If you pay attention to scholars of Scripture, then you know that just about everything you thought you knew about Christmas is not in Scripture. It might not have been an inn, there was no taxation requirement that made everyone come back to their home town, there’s no reason to think that there were three magi, and the magi story and shepherd story don’t match up, it might not have been December 25, there almost certainly wasn’t snow, and “virgin” didn’t necessarily mean she hadn’t had sex.
But I have a lot of tolerance for people with various understandings of what Christmas means. In the early 80s, I was in a store in Baja California, and I fell in love with a representation of the Last Supper. In it, Jesus (on the cross) is at a table with people eating lobster, bananas, watermelon, and tortillas. Of course, Jesus didn’t eat tortillas and lobster at the actual Passover meal he had with his disciples, and he wasn’t on a cross at that dinner, and his cross wasn’t in cactus, but I love(d) that it was an understanding of Jesus in terms of their own lives.
I love the Staples Singers’ version of “No Room at the Inn,” which is about imagining Jesus’ birth in a segregated hotel, in which the bellboy, waitress, maid, and porter would have been welcome at his birth. That isn’t historically accurate, but it’s true to Jesus’ message of inclusion.
I love Auden’s Christmas “Oratorio,” which is factually wrong in so many ways, but, again, wonderfully true in many.
I think it’s important to understand that cultural variations and interpretations of the Jesus story are exactly that—interpretations. Many years ago, Sallie McFague said that the metaphors and parables of Scripture are like the green glasses that people wear in Oz. After a while, people become so comfortable with the glasses that they think Oz really is green, as opposed to looking green through those lenses. Jesus eating lobster while on a cactus cross is a lens; his being born in an inn staffed by African Americans is a lens. Representing Jesus as white-skinned and fair-haired is a lens.
One of many reasons that the “war of Christmas” is deliberate hokum is that it isn’t a “war” at all, and it isn’t even an implicit attack on what Scripture says about Jesus and his birth. Acknowledging that not everyone celebrates Christmas, let alone in a way that is very recent, and very culturally specific, isn’t an attack on anyone or anything. Feeling threatened by that acknowledging is taking difference as aggression. Scripture doesn’t give us the right to deny that we have a lens. But we can celebrate the many ways that people understand the story of hope and birth.
A lot of American conservative Christianity is affected by Calvinism, not necessarily the most complicated aspects of John Calvin’s beliefs, nor even all of what he said, but what might be called a popular (or lay) version of Calvinism.
(As an aside, I’ll mention that’s pretty common—what actual people in the congregation believe is not necessarily what their sect is supposed to hold dear. I know a lot of Catholics who don’t believe that the host is literally Christ’s body, Lutherans who believe in “decision theology,” people who say the Nicean Creed on a regular basis but who don’t actually believe in the physical resurrection of the body, so that people would have a modified version of Calvinism isn’t a criticism. It’s just a fact.)
There are several ways in which lay Calvinism comes up, but here are the ones that are important for the question of what we should do (or not) about police violence: • that humans are so corrupted by original sin as to be in constant danger of slipping into sin. • that everyone knows what is and isn’t sin (right and wrong are not only in a zero-sum relationship, but, at any given moment, what’s right or wrong is absolutely clear). • that sin is the consequence of giving in to sinful impulses (that we know to be sinful in the moment); that is, a lack of control. Therefore, only very controlling people can do the right thing, and only a culture of control can get people to behave well. • that the world is divided into saints and sinners, and that saints are the ones capable of self-control. • the only way to get sinners to behave is to punish them; if you punish them enough, they will behave well; • that immorality and crime are (or should be) the same, because otherwise immoral people will not be punished and they will create a culture of immorality. Since immorality = crime, this failure to control the sinners will mean that everyone—including the faithful—will be punished with a high crime rate. A nation that is not following God’s obvious rules will be punished by losing its dominance. [1]
If you accept all these premises, and I think they’re a fair summary of what a lot of self-identified conservative Christians believe, then, it follows that we have to have a culture with a lot of punishment. Since immorality and crime are the same (people who are immoral will commit all the sins), then a culture that tolerates immorality will be a culture with a lot of crime. [2]
So, what many conservative Christians believe is that, if we want to have a culture that is moral (and with less crime), we must have mechanisms of social control because, if people are not threatened with punishment, they will fall into sin. People—all people–who are not threatened with punishment will sin. Therefore, we have to have a police force that can punish people—that’s the only way to have a culture without a lot of crime (other than massive salvation to their specific sect, but the Calvinist notion that the elect are few makes that problematic).
