Christmas doesn’t signify religion in America. And I can’t remember the last time I saw church in a movie that wasn’t a comedy using the setting for a set-up
Most non-religious americans are something like Christian Atheists. They don't believe in a god, but their worldview, ethics, and cultural norms are still originating in Christianity.
Anyway, Americanized Muslims tend to be quite "moderate", that is, they are either apostates or firmly on the path to becoming apostates. I don't know if this follows from selective immigration or from social pressure to assimilate into the liberal civic religion, but it is so. So it's not surprising that they would embrace the secularized counterfeit that many Americans already celebrate, just as they probably end up watching the high feast known as the Superbowl and joining into the national prostration before the Almighty Game.
And if I know someone celebrate Chanukah I’ll say happy Chanukah. Is that wrong?
I like latkes and challah, but that doesn't make me Jewish.
All groups influence culture and culture influences all individuals. But simply having adopted a piece of culture that came from some group does not make one a member of that group.
My wife and kids and I all celebrate Christmas. We are not Christian.
If celebrating Christmas made one Christian, then anyone including a yule log in their festivities must also be pagan.
That doesn't make them Germanic (or Roman) pagans. Ask the average person about Thor and you'll probably get something based on the comic book character. Ask him about Tiw and you're gonna get a blank look.
Easter Bunny is another commercialisation of a Christian holiday, which has nothing to do with rabbits. It is a day, where Christians celebrate Jesus raising from grave after being crucified.
> Santa Claus evolved from Dutch traditions regarding Saint Nicholas (Sinterklaas). When the Dutch established the colony of New Amsterdam, they brought the legend and traditions of Sinterklaas with them
The mobile app I used did not allow me to edit message and when I got back home HN no longer allows to edit the message.
The same is true, mutatis mutandis, of the retained (though radically transformed) Christian elements of consumerist celebrations like the modern American Christmas.
The pre-Christian Romans made conquering easier by bringing Roman luxuries (baths, food, wine, commerce, citizenship, etc) to conquered peoples and by making examples out of those who resisted, but Christianity was not part of the package.
Not sure what the Eastern Roman empire was doing with respect to conquering and Christianizing, but if they converted anyone, I don’t think those pagans contributed imagery back to Christian holidays as we know them in America.
That said, after the Western Roman empire collapsed there were lots of European powers who used conversion as part of their larger subjugation toolbox.
Carol of the Bells
We Americans celebrating Christmas are definitely celebrating commercialism, though, so that checks out. :)
Some quotes from the one about Christmas trees:
>People in the twenty-first century have this bizarre, instinctive notion that any custom we have today that we cannot rationally explain must be a survival of pre-Christian paganism. The idea of “pagan survivals” is so widespread that it has basically become the de facto explanation to any puzzling or peculiar tradition. People essentially just answer the question “Why do we decorate trees at Christmas?” with “I don’t know, so it must be paganism.”
>Most of the customs, traditions, and ideas we associate with the modern, secular Christmas are products of the past two hundred years. If you want to blame something for “ruining” Christmas and “taking Christ out Christmas,” you would be closer to the mark blaming twentieth and twenty-first century American capitalism than seventh-century BC Canaanite paganism (or whatever other variety of paganism you happen to fancy).
Easter definitely didn't originate with Christians, though. One of the things that made Christianity's spread so successful (apart from having the force of the great colonial empires of the Western world behind it) was the strategy of syncretizing and recontextualizing local pagan rituals, holidays, deities and (for better or worse) entire mytho-histories around Christianity.
He was debating a $social-leftist and basically said:
>You say you're not religious, but the things you hold as value, the trappings of your ethics, and your decision making process seems to be more aligned with judeo-christianity than your self-proclaimed naturalist atheism"
Christmas is incredibly popular in Japan, which isn't very Christian at all.
My family does, and we are all mixed. Also the xmass tree, was called New Years's Eve tree, and it went up every year, right before xmass.
This was even in communist Albania, where religions were forbidden. The only thing we changed, was to open presents in 1st of jan, instead on the 25th.
