it seems obscure or wavering, some careful reflection and discussion–long before the season of good will arrives–can help enormously. Careful planning can even help to preserve, possibly even enhance, that good will.
Christmas cannot be ignored: neither calendar nor culture will permit it. But the classroom, always the arena for teaching and for learning, can turn its attention to the rich lode of religious festivals, sacred holy days, and the liturgical rhythms of many traditions of faith. Students need to learn from and about their classmates, that not all Americans are cut from identical cloth. They also need to learn both of pluralistic possibilities and constitutional limits. One`s own experience and background is not the sum of all experiences and backgrounds–not in a single classroom or single school or single community, to say nothing of the nation and of the world. Moreover, the public school, no matter how homogeneous the community in which it finds itself may be, cannot, must not, offer its own profession of faith. Of course, the Constitution prohibits it, but ethical sensitivity prohibits it as well. Blessed be the teacher (and the administrator) who sees in Christmas the possibilities for enhanced good will rather than aggravated stridency and rancor.
Finally, the courts, without a lot of obvious joy, must also confront Christmas. The U. S. Supreme Court has done just that on two occasions: in 1984 and in 1989. Both cases pertained to nativity scenes such as may be found on many a church lawn or private yard in December. These many, many portrayals of Mary and Joseph, the cradle, the stable, the shepherds and their flocks, and even a Christmas star, create no problems for the courts, for these displays are on private property. The difficulty arises when such clearly religious symbols are found on government property: on land owned by a city, a county, a state. If a public school cannot make a profession of faith, may a city do so? or is such a nativity scene really a profession of faith, or only a cultural outcropping–like, say, the Washington Monument? These nagging questions ultimately required the thoughtful deliberations of nine supreme court justices who, as matters turned out, could not agree on the answers.
The 1984 case (Lynch v. Donnelly) arose in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, where the city government had for over forty years paid for an annual Christmas display that included a nativity scene. The entire display, placed in a busy shopping mall, also featured a Santa Claus house, a sleigh pulled by cutout figures of reindeer, candy-striped poles, carolers, and hundreds of colored lights. (If I had been one of the harried shoppers in the Pawtucket mall and had stumbled upon the young mother Mary, surrounded by all the glitz and gaud, my instinctive reaction would have been to inquire, "What is a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?")
The justices, less flippant, worrying about the constitutional implications of the crèche on city property, considered whether this might be a violation of that portion of the First Amendment that prohibits an establishment (or endorsement) of religion. After no doubt much discussion (not open to the public) and exchange of internal memos, the Court emerged with a five-to-four decision. The slim majority of five concluded that Pawtucket had not violated the First Amendment, that if there were some benefit to a single faith, that benefit was "indirect, remote, and incidental." Pawtucket was no more at fault than the national government itself in setting aside Christmas as a federal holiday. One justice (Sandra Day O"Connor) in a separate opinion agreed that the "overall holiday setting" keeps the Pawtucket display from being an endorsement of Christianity. She added that "The display celebrates a public holiday, and no one contends that declaration of that holiday is understood to be an endorsement of religion."
The other four justices, dissenting from this point of view, argued that the case should not have required all the careful deliberation and nice distinctions. For the Pawtucket display was, quite simply, "an impermissible governmental endorsement of a particular faith." The fact that Christmas was so familiar, so agreeable, lulled the majority into thinking that a cr6che on public property posed no legal or constitutional difficulty. On the contrary, the dissenters concluded, this action by the city of Pawtucket was in fact "a coercive, though perhaps small, step toward establishing the sectarian preferences of the majority at the expense of the minority." If Pawtucket could claim a victory, that victory was far from clear cut–as events five years later proved.
In 1989, an even more complex case arising from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, reached the Supreme Court (County of Allegheny v. Greater Pittsburgh American Civil Liberties Union). Here on county property outside the courthouse, a forty-five-foot tall decorated Christmas tree was joined by an eighteen-foot tall menorah to commemorate the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah. Inside the courthouse on the main staircase, a cr6che, donated by a Roman Catholic group, was displayed. This case, demanding even more fine distinctions, required more than one hundred pages of close reasoning to reflect the opinions of a Court, once again badly divided.
Six of the nine justices agreed that the outside display (of tree and menorah) was "not an endorsement of religious faith but simply a recognition of cultural diversity"–though that diversity was clearly limited to Christian and Jewish. The nativity scene inside, however, was more obviously sectarian. For one thing, it stood alone: no Santa Clause, no sleigh, no striped poles, and no reindeer (which led some cynics to refer to the "reindeer rule" when trying to determine the constitutionality of a nativity display). Moreover, the cr6che bore a banner with the Latin words Gloria in Excelsis Deo, a more explicit profession of religious faith. A majority of five now found this scene to be unconstitutional on the long-recognized grounds that "government may not engage in a practice that has the effect of promoting or endorsing religious beliefs."
Four dissenters, however, remained unconvinced. The religious symbols both inside the courthouse as well as outside were "passive": that is, they demanded no response, certainly no acquiescence. "Passersby who disagree with the message conveyed by these displays are free to ignore them, or even to turn their backs." The minority worried about the indifference toward religion, if not hostility toward it, that the majority demonstrated. On the other hand, of course, the majority worried about governmental intrusion into the realm of private belief. Two complicated decisions, each five-to-four but pointing in opposite directions, do not blaze a clear trail ahead. So what is the solution? More cases? More litigation? More contentiousness in the season of good will?
Justice Felix Frankfurter long ago, perplexed as he himself often was with exactly where the constitutional axe should fall, cautioned that the American public was in danger of treating every question, every issue, in purely legalistic terms. He begged that we, as citizens, begin to ask about the wisdom of our actions. Are they good or bad, wise or foolish, sensitive or callused? These, in the long run, are even tougher questions than the constitutional ones, demanding as they are. But these are the very questions we cannot dodge or escape. our consciences demand it, our faith demands it, and the hope of bringing somewhat more joy to the world demands it.