In my experience, conservative Christians who “support the police” don’t want the police to do what is actually their job: that is, arrest, and not punish, people. They want a police force that is empowered to punish in the moment. That stance, I think, has to do with their sense that the judicial system is too concerned with process, too likely to insist on fairness, and too “liberal” (in the old sense of the word). They think a police officer should be able to decide, in the moment, that a person is good or bad (saint or sinner), and act accordingly.
If you accept all the premises of this version of Calvinism—people are basically bad, they only behave well if punished, right v. wrong is obvious to good people—then you can end up with thinking that the police should be able to punish people.
Except for one problem. Police are people.
If all people are prone to sin unless threatened with punishment, then, if we give the police the power to punish people, some of them will use that power in a sinful way. That conclusion necessarily follows from the premises of this version of Calvinism.
So, were these conservative Christians consistent in their application of Calvinism, they would be strong advocates of punitive policies in place for police forces. They would insist that police be held accountable, and punished for misbehavior. They would want to make sure that the police who abused their power—since, as their model of human behavior says, all people will behave sinfully unless threatened with punishment says—are guaranteed to be punished. They would be as committed to punishing abusive police as they are to punishing any other criminal. They would advocate strong and powerful community control of the police, and criminal charges for abusive police.
But they don’t. When it comes to the police, suddenly people don’t need accountability or punishment. How interesting.
[1] As another aside, this is the weakest part of the lay Calvinist argument for social control. They have a tendency to cite stories, like those about Sodom and Gommorah, that are actually about saving the righteous. While there are Hebrew Bible passages that say that God punishes communities that have fallen, there are none that say that the righteous will be punished for being in a fallen community. God always protects the righteous. It’s also impossible to make a good faith argument that the history of triumphal civilizations is one of Calvinist v. non-Calvinist, or even “follow the rules that current conservative Christians believe are absolutely clearly right v. wrong.” It’s all no-true Scotsmen. When in-groups triumph, it’s proof that God prefers them, when out-groups triumph, it isn’t proof that God prefers them.
[2] Another aside, this is sometimes a circular argument—if you criminalize normal behavior, then it can look as though immorality and criminality correlate. You can break that correlation by decriminalizing immoral behavior, of course. The more important data would be whether decriminalizing “moral” behaviors—women speaking in church, for instance—correlates to civil crimes like murder. There’s no evidence to suggest it does.
April 26, 1933, the British Ambassador to Germany (Horace Rumbold) wrote a long (5k words) telegram about Hitler. It was not only prescient about Hitler’s plans and strategies, but smart about authoritarianism. What follows are some excerpts.
The Chancellor has been busy gathering all the strings of power into his hands, and he may now be said to be in a position of unchallenged supremacy. The parliamentary regime has been replaced by a regime of brute force, and the political parties have, with the exception of the Nazis and Nationalists, disappeared from the arena. For that matter Parliament has ceased to have any raison d’etre. The Nazi leader has only to express a wish to have it fulfilled by his followers.
Hitherto I have dealt in despatches with the internal changes and the events of the moment. Now that Hitler has acquired absolute control, at any rate till the 1st April, 1937, it may be advisable to consider the uses to which he may put his unlimited opportunities during the next four years. The prospect is disquieting, as the only programme, apart from ensuring their own stay in office, which the Government appear to possess may be described as the revival of militarism and the stamping out of pacifism. The plans of the Government are far-reaching, they will take several years to mature and they realise that it would be idle to embark on them if there were any danger of premature disturbance either abroad or at home. They may, therefore, be expected to repeat their protestations of peaceful intent from time to time and to have recourse to other measures, including propaganda, to lull the outer world into a sense of security.
The new regime is confident that it has come to stay. At the same time it realises that the economic crisis which delivered Germany into its hands is also capable of reversing the process. It is, therefore, determined, to leave no stone unturned in the effort to entrench itself in power for all time. To this end it has embarked on a programme of political propaganda on a scale for which there is no analogy in history. Hitler himself is, with good reason, a profound believer in human, and particularly German, credulity. He has unlimited faith in propaganda. In his autobiography he describes with envy and admiration the successes of the Allied Governments, achieved by the aid of war propaganda. He displays a cynical and at the same time very clear understanding of the psychology of the German masses. He knows what he has achieved with oratory and cheap sentiment during the last fourteen years by his own unaided efforts. Now that he has the resources of the State at his disposal, he has good reason to believe that he can mould public opinion to his views to an unprecedented extent.