The whole xmass tree thing tradition, is an old pagan one, and existed way before jessus or whoever was born. It is a indo-european thing.
Yes it does...
Considering everything I was told about America, I was surprised to see that it is a Christian nation (I expected it to not be because of nominal separation of church and state). Instead, many laws are based on Christianity, leaders invoke the Christian god for justification for actions, and the state has official holidays for Christian events.
Modeling America as a Christian nation led to a more accurate prediction of reality.
This has led to less surprise on my part than most to see that local governments were amenable to bending to Christianity a lot more than others. SF has recently made specific parking laws for churches that close the streets. No such policy exists for synagogues, in comparison. Some were surprised. But I wasn’t. I expect governments at all levels in America to act to privilege Christianity.
After all, in action, America is a Christian nation. In practice, it is indistinguishable from the UK which has a de-jure (and de-facto) state religion.
If that alarms you, definitely do not go to Europe!
That America has some unimportant vestiges of Christianity doesn't make it "a Christian nation" for any useful purposes. Yes, Trump did a bit of pandering to Christians which fooled precisely no one, but in any matter of substance America is resolvedly secular.
If you want an accurate and useful model, think of secularism as the religion of the elite minority and the law of the land while Christianity is simply the most popular plebeian religion. Yes, in rare occasions members of the elite need support from the lower classes and will pay some vapid lip service to Christianity (consider Trump's comical appeal to Christians: "the Bible is the best book ever, probably even better than the Art of The Deal"), but beyond that secularism is absolutely the law of the land legally and culturally.
For other readers, you can model America as parent comment or you can model America as I have described it. I think you will get more accurate predictions from my model but if you don’t believe that, ask other outsiders who have moved to America (and made it their home, as I have). Or come here yourself.
Unfortunately, American identity is tied up in these things. The so-called separation of church and state is held up on as much of a pedestal as “freedom” with predictable effects: evidence contra these principles is ignored or considered a threat. But come here and see for yourself.
You're extrapolating an awful lot from a joke, but in any case if Europe fails your test for secularism then what countries are more secular? China?
> The so-called separation of church and state is held up on as much of a pedestal as “freedom” with predictable effects: evidence contra these principles is ignored or considered a threat.
The principle of separation of church and state is the foundation for American secularism. It's strange to me that you're appealing to it as evidence that America is particularly religious. Do you reserve "secularism" only for polities that forbid religious practice?
Having at least o couple of irreligious people in the legislative would be a good start :)
https://www.pewforum.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/2018/12/...
If Christianity wasn't a major force in America there would be no controversy over Roe vs Wade (which everyone expects to be overridden soon, thanks to Christian activism) nor over gay marriage.
That is very different! Buddhists in Jordan a legally barred from doing so, whereas there's no law demanding that you actually celebrate Christmas.
It’s not anything that upsets me but observationally it is so obvious. M
Context matters.
This is not a general xtian supremacy thing. It is a unique historical thing with SF AA Baptist churches whose populations were gentrified out of their neighborhoods. Their churches remained and they commute from all over the Bay Area to attend Sunday mass.
Cops and neighborhoods accomodated this practice, but the latest generation of gentrifiers whined and complained as they are wont to do so the Supervisors got involved.
However, the fact that this stuff happens repeatedly for Christian institutions and rarely (almost never, in fact) for others is not something that escapes me. The state does privilege Christianity. That makes sense since America is a Christian nation.
Probably just because there are a lot of Christian institutions.
It is extremely common in religions to have a large majority of people only doing the most visible festivals, not the daily/weekly things, that doesn't mean that the festivals are no longer religious.
I grew up in a major Jewish population center in the United States, most jews did not celebrate christmas outside of the ceremonial going out for chinese food.
Muslim students also did not celebrate xmas.
This is an urban center on the east coast.
Wait, what, this is a thing? I'd never heard of that. Like, only the Jews would do it? Or more generally it's common for everyone to go out for Chinese food on Christmas? That has to be regional, if it's true. Kinda funny either way.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_American_Chinese_restau...
