Six Ministers and a Rabbi Tackle the Question:

By Joseph C. Hough Jr. and guests

What is Christmas? Is it malls? Is it a religious event? Or is it both? If it is both, is that all right? Is it possible that the religious can happily co-exist with the commercial?

Amidst the annual onslaught of the holidays, the Nashville Scene last week convened a panel of local clergy and asked them to discuss the religious and cultural underpinnings of Christmas. Joseph C. Hough Jr., dean of the Vanderbilt University Divinity School, served as moderator and asked the panel members to consider a string of questions: “How do you interpret the significance of Christmas? Do you see it as a ‘Christian event’? Or do you attribute to Christmas a wider significance for all people? How reliable are the stories surrounding the Christmas event? How do you interpret such things as the visit of the wise men? The singing of the angels with the shepherds? The birth in the stable? What meaning do these stories carry for people today?”

In addition to Hough, the panel members were Randall Falk, rabbi emeritus, The Jewish Temple; Mark Fuller, senior priest, St. Frances Cabrini Catholic Church, Lebanon, Tenn.; Forrest Harris, pastor, Pleasant Green Missionary Baptist Church, and director, Kelly Miller Smith Institute at Vanderbilt Divinity School; Judy Hoffman, associate pastor, West End United Methodist Church; K.C. Ptomey, senior pastor, Westminster Presbyterian Church; and Rubel Shelly, minister, Woodmont Hills Church of Christ.

Editor’s Note: This transcript of the panel’s conversation has been edited, due to space limitations.

Joseph Hough: There’s a fairly wide consensus among religious leadership that Christmas has become a big selling season and retailers depend on that, and now start advertising on Halloween for Christmas shopping. There are actually some stores that advertise year-round for Christmas shopping.

When this panel talks about Christmas, I would think we don’t really want to deal with that phenomenon. Everybody sort of knows that everyone feels that way about the Christmas holiday.

I thought what might be interesting to talk about is whether Christmas has become a cultural holiday rather than simply a Christian religious one. Is it the case that, apart from the commercialization of Christmas, there’s broad celebration of the season that’s not just commercial? Do you think that’s the case, and if so, do you think that’s a good thing or not?

Randall Falk:Of course, having Christmas as a legal holiday poses the whole question of separation between church and state. Is it a religious holiday, or is it a legal government holiday?

Hough:That’s the kind of thing I think we ought to talk about, and then, if it’s become a cultural holiday, I’d like for us to talk about how we perceive its non-commercial meaning. Is Christmas now simply a cultural holiday more than it is a religious holiday for the culture at large?

Forrest Harris:To begin, we have to attend to the fact that Christmas has cultural significance to people other than religious people, that it tends to inspire people toward values that help them appreciate things around family, around community, around social histories that overlap into religious meaning. Those things have more cultural meaning than religious meaning.

Hough:You know, almost everybody has a Christmas tree, that is, almost everybody in my neighborhood does, and that Christmas tree has very little to do with the stories that those of you who are Christian ministers will be recounting in your pulpits. What does it mean that the Christmas tree has become a kind of a symbol?

Mark Fuller:I think you have to be blind, deaf—and whatever—not to recognize the cultural thing Christmas has become. We’ve surrounded many of our Christmas celebrations with all these things that don’t have a clear, direct connection to the original story. But, too, we have to acknowledge the fact that a significant portion of our society operates around the holiday of Christmas. It’s to the point where, even in our local churches, we have to organize things not based on the idea of what happens on Dec. 25, but in terms of what happens from three days before Christmas until three days after New Year’s, because that’s when all the kids are on vacation, that’s when everyone’s out of town.

One of the challenges that we face as Christians attempting to talk about something that is supposed to have some religious significance to us is, how do we find that significance in the midst of all these other things?

Hough:That’s not always easy, is it?

Fuller:No, it’s not. But one of the reasons it’s difficult for us is that we do try to ignore those cultural things—we try to pretend those things aren’t there. We try to get back to the kernel without going through the shell. As a child in elementary school living in Phoenix, Ariz., I remember we had a yule log. That was in the ’60s, which meant we had a fake yule log sitting next to the aluminum Christmas tree.