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A Mid-Century Modern Christmas

On December 9, 1965 A Charlie Brown Christmas aired on CBS for the first time. I was two at the time and probably didn’t catch the first airing but it became for me, and many in my generation a part of my Christmas tradition.

The climax of the program, shown this year in my children’s public high school Christmas band concert, was Linus’ retelling of Luke’s birth narrative complete with shepherds watching their flocks by night. In the telling of this story Linus explains to Charlie Brown the true meaning of Christmas, rescuing him from his angst of increasing American consumerism surrounding the holiday.

George Marsden and the Twilight of the American Enlightenment

This year George Marsden, a preeminent historian of American evangelical history published a book covering the progression from mainline Protestant Christianity in the mid 20th century to the rise of the religious right setting the state for our current culture wars.

His assertion is that what dominates this history is a struggle to come to grips with religious pluralism. In the 1950s through the 1970s American was wrestling with Protestant, Catholic, Jew but the value system rested upon religious and philosophical assumptions it had inherited back to the period of its founding fathers. As long as competing cultural groups could agree upon “the good” institutions and practices wouldn’t suffer too much dislocation. As that consensus broke down institutions and assumed practices began to break down leading to the kinds of conflicts we have today over what is “the good”.

The Peanuts vs. South Park and The Simpsons

When I watch a Charlie Brown Christmas today I hear the older voice of the Protestant mainline still coming through. If you want to feel the difference compare the Peanuts to The Simpsons or South Park and you can see the deeply the conversation has changed. It isn’t simply our tolerance for the crass, but how many competing voices are in play and how deep the divisions between views of “the good” or moral practices.

The fight between mainline and evangelical churches was all about historical assertions and the Bible, but what they had in common was the liturgical use of the Bible. The mainline rejected a naive view of the Bible and history but mainline and evangelical could, with Linus, recite Luke’s story to discover “the true meaning of Christmas”.

The Holiday Season Continue reading →