Sects, Lies, and Videotape: Saving Christmas (Doane, 2014)

I watched this pile at the behest of M. C. Steffen. Thanks a lot, asshole. If you too would like to suggest a future topic for this column, leave a note in the comments section or on Discord!

Happy New Year and welcome back to Sects, Lies, and Videotape, where we look at religion in film. And Merry Christmas! Christmas was last month, you say? Oh ho ho, you Western schismatic. You probably also think that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. True Orthodox Christians pay no heed to the calendar established by the Antichrist in Rome and instead follow the one established by Julius Caesar, who has nothing to do with Rome. So what if it’s snowing on our crops? It snows all the time here anyway. How do things look two weeks in the past, you benighted heathen?

In any case, January 7 is close enough to January 6, which was, indeed, an alternative date for the celebration of Christmas in Antiquity and is still celebrated in the decadent West as the Epiphany, the culmination of the twelve days of Christmas. Or you can do like the Armenians in Jerusalem (but not the Armenians in Armenia) and combine the alternative date of January 6 with the 13-day difference between the Gregorian and Julian calendars. That means Christmas falls on January 19—which is today! So Merry Christmas!

Now, if you didn’t know any of that about Christmas, don’t feel too bad. You know who also doesn’t know very much about Christmas? Kirk Cameron, the star and producer of this month’s subject, the abominable Saving Christmas. This sack of coal was once the lowest-rated movie on Letterboxd, but now it does not even have that distinction to its name. I promised in my inaugural column that I was going to avoid typical Evangelical fare, because they are easy targets and Evangelical Christianity is about as foreign to me as Jainism.

But, you see, this is not a typical Evangelical film. In The Chosen (another Evangelical production), Jesus says at one point [Season 2, Episode 8]: “Did you think I was just going to come here and say, ‘Hey, everyone, just keep doing what you’ve been doing for the last thousand years, since it’s been going so great’?” Cameron, nevertheless, shares a different perspective: Everything we’ve always been doing is terrific! Even the crass materialism. Don’t you know? Christmas is all about the Son of God taking material form. And what better way to celebrate this event than by indulging in material goods? Greed, for lack of a better word, is God.

This message comes at the back end of a film whose primary target is not the godless masses who need to be brought to Christ but to a certain brand of Christianity that views the trappings of Christmas—the tree, the presents, Santa, the friggin’ Nutcracker—with deep-seated suspicion. People who ask themselves: Have I put perverted symbols with hidden meanings in my home? Is this works-based? Am I worshiping an elf?

Along comes Kirk Cameron to shepherd his fellow soldiers-in-Christ through their spiritual growing pains. His target is fictional brother-in-law Christian (Darren Doane, also the director), a disaffected loser who hates everything to do with Christmas yet lets his wife (Bridgette Cameron, Kirk’s real-life sister) tart up the place with the tackiest shit and a Santa-for-hire. Poor stewardship, Christian!

Cameron sits ol’ Christian down in the family car and witnesses to him about how every gaudy Christmas trinket is a symbol of the Gospel truth. His explanations range from “Maybe” to “Certifiable,” but before we get there, let’s take a little peak at the history of Christmas.

Sects!

First things first: Christmas—the liturgical celebration—is not in the Bible. That poses a problem for so-called Bible-Believing Christians, except for the Puritans, who straight-up banned the holiday because they couldn’t stand the thought of joy.

The celebration of Christmas, in fact, is not attested before the fourth century. That shouldn’t be surprising. If we take seriously the Book of Revelation’s claim that early Christians expected Jesus to “come quickly,” then there was not much need for an institutional religion, including yearly celebrations, because the world was about to end. That it took so long to solidify is based on several factors. Persecution probably did not help. The lack of a centralized church government and inefficient means of communication were likely contributing factors. All these things changed after the religion received state support.

To restate: Christmas, like other major facets of Christianity, is not strictly biblical. Neither is Sunday worship. Neither is the Trinity. Neither, you might say, is the divinity of Jesus, at least not in the way understood by Nicene Christianity. But I’m getting ahead of myself!

Why is it celebrated on December 25? I can confidently answer this one: I do not know. I’m well aware of the common opinion that the date is intended to counteract the celebration of the winter solstice, the main obstruction being that December 25 is not quite the solstice (though it may have been in the Roman calendar). Then there is the Roman cult of Sol Invictus, the “Unconquerable Sun,” who was indeed fêted on December 25. The issue here is that the evidence for this feast is roughly contemporaneous with the evidence for Christmas. So we have a chicken-and-egg problem: Who is copying whom?

The most compelling—though not necessarily correct—explanation I have read for the date ties Christmas to Jesus’ conception, celebrated (logically) on March 25. March 25 is not only the date of the Annunciation but also the date of Jesus’ death, which, according to the Gospel of John, fell on 14 Nisan of the Hebrew calendar (the day before Passover). Linking the Jewish lunar calendar with the Roman solar calendar is a big headache, but two popular propositions for 14 Nisan were March 25 and—wait for it—April 6. And nine months after April 6 is… January 6!

