Christmas is Much Bigger than Mere Politics

This past week, Peter Wehner—the longtime conservative activist, former speechwriter for George W. Bush, and prominent critic of President Trump—used his New York Times column to discuss Jesus, his family, and the “dysfunction” therein. The basis of the column is the beginning of the Gospel of Matthew, which traces Jesus’s genealogy from Abraham, through King David, through the Babylonian Exile, and up to Joseph. As Wehner notes, the lineage of the Lord is filled with sketchy and sinful people, not the least of which was King David himself, who, after sleeping with Bathsheba and getting her pregnant, arranged to have her husband, Uriah, killed in battle.

The premise of Wehner’s discussion here is hardly new. Indeed, this passage from Matthew is the traditional gospel reading at Catholic mass on Christmas Eve and has, therefore, been the subject of countless priestly homilies over the centuries. While it is presumed that Matthew’s intention in beginning his gospel thusly was to establish Jesus’s right to the throne and to document the fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy, the story has, lately, served as an opportunity to remind the faithful that we are all sinners and all, therefore, require God’s mercy to be saved.

For his part, Wehner seeks the input of biblical “experts” to explain to him the broader meaning of Jesus’s genealogy and to place it in a contemporary context. One such expert tells him that the passage shows that “Cycles can be broken. Systems can be replaced. Families—and therefore whole nations—can be healed.” Another tells him that it serves as a reminder that “from the very beginning, Jesus entered into solidarity with even the most disdained and marginalized of people.” A third tells him that “the genealogy of Jesus is also a story of radical inclusion,” which is important because “many who claim to be followers of Jesus are holding up Not Welcome signs to others.”

This is all well and good, I suppose, and certainly, it is true that all of these “experts” make valid points about what Christianity is or should be. Christianity is about forgiveness. Jesus did have a special place in his heart for the lowest among us. And yes, the faith is meant to be inclusive.

At the same time, each of these statements is rather reductive, and, more to the point, they appear to make narrow, mostly political points, rather than broad religious ones. They are explanations of Jesus’s mission and the faith he begat that appear to serve a political agenda—or at least they are in Wehner’s hands. The use of contemporary terms like “radical inclusion,” for example, suggests an acerbic political message, a purposeful jab at those who disagree with the experts on matters of social policy.

This is unfortunate, to say the least.

While it is inarguable that there is considerable overlap between religious beliefs and politics, the approach employed here by Wehner and his experts gets the relationship entirely backward. They start with political ideas—“nations can be healed” (after Trump, presumably); we must do a better job of caring for the least among us; be inclusive—and work backward to find a religious justification for them. Again, each idea is valid in a reductive sense, but the message of Christianity—and of Western Civilization more generally—is much bigger than that. It is far more expansive and far more important than the mere justification of narrow policy predilections. The politics of Christianity flow from the faith outward, not the other way around.

Given this, it would seem that the real message of the Genealogy of Jesus is that it doesn’t matter who or what came before; you are what matters to God. God sees you as an individual soul, created in His image and therefore full of His grace. Jesus was not the sum of his ancestors’ sins. And nor are we. We are all inherently equal and deserving in God’s eyes. This is the foundation not just of our faith, but of our civilization as well.

“The West,” as we understand the term, is a unique blend of traditions, all of which flourished in the Mediterranean region three to five thousand years ago. This blend—a mix of classic Greek and Roman cultures and especially the Judeo-Christian tradition—fostered a civilization that was unlike any in the history of man, established on two bedrock principles: that all individuals are equal and important before God and that there are commandments that transcend human traditions and conventions that apply to all individuals equally, at all times, and in all places. These two foundational values—the irreproachable worth of the individual and the transcendence of natural law—have their seeds in the Jewish and Greek traditions and are embodied in two celebrated quotes, the first from the Hebrew Bible’s Book of Jeremiah and the second from Sophocles’ drama Antigone. They are as follows:

Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you. And before you were born, I consecrated you.

And:

Creon: And still you had the gall to break this law?

Antigone: Of course, I did. It wasn’t Zeus, not in the least, who made this proclamation—not to me. Nor did that Justice, dwelling with the gods beneath the earth, ordain such laws for men. Nor did I think your edict had such force that you, a mere mortal, could override the gods, the great unwritten, unshakable traditions. They are alive, not just today or yesterday; they live forever, from the first of time, and no one knows when they first saw the light. These laws—I was not about to break them, not out of fear of some man’s wounded pride.”

These traditions, plus the New Testament—the Gospels and the letters of Paul—were interpreted and clarified by St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, who integrated Platonic and Aristotelian concepts, respectively, into Christian theology, all of it forming the substance of a civilization dedicated to the notions “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

This civilization—Western civilization—was summed up succinctly and poignantly by one of its last true heroes, Martin Luther King, Jr., who, in 1963, put it this way in his famous letter from the Birmingham jail:

We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights. . . Now . . . how does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust.

It almost goes without saying that there are political implications that flow from all of this—as the American Founders clearly understood and articulated. The late, great political scientist James Q. Wilson called this “the universal aspiration” and described it as the “most remarkable change in the moral history of mankind… the rise—and occasionally the application—of the view that all people, and not just one’s own kind, are entitled to fair treatment.” While it is true that the failure to be “inclusive,” for example, violates the spirit of the universal aspiration, it is not the whole of the moral principle in itself. The point is to create institutions—religious and secular—that encourage the aspiration, not to attack the narrow failure to apply it in some cases, and to make that the focus of the entire religious and civilization endeavor.

The message of Christmas is far bigger than politics and far more important than ideological spats. It is the message that we are all loved by God and are all equal and important in his eyes.