Christopher Hitchens vs. Christmas Cheer (UNLOCKED)

Christopher Hitchens was a weird grinch about Christmas--but there's no reason atheists have to be. There's a straightforward Godless case for enjoying Christmas (or Hannukah) (or both) (or whatever).

It’s a long-standing contention of a certain kind of conservative Christian goofball that atheists hate Christmas. Polling data tells a different story. A whopping 85% of Americans who list their religion as “none” celebrate the holiday. Of course, “nones” range all the way from “spiritual but not religious” to “I’ve worn out the spines on all of my Richard Dawkins books” to “I don’t know, man, I don’t really think about that stuff.” If there’s finer-grained data out there, I have’t seen it.

Anecdotally, though, out of the…hundreds?…of non-believers I’ve known who come from Christian backgrounds, I can think of exactly one who I know for a fact stopped celebrating Christmas when he stopped believing in God.¹ On the other end, I’ve known plenty of atheists and agnostics raised in non-Christmas-celebrating religions—Jews or Muslims or Hindus or Jehovah’s Witnesses—who started celebrating it once they drifted away from their childhood faiths. That doesn’t always happen. Lots of people just stick with whatever holidays they grew up with (or some subset of them). But in twenty-first century America, “celebrating Christmas” is a thoroughly culturally standard thing for secular people to do and so secularizing people not infrequently fall into it.

All that said, there’s at least one famous real-life atheist who seems to have had about the attitude toward Christmas you’d expect from an atheist character in a direct-to-DVD knockoff of God’s Not Dead. In fact, other than Karl Marx (who, by the way, celebrated Christmas), the guy I’m thinking of is the famous atheist I’ve spent the most time thinking about—Christopher Hitchens.

“Hitch” is a character who’s fascinating to me for several reasons. Most obviously, he was a very smart person who was passionate about a lot of values I too care about who nevertheless migrated during the 90s and 2000s to positions—most obviously on Iraq and Afghanistan—which I find abhorrent. That’s interesting! I think trying to understand why he came to those conclusions is more fruitful than just denouncing him and moving on. (The Left is very good at denouncing people who disagree with us but sometimes we could do better on the “trying to understand why they disagree” part.) Hitchens may have also been the best debater in the whole era in which debates were regularly captured on YouTube, and as someone who pretty clearly likes and sees value in debate, I think he’s worth paying attention to for that alone. Finally, while there’s a lot about the “New Atheist” movement he helped to launch which I don’t love, I’ll repeat what I said two Christmas Eves ago in the Nation and “admit to retaining some sympathy for his humanistic critique of Judeo-Christian morality.”

The subject of Christmas, though, didn’t exactly bring out the most intellectually impressive side of Hitch’s anti-theism. Here he is this 2005 Slate article Bah, Humbug: The Horrors of December in a One-Party State:

I was invited onto Scarborough Country on MSNBC to debate the proposition that reindeer were an ancient symbol of Christianity and thus deserving of First Amendment protection, if not indeed of mandatory display at every mall in the land. I am told that nobody watches that show anymore—certainly I heard from almost nobody who had seen it—so I must tell you that the view taken by the host was that coniferous trees were also a symbol of Christianity, and that the Founding Fathers had endorsed this proposition. From his cue cards, he even quoted a few vaguely deistic sentences from Benjamin Franklin and George Washington, neither of them remotely Christian in tone. When I pointed out the latter, and added that Christmas trees, yule logs, and all the rest were symbols of the winter solstice “holidays” before any birth had been registered in the greater Bethlehem area, I was greeted by a storm of abuse, as if I had broken into the studio instead of having been entreated to come by Scarborough’s increasingly desperate staff. And when I added that it wasn’t very Tiny Tim-like to invite a seasonal guest and then tell him to shut up, I was told that I was henceforth stricken from the Scarborough Rolodex. The ultimate threat: no room at the Bigmouth Inn.

This is very far from his best writing. And honestly the bit about no one watching Scarborough sounds more than a little like something Donald Trump would say.

Forget all that, though, while we see if we can trace the thread of his argument.

I concur that Joe Scarborough isn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer. But what is this particular run-in with this particular dull knife supposed to illustrate about Hitch’s larger point about Christmas?

Well:

This was a useful demonstration of what I have always hated about the month of December: the atmosphere of a one-party state. On all media and in all newspapers, endless invocations of the same repetitive theme. In all public places, from train stations to department stores, an insistent din of identical propaganda and identical music. The collectivization of gaiety and the compulsory infliction of joy. Time wasted on foolishness at one’s children’s schools. Vapid ecumenical messages from the president, who has more pressing things to do and who is constitutionally required to avoid any religious endorsements.

And yet none of this party-line unanimity is enough for the party’s true hard-liners. The slogans must be exactly right. No “Happy Holidays” or even “Cool Yule” or a cheery Dickensian “Compliments of the season.” No, all banners and chants must be specifically designated in honor of the birth of the Dear Leader and the authority of the Great Leader.

The writing, at least, is getting better as he warms to a standard Late Hitchens theme—drawing parallels between Christianity and secular “totalitarianism”. But it’s worth taking a long step back and thinking about how the arguments he’s making (or gesturing at) in this essay are supposed to fit together.

Earlier, he touched on another standard Late Hitchens preoccupation—the essential secularism of the Founding Fathers. There’s a lot we could say here about his fixation during this stage of his career on figures like Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine and what that says about the post-Cold War evolution of his politics. But for now the thing to notice is that his disagreement with Scarborough about the religiosity of the Founders is actually a pretty odd fit with his overall point about Christmas.