Dr. Goebbels is engaged on a two-fold task, to uproot every political creed in Germany except Hitlerism and to prepare the soil for the revival of militarism. The press has been delivered into his hands, and he has declared that it is his intention “to play upon it as on a piano.”
The outlook for Europe is far from peaceful if the speeches of Nazi leaders, especially of the Chancellor, are borne in mind. The Chancellor’s account of his political career in Mein Kampf contains not only the principles which have guided him during the last fourteen years, but explains how he arrived at these fundamental principles. Stripped of the verbiage in which he has clothed it, Hitler’s thesis is extremely simple. He starts with the assertions that man is a fighting animal; therefore the nation is, he concludes, a fighting unit, being a community of fighters. Any living organism which ceases to fight for its existence is, he asserts, doomed to extinction. A country or a race which ceases to fight is equally doomed. The fighting capacity of a race depends on its purity. Hence the necessity for ridding it of foreign impurities. The Jewish race, owing to its universality, is of necessity pacifist and internationalist. Pacifism is the deadliest sin, for pacifism means the surrender of the race in the fight for existence. The first duty of every country is, therefore, to nationalise the masses: intelligence is of secondary importance in the case of the individual; will and determination are of higher importance. The individual who is born to command is more valuable than countless thousands of subordinate natures. Only brute force can ensure the survival of the race. Hence the necessity for military forms. The race must fight; a race that rests must rust and perish. The German race, had it been united in time, would now be master of the globe to-day. The new Reich must gather within its fold all the scattered German elements in Europe. A race which has suffered defeat can be rescued by restoring its self-confidence. Above all things, the army must be taught to believe in its own invincibility. To restore the German nation again ” it is only necessary to convince the people that the recovery of freedom by force of arms is a possibility.”
Intellectualism is undesirable. The ultimate aim of education is to produce a German who can be converted with the minimum of training into a soldier. The idea that there is something reprehensible in chauvinism is entirely mistaken. ” Indeed, the greatest upheavals in history would have been unthinkable had it not been for the driving force of fanatical and hysterical passions. Nothing could have been effected by the bourgeois virtues of peace and order. The world is now moving towards such an upheaval, and the new (German) State must see to it that the race is ready for the last and greatest decisions on this earth ” (p. 475, 17th edition of Mein Kampf). Again and again he proclaims that fanatical conviction and uncompromising resolution are indispensable qualities in a leader.
Foreign policy may be unscrupulous. It is not the task of diplomacy to allow a nation to founder heroically but rather to see that it can prosper and survive. There are only two possible allies for Germany—England and Italy (p. 699). No country will enter into an alliance with a cowardly pacifist State run by democrats and Marxists. So long as Germany does not fend for herself, nobody will fend for her. Germany’s lost provinces cannot be gained by solemn appeals to Heaven or by pious hopes in the League of Nations, but only by force -of arms (p. 708).
Germany must not repeat the mistake of fighting all her enemies at once. She must single out the most dangerous in. turn and attack him with all her forces ” (p. 711). “I t is the business of the Government to implant in the people feelings of manly courage and passionate hatred.” The world will only “cease to be anti-German when Germany recovers equality of rights and resumes her place in the sun.
Hitler admits that it is difficult to preach chauvinism without attracting undesirable attention, but it can be done. The intuitive insight of the subordinate leaders can be very helpful. There must be no sentimentality, he asserts, about Germany’s foreign policy. To attack France for purely sentimental reasons would be foolish. What Germany needs is an increase in territory in Europe. Hitler even argues that Germany’s pre-war colonial policy must be abandoned, and that the new Germany must look for expansion to Russia and especially to the Baltic States. He condemns the alliance with Russia because the ultimate aim of all alliances is war. To wage war with Russia against the West would be criminal, especially as the aim of the Soviets is the triumph of international Judaism.
A number of the clauses of the original twenty-five-point programme have been abandoned as Utopian or out of date, but the campaign against the Jews goes to show that Hitler will only yield to energetic opposition even on comparatively unimportant points of policy. The brutal harshness with which he has overwhelmed his opponents of the Left and the ruthlessness with which he has muzzled the press are disquieting signs.
