Is there any holiday with the moral power of Christmas? As it pertains to the popular imagination, Christmas is our last great shared event with the power to confront immoral selfishness and inspire moral goodness. Even Remembrance Day, which certainly can (and should) elicit a sombre gratitude, is complicated by the ambiguities of war (was that war justified? did our side commit atrocities?). No, there is nothing in our day that comes close to Christmas.
We can see this in some of the most popular Christmas stories we return to over and over again. A number of these have remarkable similarities. As Samuel James points out in his recent article, A Christmas Carol (by Charles Dickens) and It’s a Wonderful Life (the 1946 movie by Frank Capra) both turn on a heaven-sent alternative reality to awaken the protagonist to an important truth. In Scrooge’s case, it triggers a kind of moral conversion from miserly selfishness to generous goodness. In George Bailey’s case, it opens his eyes to what really matters in life and how rich his life of helping others has made him and everyone around him.
Another Christmas movie, The Family Man (released in 2000, starring Nicolas Cage), borrows from these classics. Cage’s character, a rich, powerful, single, Wall Street executive, is given a glimpse of an alternative life where he marries his college girlfriend, works a boring job, is middle-class, and has two beautiful kids. The experience awakens him to the relational poverty (and selfishness) of his high-flying lifestyle in comparison to the riches of a good marriage and loving family.
And then there is The Grinch Who Stole Christmas. At its core, beneath the rhymes and silliness, it is another tale of moral transformation—though I won’t attempt any deep analysis of this great piece of literature (and film). Beyond these examples, we could name plenty of others that use Christmas as a vehicle for moral transformation. What I’d like to point out is that this moral transformation is a remnant of the Christian gospel: a cultural inheritance, an afterglow from the moral revolution that Christianity brought to the world.
And why does this matter? Because we live in a firmly post-Christian, re-paganizing world. Paganism offers many things, but moral transformation of the kind we see in all these Christmas stories is not one of them. So this enduring testimony to the possibility and power of moral transformation is a distinctly Christian note, ringing and echoing in our culture, while the source of that note has been almost completely forgotten. Yet these stories are undeniably powerful, and that surprising power—appealing to our God-given moral intuitions and consciences—can serve as a kind of lighthouse beacon for anyone adrift in the bewildering sea of modern spiritualities.
Some Christians will point out that all these Christmas stories fall far short of the gospel message. Moral improvement is not the gospel. Scrooge may be a better person, but if he does not trust Christ, he is ultimately no better off. Yes and amen, brother and sister, I agree. But here is the thing: these stories with moral power are a conduit to and from the Kingdom. To explain this better, let us turn to an insight from C. S. Lewis.
Sub-Christian Values as Roads to the Gospel
In a little-known essay called “Christianity and Culture,” Lewis argues that every road into Jerusalem is also a road out of it. By this he meant that there are various goods in life that can be traced all the way to the Source—God himself. These are the roads. But from inside Christianity, each of those gifts can be idolized and followed in a way that alienates a person from God, thus serving as a road out. A partial list would include sex, pleasure, beauty, honour, and, in light of our discussion above, moral goodness.
“These were called ‘sub-Christian,’” writes Lewis. This is the common conservative evangelical critique of sentimental Christmas stories, songs, and movies that fall short of presenting Christmas as the Bible does: the incarnation of our Redeemer. And fair enough; that is a legitimate critique. Lewis agrees that the artistic portrayal of these good things is inferior in comparison with truly Christian values. But then he turns it around: “If we take ‘sub-Christian’ to mean ‘immediately sub-Christian’ (i.e., the highest level of merely natural value lying immediately below the lowest level of spiritual value), it may be a term of relative approval.” Because of the way these sub-Christian values flow from spiritual values, they can serve as natural conduits.
Therefore we see that these sub-Christian goods can serve as roads away from but also as roads into the Kingdom. Let us stick with our theme and take Christmas as our example. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, we saw a gradual secularizing and sentimentalizing of Christmas. Christ and Mary were eclipsed by Santa Claus and Rudolph; the celebration of the world-changing incarnation of the Creator was replaced with warm fires, family gatherings, sentimental nostalgia, and the moral value of unselfishness. Christians rightly lamented this decline as our culture collectively took this road away from a more explicitly Christian version of Christmas.
We took Christ out of Christmas, uprooted the flowers of the Christian moral order from its nourishing soil, and called it progress.
Why Things Are Different Now
The prevailing intellectual climate of the 19th and 20th centuries made plausible the idea that we could have moral goodness without the hard truths of orthodox Christianity—an idea which fueled the massive liberal drift of mainline denominations. Those denominations, and the culture of the West more generally, took that road (among others) away from the truth of the gospel. Exhibit A would be the fact that the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights contains zero references to God or anything divine. They pondered moral virtue and goodness and concluded that they could be produced and sustained without the particular truth claims of the Christian message.
But a quarter of the way into the twenty-first century, the landscape is different. Our culture is disintegrating and people are searching for something solid and good.
More and more people are seeing where the trajectory of moral transgression and maximizing autonomy has brought us, and the result is human misery, not flourishing. In other words, we are living in a time of great flux. People are travelling the roads, seeking and searching. Many are choosing all manner of strange moral and spiritual paths, but others are travelling various roads towards Christianity. My point here is simply that the enduring moral power of our culture’s sub-Christian Christmas stories can serve as one road toward the gospel, and that is especially true today.
In an age of moral chaos, artistic portrayals of true moral goodness and of moral transformations are especially attractive.
Conclusion
Christmas retains a surprising amount of moral power.
The narrative shape of many of our beloved Christmas stories is that of repentance and transformation: the sudden realization of one’s moral poverty, contrition and conviction, and then transformation (“his heart grew three sizes that day”).
If someone finds themselves strangely moved by the power of these stories and pursues them to their source, where will they end up? They will find themselves reading the New Testament, where Zacchaeus is transformed from greedy tax collector to generous benefactor, where Paul is transformed from murderous persecutor to tenderhearted church planter, and where person after person is transformed by their encounter with Christ Jesus, including, often enough, the reader himself.
So this Christmas, as we welcome visitors into our churches and family into our homes, perhaps it is worth asking out loud: what is it about all these beloved Christmas stories that moves us year after year? Could it be more than nostalgia? Could it be their moral power, which stems from the possibility and promise that bad people can become good, that sinners can be forgiven and transformed? Whatever gave the world this strange idea—conspicuously absent from the pre-Christian world? It was Christmas, of course: that singular event utterly unlike everything that came before, and utterly transformative of the moral and spiritual landscape in its wake.
“And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14).