Jefferson, for example, is a plausible case of a Founding Father who not only wasn’t a Christian but only stopped at a deistic belief in an indifferent Cosmic Clock-Maker because Darwin hadn’t come along yet to (as Hitchens’s friend Richard Dawkins would later put it) “[make] it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.” And Jefferson hosted Christmas celebrations at Monticello! How does this fit with Hitch’s portrayal of pervasive Christmas festivities not as a particular instance of the boringly obvious more-or-less universal truth that the main holidays of any given culture are going to be hard to avoid if you’re immersed in that culture but as enforcement of religious conformity? Doesn’t the long history of non-believers enjoying Christmas suggest that the holiday is in practice quite separable from its Christian roots—to the extent that it even has such roots? (Remember Hitchens’ contention on Scarborough Country that “Christmas trees, yule logs, and all the rest” predated Christianity.)

And why does he take the distress of “the party’s hard-liners” against what they see as the worrying secularization of Christmas as an internal dispute between enforcers of public religiosity about where to set the party line—and not as the natural distress of gatekeepers of a religious version of Christmas at the very real secularization of the holiday?

On this point, it seems to me, Hitchens wants to have it at least a couple of different ways and I don’t see how the ways fit together. On the subject of the hard-liners, he writes:

A revealing mark of their insecurity is their rage when public places are not annually given over to religious symbolism, and now, their fresh rage when palaces of private consumption do not follow suit. The Fox News campaign against Wal-Mart and other outlets—whose observance of the official feast-day is otherwise fanatical and punctilious to a degree, but a degree that falls short of unswerving orthodoxy—is one of the most sinister as well as one of the most laughable campaigns on record. If these dolts knew anything about the real Protestant tradition, they would know that it was exactly this paganism and corruption that led Oliver Cromwell—my own favorite Protestant fundamentalist—to ban the celebration of Christmas altogether.

As it happens, parliament’s crackdown on public celebrations of Christmas happened well before Cromwell’s rise to power.² Putting aside this lapse in Hitch’s often impressive command of history, though, there’s something strange about the way he’s simultaneously (a) acknowledging that fundamentalists over the centuries have had some pretty good reasons from their point of view to dislike the the “pagan” features of Christian celebrations while (b) rhetorically siding with the fundamentalists over the ordinary people whose good time they were trying to ruin.

Naturally, he stops short of advocating a similar ban in 2005:

No believer in the First Amendment could go that far. But there are millions of well-appointed buildings all across the United States, most of them tax-exempt and some of them receiving state subventions, where anyone can go at any time and celebrate miraculous births and pregnant virgins all day and all night if they so desire. These places are known as “churches,” and they can also force passersby to look at the displays and billboards they erect and to give ear to the bells that they ring.

Hold on, though. Shouldn’t the natural sympathy of an adamant anti-theist (and whiskey-enjoyer) like Hitchens who looks back at the seventeenth-century controversy be not for grim-faced Puritans who wanted everyone to have to go to work as usual on December 25th but for the hard-working artisans, laborers and peasants—the vast majority of whom didn’t have the franchise and hence couldn’t even vote the Christmas-banning Puritan weirdos out of office—who wanted to devote a few of the coldest, shortest days of the year to singing and getting drunk and hanging mistletoe?

As relatively inconsequential as this all may be, it actually does strike me as a symptom of a larger problem with New Atheists not thinking very hard about how societies actually evolve toward greater non-belief over time and what does or doesn’t help that process along in practice.³

Why exactly should someone who wants a more secular society want to grant “these places…known as ‘churches’” a cultural monopoly on festivities that most normal people find, y’know, fun? How does reinforcing that association serve your cause?

If lots and lots of people enjoy drinking spiked eggnog in front of fireplaces while “White Christmas”—written by a secular Jew—plays in the background, and increasing numbers of them do these things while paying very little attention to the Christian elements of the holiday…

….or if people with other backgrounds slop applesauce onto their latkes and light candles from right to left without giving so much as a passing thought to miracle of the oil by which the creator of the universe is alleged to have signaled his approval for the victory of the Maccabees⁴…

…or if various other people do the equivalent with various other cultural traditions with religious origins…

….isn’t this all a win for the Hitchensian agenda of a society liberated from what he sees as the spiritual authoritarianism of belief in an eternally supervising heavenly father-figure?

Why not just take the W?

It’s OK to enjoy moments of collective cultural merriment. Drink some eggnog. Enjoy yourself. Heaven will still be empty on Tuesday morning.

1. Hi, Jake! Long time, no talk.

2. Ditto for the closing of the theaters, also widely attributed to Cromwell. And the alleged ban on mincemeat pies during England’s brief period as a Republic seems to be a total fiction. (This is probably a good time to shout out this book, which I finished about a month ago! A very solid piece of narrative history that tells the story of England’s political, legal, economic, and religious emergence into the modern world from the reign of James I to the Glorious Revolution.) Cromwell was a complicated figure who committed some genuine atrocities, most obviously in Ireland, and who certainly held the line against the Levellers in England who thought the goal of the revolution should be actual no-kidding democracy. So that’s all very bad. But honestly the myth of Cromwell-the-Christmas-canceler gets him wrong in important ways. He wasn’t some Presbyterian busybody who wanted to impose his beliefs on the populace. Outside of what he considered to be the most outrageous blasphemies he was mostly content to let people find Christ in their own way—and he even extended religious toleration to Jews, who’d been expelled centuries earlier. That mixture gives you a lot to work with if you want to attack him in other domains but the whole imposing-his-fundamentalist-religiosity-on-the-masses one is mostly a swing and a miss.

3. Hint: Fighting about religion all the time does the opposite of getting people to care less about religion. And let’s not even get into the War on Terror stuff.

4. A group of bloodthirsty religious fanatics who made Cromwell’s army look like the California National Guard, by the way.