Not only is it a crime to preach pacificism or condemn militarism but it is equally objectionable to preach international understanding, and while politicians and writers who have been guilty of the one have actually been arrested and incarcerated, those guilty of the other have at any rate been removed from public life and of course from official employment. The Government are openly hostile to Marxism on the ground that it savours of internationalism, and the Chancellor in his electoral speeches has spoken with derision of such delusive documents as peace pacts and such delusive ideas as the “spirit of Locarno.” Indeed, the foreign policy which emerges from his speeches is no less disquieting than that which emerges from his memoirs. Even when allowance is made for the exaggerations attendant upon a political campaign, enough remains to make it highly probable that rearmament and not disarmament is the aim of the new Germany.
Representative government has been overthrown. Parliament has to all intents and purposes been abolished. A campaign of terror instituted by the authorities has not failed to have its effect on Democrats, Socialists and Communists alike. It is doubtful whether any real resistance would now be offered to a return to conscription. Still more serious is the fact that the resumption of the manufacture of war material by the factories can be undertaken to-day with much less fear of detection or denunciation than heretofore. Owing to the abolition of the press of the Left and the exemplary punishment of traitors and informers, it will be much easier in future to observe secrecy in the factories and workshops. I cannot help thinking that many of the measures taken by the new Government of recent weeks aim at the inculcation of that silence, or “Schwiegsamkeit,” which Hitler declares in his memoirs to be an essential to military preparations. In the introduction to my annual report last year I stated (paragraph 27) that militarism in the pre-war sense, as exemplified by the Zabern incident, no longer existed in Germany. I wrote (paragraph 29) that there had been a revival of nationalism, that nationalism, was not synonymous with militarism, but I added that, ” should nationalist feeling in Germany become exacerbated, it might well lead to militarism.” The present Government have, I fear, exacerbated national feeling, with the results which I anticipated.
Indeed, the political vocabulary of national socialism is already saturated with militarist terms. There is incessant talk of onslaughts and attacks on entrenched positions, of political fortresses which have been stormed, of ruthlessness, violence and heroism. Hitler himself has proclaimed that Germany is now to enter upon a ” heroic ” age, in which the individual is to count for nothing, and the weal of the State for everything.
They [German forces] have to rearm on land, and, as Herr Hitler explains in his memoirs, they have to lull their adversaries into such a state of coma that they will allow themselves to be engaged one by one. It may seem astonishing that the Chancellor should express himself so frankly, but it must be noted that his book was written in 1925, when his prospects of reaching power were so remote that he could afford to be candid. He would probably be glad to suppress every copy extant to-day. Since he assumed office, Herr Hitler has been as cautious and discreet as he was formerly blunt and frank. He declares that he is anxious that peace should be maintained for a ten-year period. What he probably means can be more accurately expressed by the formula : Germany needs peace until she has recovered such strength that no country can challenge her without serious and irksome preparations. I fear that it would be misleading to base any hopes on a return to sanity or a serious modification of the views of the Chancellor and his entourage. Hitler’s own record goes to show that he is a man of extraordinary obstinacy. His success in fighting difficulty after difficulty during the fourteen years of his political struggle is a proof of his indomitable character.
Herr von Papen, speaking in Breslau a few weeks ago, stated that Hitlerism in its essence was a revolt against the Treaty of Versailles. The Vice-Chancellor for once spoke unvarnished truth. Hitlerism has spread with extraordinary rapidity since the 5th March, and those who witnessed the celebration of Hitler’s birthday a few days ago must have been impressed by the astonishing popularity of the new leader with the masses. So far as the ordinary German is concerned, Hitler has certainly restored something akin to self-respect, which has been lacking in Germany since November 1918. The German people to-day no longer feel humiliated or oppressed. The Hitler Government have had the courage to revolt against Versailles, to challenge France and the other signatories of the treaty without any serious consequences. For a defeated country this represents an immense moral advance. For its leader, Hitler, it represents overwhelming prestige and popularity. Someone has aptly said that nationalism is the illegitimate offspring of patriotism by inferiority complex. Germany has been suffering from such a complex for over a decade. Hitlerism has eradicated it, but only at the cost of burdening Europe with a new outbreak of nationalism.