I'm sure if more restaurants were open people would be celebrating at all sorts of other restaurants as well.
Going out for Chinese food is literally a tradition of said holiday. It's as much as celebration, as having a family gathering for atheists "for Christmas".
I think that people have a tendency to underestimate the degree of Christian influence on their way of life, and the vast majority of people who practice xmas are Christian, even if they are not weekly church attendees.
I was raised in an atheist household, we definitely viewed Christmas as a religious thing. Most of the songs are very religious, people go to mass, etc.
One is not a Christian because Christianity influenced their culture.
> and the vast majority of people who practice xmas are Christian
The vast majority of people on the planet are also Christian. Does that make "humanity" a Christian institution?
The point is that Christianity has become so normalized to you that you don't recognize Christian celebration as religious.
The fact that you incorrectly think that the "vast majority of people on the planet are also Christian" proves my point.
So? Doesn't that just serve to lessen its overall religiousness? I mean, Christmas's traditions are themselves derived from pagan solstice celebrations. Wouldn't that make it a pagan institution by your reasoning?
Much like how Christians adopted pre-existing traditions and slapped a Jesus-shaped label on them, people are now slapping a secularity (or, I would argue, consumerist) label on to Christmas traditions.
Well... [0]
> Wouldn't that make it a pagan institution by your reasoning?
Even when, say, a previously pagan practice is incorporated into Christianity, it is reinterpreted and given a new meaning, though probably in some way related to the original _by analogy_. This could be done to help the new converts better relate to the new faith and to preserve as much of the good in the previous culture as possible (in general, Catholicism gladly takes in whatever good and reconcilable there is in any culture[1]). In agreement with what you say, this does not make Christianity pagan.
Whether this is the same as the secularizing or commercializing or "consumerizing" of Christmas, I don't know. Maybe you could argue that this lumpenreligions are doing something analogous to what I just described, but this seems like a flaky comparison. Besides, secularism is a Christian heresy, so it's more like a heretical version of Christmas that's being practiced. The very idea of "secularism" is incomprehensible outside of Christianity (e.g., in Islam there is only Islam and the world of the infidels to be conquered and brought under the rule of Allah; the mosque is not an institution like the Church, just a building for prayer and thus no distinction, much less separation, between Church and State is thinkable).
[0] https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/refuting-th...
[1] You can give this ultimate justification in "logos spermatikos".
No, it means that I confused the terms "majority" and "plurality". If 75% of the world were Christian, it wouldn't make "being human" a Christian institution.
For most Americans Christmas is about family, Santa (Coke's version), Reindeers, Elves, Trees, and Gifts. And then local or family traditions which may include mass, but for most, it does not.
If you'd like some stats - 90% of Americans celebrate Christmas. Fewer than half of Americans consider Christmas primarily a religious holiday. Among younger generations that is much lower (30% of Millennials consider it a primarily religious holiday). A majority of Americans say that Christmas is less of a religious holiday than it was in the past. Only about half of Americans will go to church on Christmas (compared to 82% that will spend time with family).[1]
https://www.pewforum.org/2017/12/12/americans-say-religious-...
Maybe we're looking at different stats. I'm looking at the ones you linked from Pew, which show that 61% of Americans who celebrate Xmas consider it to be Christian, down from 64% in 2014.
That's supposed to convince me that it is a secular holiday?
“The image of Santa Claus as a jolly large man in a red-and-white suit was the standard long before Coca-Cola co-opted it for their advertising.”
People are like fish, they often don't know what water is. They don't realize that their views are usually defections (of defections of...) from Christianity and therefore essentially Christian heresies. In similar fashion, Christmas is first and foremost a religious holiday. The secular version is neuters and changes the original to better conform with secular expectations while trading on the energy and raison d'etre of the original in some weird way. If you think about it, the secular version drained of the original religious content is ridiculously stupid, like all those Soviet attempts to create substitutes for the originals. Call it an idol that will one day fade because Christmas is not very sustainable when cut from its life giving root for very long.
Like "Die Hard" ;).
Did you know that Sunday is a day off in China as well?