I know the thread has moved on but I thought this was an interesting question. What makes a secular holiday? Does going to church on Memorial day make it religious? I certainly know a lot of people who go to remember/pray for the dead and then go about their BBQ business.
For me I think I’d draw the line between 4% (1/24 hours) and 0.1% (1/24*30) if you are going to church every Sunday in advent I think you’re, at a minimum, celebrating religious Christmas but if you put lights up the day after Thanksgiving and are rocking Christmas carols all the way through the holidays and then go to a Christmas eve service so you don’t have your Christmas interrupted by religion. I’d say you were doing a secular Christmas.
I also think that it’s interesting that from the outside, or at least outside who have a prohibition from appearing to celebrate another religion, Christmas is very religious. While from the inside, the Christians saying “put the Christ back in christmas” or Charles Shultz having all of his characters but Linus forget that Jesus has anything to do with Christmas while putting on a Christian play, think that a large segment of cultural Christians are celebrating Christmas without religion. I, as an obviously bias person, think that the opinion of the people on the inside should be more valid then the opinion on the outside since that draws parallels to racism, sexism or other issues. The people experiencing something are typically given greater weight then the people observing their experience and talking about it. On the other hand it sure seems like some Jews feel like Christianity is being pushed on them by Christmas so maybe there are multiple people on the inside with wildly different perspectives. Which of course brings us to:
Of course, arguing about Christmas is almost as much fun as celebrating it so I’m still enjoying following along even if I’m not able to keep up with you guys.
I’m not commenting on people’s natures. I’m commenting on the nature of the holiday itself. The degree to which any individual feels religious about the holiday is only one contributor to that, and it’s not the dominant one. Their actions are a bigger part, as well as all the actions of the non-religious.
To put it simply :If people “feel religious” about something but still engage largely in secular actions, that makes the holiday secular.
How can I say that? By the fact that the holiday can be exported wholesale to a largely non-Christian country like Japan, and still be largely recognizable there (except the KFC thing…). If it were that religious, it wouldn’t be able to. Just like Valentine’s but not Easter.
The argument is where most Americans fall on that line. I’m saying it’s much more like the latter than the former.
I think this assertion is unsupported by your arguments in this thread. Based on my experiences with 100’s of people who celebrate Christmas in a variety of ways, I think you’ll find your views in the minority.
And you once again are engaging in the fallacy that religious people have bright lines between the two. Those things that you consider secular are things that others consider religious ritual. The fact that others can take said religious ritual and strip it of religious meaning for themselves doesn’t make the holiday secular.
No, I’m not. Religious people may not have bright lines, but I’m not in these religious people’s heads. So I’m judging the secularity of the holiday entirely by the observables - What actual religious activities they engage in, versus secular ones they engage in while possibly “feeling religious”. Because it’s the latter that’s a useless metric, not the former.
Oh, bullshit. There’s a difference between actual religious ritual and “feeling vaguely religious while doing it” and it’s only a disingenuous contrarian who would argue that e.g. putting up a plastic reindeer is the former, not the latter.
No-one’s shown that $1 trillion isn’t spent, that millions of people don’t go into debt, that secular Xmas entertainment rules the media. It’s entirely supported. You may disagree with the interpretation, but that’s not the same thing.
Having spent about 30 years participating in an entirely and I truly do mean entirely secular Christmas, with a tree, cookies, presents, stockings, and family feast without a whiff of baby Jesus in it, and then another 30 years participating in both the secular Christmas above, and an entirely religious and entirely separate Christmas as well (Midnight Mass, Christmas hymns in church, prayers before the creche), I can say from my own anecdotal experience that one person, that would be me, finds the secular and religious very separable. When I lived near my extended atheist family and was also a practicing Catholic who sang in the choir and was head of the liturgical environment committee (aka seasonal decorating), I found having two separate Christmases stacked on top of each other very tiring. And Easter, being a considerably bigger holy season for Catholics than Easter, was that much worse.
The churches are packed at Christmas by people who never show their faces any other time. We used to refer to them as “The Poinsettias”. Much of the labor of preparing for Christmas, for the parish, was about drumming up and then directing all the extra volunteers required to handle these crowds of strangers. For them it is just a traditional part of Christmas, and very little more. They may say they are Christian but they are certainly way less Christian than Jews who may never set a foot in Temple are Jewish, since Christianity is not about being genetically and/or culturally Christian, but about practice.
I don’t think we’re disagreeing on the interpretation, but on your conclusion. No one is arguing that there’s not a very extensive commercial aspect to Christmas. But that’s orthogonal to whether the same people also celebrate the spiritual aspects of the holiday. You see it as a bright line dividing the two; I don’t. And most of the people I know agree.
Let’s just say your experiences from far away don’t override the experiences of people who live in America, are immersed in the holiday season as an outsider, and extensively know many of the people you claim to be completely secular. Your experiences are valid, but not sufficient to support your claim. You have to account for more data points than your personal, limited, observations.
Much of my wife’s family are C & E Christians, but they were raised devout Catholics. While they only go to church on the holidays it is definitely a spiritual experience for them. Yes, it’s part of the ritual, but an extremely meaningful part.
Agreed, I’m not very impressed with the idea that church festivals are the preserve of the weekly devotees. Church should be a welcoming place for everyone, at any time (and of any faith and none). Of course, I’m just a CofE baptised atheist who admits to quite enjoying a carol service as part of my cultural heritage. Didn’t realise I’d been thrown out of the club.
Eh, fwiw, none of my religious Christian friends goes overboard with the commercial celebration. They give gifts to their kids. They host parties. They indulge in favorite foods at the holiday table. But the orgy of spending is mostly done by secular people, i think.
So Christmas is chiefly celebrated by religious Christians, but there’s a minority cabal of incredibly wealthy “secular people” spending that trillion and driving Mariah up the charts?
No, I’d say that Christmas is celebrated by religious Christians, by people who identify as Christian and feel more Christian during the holiday season, and by people who celebrate completely secularly.
My guess was about a third of Americans are celebrating Christmas as a religious holiday. And not all of those are devout Christians (but some have their Christianity bolstered by participating in an overtly Christian celebration.) That leaves part of the 30% and most of the remaining 70% to be spending like mad. No “minority cabal” required.
…but it’s still more a religious holiday than a secular one? You’re doing my arguing for me…
Americans spend on average 15 hours just shopping for presents (20 if they’re a woman). That doesn’t include wrapping … or returns. That’s an average. It’s take quite the marathon Christmas Eve service to compare with that. Secular activity is by far the dominant part of the holiday.
Your framework for the argument–that the secular and the religious are weighed on a balance scale against one another, like a soul is weighed against a feather–is what’s being rejected. There’s a fundamental disconnect here.
The fundamental disconnect is with those who think a few hours of prayer somehow renders a two-month orgy of spending and partying (where 70% of the participants aren’t even doing much, if any, of that praying) into something more religious than secular.
I’m not the one weighing feathers and souls. The ones who think religion is catching like cooties, but secularity somehow isn’t, are the ones playing with magic comparisons.
whereas I have experience with what, five?