Whatever the case, there is certainly an impulse to synchronize seasonal time with sacred time. It is surely convenient that Jesus, the “light of the world” (John 8:12) was born not long after the days begin to grow longer (this is mentioned explicitly in Saving Christmas and is one of the things that is not total bullshit). The birth of John the Baptist, Jesus’ precursor, is celebrated on June 24, almost six months earlier. This time difference is not only based on the Gospel of Luke, which states that John’s mother Elizabeth was in her third month when Mary conceived, but it accords nicely with John 3:30, where the Baptist says of Jesus, “He must increase; I must decrease.” And what does the sun do after the summer solstice? It recedes! John’s conception, also narrated in Luke, does not receive the same recognition as Jesus’ Annunciation, but it is commemorated in some Eastern Churches on September 23.

As for local customs, and not the holiday itself, most of the ones commonly observed in present-day America are about as old as Queen Victoria. She’s pretty old (I’ve seen pictures), but not nearly as old as the liturgical celebration of Christmas. Somewhat ironically, the customs commonly denounced as pagan were promoted as a means to strip the holiday of “papistry” following the Reformation. The creation of a generic “Christmas Man” over the Greek bishop Saint Nicholas (Greek: Nicolaus) is one of these things, although he inadvertently retained his name in a somewhat denatured form: Santa [Ni]C[o]laus. Then there is the Christmas tree, often erroneously credited to Martin Luther himself. A mighty Nordic shoot decorated with the intestines of your enemies was considered a godly Protestant alternative to setting up a playset of idols, a tradition attributed to Saint Francis of Assisi.

Catholic or Protestant, apart from the mirthless Puritans, the Christmas papistries stayed.

Lies!

Speaking of mirthless, let’s now turn to Cameron’s film.

My preconception of this film was that Cameron’s arguments were so off-base that he is Not Even Wrong. Unfortunately, it’s a little more complicated than that. Although some of the arguments are rightly mocked, such as the claim that Christmas presents are the skyline of the New Jerusalem and nutcrackers are Herod’s soldiers sent to kill your children (the nutcrackers are from The Nutcracker), others are slightly more grounded in Christian tradition. They are undermined, however, by pointless casuistry, and, in the case of St. Nicholas, outright lies.

Once we are a captive audience in that car, Cameron’s first argument turns to the Nativity stories and how they anticipate the Passion. That is certainly a traditional interpretation, if not the intent, of Matthew’s story especially, but Cameron zeroes in on an idle detail: the swaddling clothes mentioned in Luke 2:7, which he claims are an echo of the linen clothes and the sudarium in which Jesus’ dead body was wrapped in the Gospel of John (20:7).

Combining Gospel accounts willy-nilly is a red card offense in critical scholarship. Matthew and Luke knew Mark, but they didn’t know each other, and who knows what sources John used. That’s not how Cameron would read the Bible, which, for him, is a unified work by a single divine author. I can respect that viewpoint, but there is an additional problem. The New Testament was written in Greek, not King James English, and the vocabulary for the various soiled pieces of clothing are different. In fact, the swaddling clothes are not even there. They are implicit in a Greek verb, esparganōsen, which means “to wrap in clothes.” Some translations of Luke 2:7 do not even mention the clothes, like the Common English Bible, which just has “she wrapped him snugly.”

Then Cameron talks about the Christmas tree as the Tree of Life/Cross of Christ and, well, that might be right. The Tree of Life—that was the other tree in the Garden of Eden, the one Adam didn’t get around to eating—has been typologically associated with the wood of the cross since at least the second century. A medieval legend developed that the tree in Eden is the literal wood of the cross. I’ve even written about it! But how did Eden and the crucifixion become associated with Christmas?

The origin of the Christmas tree is a tricky thing, and I will defer to my earlier answer about the date of Christmas: I do not know. But I have theories, and it does not depend on the Bible but on apocryphal literature. A widely disseminated work, The Life of Adam and Eve, recounts how, at the end of his life, Adam sent his son Seth to retrieve fruit from the Tree of Life to cure his terminal illness. Seth is refused at the gates to Eden, but an angel promises him that in due time the Son of God will be born to save Adam and his children. In a late version of this story (called Post peccatum Adae or The Legend of the Holy Rood Tree), Seth sees the Tree of Life for himself. It is an as-yet unadorned tree, though with an image of the Christ child at its top. The story is immediately followed by an account of the wood of the cross, which grew from seeds given to Seth from the Garden.

The Life of Adam and Eve makes an explicit connection between the tree of the Garden and the birth of Jesus. Another link is that, in Western Europe in the Middle Ages, Adam and Eve had a feast day—December 24, Christmas Eve—where celebrants put on a  “Paradise Play.” This play featured a tree decorated with Eucharistic wafers—a Christmas tree.

Cameron, naturally, has a different point of view. Adam stole from the tree, he explains. And when you steal something, you’ve got to put it back. But how could Adam put back the fruit, which had already become part of his body? Cameron pauses long enough for me to mentally conjure the image of Adam taking a huge dump and smearing it on the Tree of Knowledge. Then he continues: Adam had to put himself back on the tree! And Jesus, the last Adam, did that!

Cool, cool, but I spot two problems here. The first is the emphasis on theft, when Adam’s sin was disobedience. The forbidden fruit was given to him, after all. So there’s the casuistry. Second, the cross is traditionally identified with the Tree of Life, not the Tree of Knowledge. So Christ has gone and ornamented himself on the wrong tree.

The most bonkers part of this dreary midsection is when Cameron lets us know he has discovered the legend that St. Nicholas punched the heretic Arius at the Council of Nicaea. This is a real legend—not historical, mind you—but a real legend from the Middle Ages which has inspired some entertaining artwork.