The Annual Christian Challenge

Some Christians Shun Christmas and Its Trappings
By Jacqueline L. Salmon

For some Christians, Christmas is just another day.

For them, there will be no Christmas tree, no Christmas wreaths, no Christmas lights, no Nativity scenes. Nor will there be that rich Christmas dinner, nor the traditional exchange of gifts.

"It's not in the Bible," said Arnold Hampton, 58, minister of the United Church of God Columbia, who hasn't celebrated the holiday since 1966. "Jesus never mentioned it."

Hampton is a member of a niche of Christians who reject the traditional Christmas holiday. Like Jehovah's Witnesses and a few nondenominational churches scattered in the Washington region and nationwide, Hampton's denomination, the United Church of God, will ignore Christmas Day.

For Christians who refuse -- literally -- to buy into Christmas, the season has too many secular trappings. Some consider it a pagan holiday with no basis in Christian scripture, while others say the holiday's relentless consumerism turns them off so much that they've shut down the season altogether.

"I just don't think that this whole idea of the commercial Christmas and our American view of Christmas is what God is really asking for," said Kelvin Redmond, pastor of Body of Christ Church, a 900-member nondenominational congregation in Raleigh, N.C., that doesn't celebrate Christmas. The holiday, said Redmond, has "been gobbled up by secularization."

In fact, most modern-day Christmas customs -- Santa Claus, Christmas trees and wreaths -- have secular origins with only tenuous connections to Christians' beliefs about the divine birth of Jesus Christ, according to religious studies scholar Bruce David Forbes, author of "Christmas: A Candid History." Christian scriptures say little about the birth of Jesus, nor is there any indication of the day on which he was born.

The Puritans banned celebration of the holiday because they believed it lacked a biblical foundation and also because of the drinking and debauchery that had grown up around it, Forbes said. Indeed, until the 19th century, wide swaths of American society did not celebrate it. Congress still met on Christmas Day, and most businesses remained open.

But the holiday began to make a comeback in the 1840s, partly because of Charles Dickens's Christmas stories -- he wrote five Christmas novellas, including "A Christmas Carol" -- which painted the season as a time of warm family celebrations and imbued it with its modern-day spiritual and moral significance.

No one knows for sure how many Christians eschew the holiday, but for those who do, such sentimental depictions have little to do with the birth of Christ.

Jehovah's Witnesses -- 1 million in the United States and 7 million worldwide -- have long ignored Christmas, as well as other Christian holidays. They believe that Christians began observing the day only to compete with midwinter celebrations in the Roman Empire.

"The date is more tied to pagan observances, and the customs have pagan origins as well," said James B. Walker, a spokesman for the local faithful and a member of a Falls Church Jehovah's Witnesses church.

For the approximately 8,000 Jehovah's Witnesses in the Washington area, the "day will go on as normal," Walker said.

Like the Jehovah's Witnesses, the United Church of God -- which has 216 congregations in the United States, with a total weekly attendance of 13,000 -- sees no biblical basis for the holiday.

Todd Carey, a Mechanicsville, Va., United Church of God minister, last celebrated Christmas in 1984.

As a child, "I always liked it," Carey recalled. "I could use it to get gifts. That was the big pull."

But after unsuccessfully searching the Bible for an edict to celebrate the birth of Christ, Carey joined the United Church of God and now shuns the Christmas season.

"You want to be respectful to the scripture and the Bible and what it says, and Christmas isn't there," said Carey, whose teenage sons have never celebrated the holiday.

To many Christians who celebrate Christmas, the non-Biblical elements of the holiday have become so beloved that they have evolved into an integral part of the celebration of Christ's birth. There is no need, they say, to throw out the entire holiday because some aspects aren't in the Bible.

Pastor Johnny Barton of Glenarden Church of Christ in Lanham says he takes care to warn his flock that they can't lose sight of the sacred reality of Jesus's birth in the midst of the commercialization. That's when Christians run into trouble, Barton said.

Christian leaders who celebrate Christmas acknowledge that Jesus never commanded anyone to celebrate his birth. "But he didn't tell us not to, either," said the Rev. Thomas Reese, a senior fellow with the Woodstock Theological Seminary at Georgetown University.

"Because we believe that Jesus is so important to who we are as Christians, we want to remember and celebrate his birth, his death and his resurrection," Reese said.

Others who don't celebrate Christmas have a more secular concern: the commercialization that has risen up around it. Redmond said he began urging members of his congregation to drop the Christmas-season hoopla a dozen years ago.

"I really believe it is Satanic," he said. "It feeds into our selfish nature, that the season is really all about me."

Redmond acknowledges that some newcomers to the church have difficulty taking to the doctrine.

"It's a hard pill to swallow," he said.