Context: Tom Flynn, executive director of the Council for Secular Humanism and editor of its flagship magazine Free Inquiry, wrote an essay and a book a few years back, arguing that no atheist should celebrate Christmas ever ever ever — yes, he uses the words “should” and “shouldn’t,” repeatedly. He’s opined about this topic many times, including comments (on Facebook and elsewhere) that atheists who do celebrate Christmas aren’t “real atheists,” are “hypocrites,” and are giving “aid and comfort to the enemy.” He doesn’t even approve of secular Solstice celebrations. In the last couple of weeks, Beth Presswood, of the Godless Bitches podcast and the Atheist Community of Austin, has been ripping him a new one about it on Facebook.
My overall angle on this is that every atheist has to find their own ways of coping with religion’s intrusion into everyday life. Some of us push back on it with everything we’ve got. Some of us are fine with secularized versions of religious traditions — sincere or mocking or both. Some of us are fine going along with religious traditions. And many of us mix and match: pushing back against some religious incursions, accepting or creating secularized versions of others, going along with still others. I have zero problem with this. I’m finding my own way of handling Christmas, a balance of festivity, mockery, tradition, and resistance that works for me, and it does not trouble me in the slightest that other people are more traditional about it, while others are more oppositional, or are simply not interested.
I was thinking about this, and it occurred to me:
Oh. There’s a social justice angle to this.
Yes, different atheists have different ways of handling religion and its intrusions into everyday life. There are lots of reasons for that. But one of the big ones is: How much do they rely on a social support system that’s structured around religion? Are they in a culture or subculture or family that’s very religious? Would refusing to participate in traditions like Christmas — traditions that are religious, or semi-religious, or quasi-religious, or secularized religious — mean alienating people they can’t afford to alienate, for practical reasons or emotional ones? Would refusing to participate mean isolating themselves from the continuity that people get from traditions, the sense of connection to something larger?
And certain forms of marginalization can play into this.
African-Americans are more likely to have deeply religious families and communities, who they can’t afford to alienate or simply don’t want to. Poor people are more likely to have deeply religious families and communities, who they can’t afford to alienate or simply don’t want to. For women, the social costs of disconnecting from family traditions are often greater than they are for men, since the job of perpetuating these traditions is commonly seen as women’s work. Many LGBT people, who have been cut off from their families, find much-needed practical and emotional support in LGBT-friendly churches or other religions, and a much-needed sense of continuity and connection.
So insisting that no true atheist would celebrate Christmas is pretty damn insensitive to the different realities of different atheists — black atheists, poor atheists, women atheists, LGBT atheists, any atheists in other marginalized groups — who are more dependent on religious structures, or whose lives are just more intertwined with religious people.
Atheists with other forms of marginalization are often treated as traitors to their race, their gender, their culture. Why on earth would we want to pile onto that from the other side? Many black atheists already get a bellyful of, “You’re not really black.” It’s messed-up to pile onto that with, “You’re not really an atheist.”
It wouldn’t be a holiday without a lovely “no true scotsman!” argument, would it?
Honestly, for me, I just enjoy all of the stuff about Christmas outside of the religious stuff, so I have no issues celebrating it. Sure, I roll my eyes at so many things, but it’s a rare chance for us to use one evil (commercialism) to fight another one (religion). Beyond that, there is a lot of good stuff in the holiday season, and there’s comfort in friends and family, even religious friends and family.
I’ve spent the month opening a LEGO Advent Calendar with my daughter (no religious stuff there, unless Santa Vader is secretly Eastern Orthodox), something I couldn’t really do unless I was celebrating. I also get to wear silly santa hats (so does she), enjoy pumpkin pie and egg nog (which I like), and talk to some friends and family I rarely get a chance to. That makes it worth suffering through the religious junk to me. If that means I’m not a true atheist, I’m okay with it.
I guess Tom Flynn’s position is that celebrating the solstice in any way is conforming to Christonormative religiosity. But one of the trends that weakens Christian Christmas is the spread of secular Winter Holiday or Yule celebrations that tell people they don’t have to be Christian to enjoy a break from the cold, dark, long nights of winter.
We have our own Christmas- Yule- Solstice- atheist- traditions that do us quite nicely, thank you. Happy celebrating in your own way to you and everyone!
All the Dogmatic finger pointing, holier-than-thou pontificating, and shaming of people who don’t measure up to some BS standard is what Religions do. One of the great things about being an Atheist is that you can adapt and customize your life. So do what you want/need to and get on with it!
Merry Lennoxmas every one!*
*Annie Lennox was a Christmas baby.
What, does he hate agriculture or axial tilt or something?
I loathe the coercive and commercial aspects of Christmas, but I see no reason other people who like the holiday should have to give it up – just leave me out of it. Imperious authoritarians ruin everything. :-/
I bet this guy is super fun at office parties. Speaking of which, just had one at work. Everyone brought food and we exchanged gifts (some of them silly). It was fun. I’ve always liked Christmas and I’m not bothered by people who don’t celebrate or like it. I’m proud to be a bad atheist, especially since the larger atheist community has been shitty regarding social justice. I’m not going to follow someone else’s secular movement dogma.
I’m going to call this guy (Flynn) out as what I call an adolescent atheist.
For those that haven’t seen my formulation before (I wouldn’t think you have, but i’ve used the phrase on other boards and maybe here and I didn’t want to be too redundant) I mean the kind of atheist you met in high school who listened to Depeche Mode and thought he (it’s almost always a he) was being super-edgy or rebellious. The guy who makes every eaking moment an argument. The guy who doesn’t see the unspoken racism and classism in the “they are just a bunch of superstitious fools” line, and who thikn s the sole function of religion is to explain why and how things happen.
Some adults who fell victim to this were quite famous: Arthur C. Clarke, who called religion a form of insanity, was one of these.
I find it a tiresome argument. Becaue it comes from a place of privilege. And lord knows I did the same shit when I was a teenager and a young adult. But as I got older I learned that in marginalized populations especially, the entire equation of one’s relationship to religion is rather different.
I can be an atheist and still put up a Christmas tree and a menorah in the window. Because it’s an acknowledgement of the many strands that make up our family. Even though my in-laws are sort-of-religious people, my immediate family was a bunch of atheistic socialists for the last 100 years. And they had zero problem with CHristmas, and I would bet have been on the front lines of many, many struggles a damned sight more than Flynn has.
So Mr. Flynn: You’re being a dick, and the first step in social justice is DBAD.
Jesse, I think your stereotype of adolescents/high school age people is quite unfair. I doubt you have hard evidence that supports your opinion, but even if you did it would still be unkind and ennabling of the common prejudices against the young.
The headline in the photo, “Why believe in a god?” pleases me. Contrast that phrasing with the more common ‘why believe in god’.(or God) I think the latter gives the framing to the believers in that it appears to posit an identity that does not exist.
I have offered this point in the past, dunno if anyone agrees. I think it is at least worth a discussion. The believers have so many vernacular advantages that I don’t like to give them this freebee.
People have been using the winter solstice as an excuse to get together to party all over the world (except possibly equatorial places) more or less for ever. Exactly how you celebrate and what you call the celebration is up to you. Also, Mr. Fine does not get to define a “real” atheist.
I celebrate Christmas not as a religious holiday but as a family get-together. Some of the friends and family that I spend time with are celebrating a religious holiday. That is fine. I have the strange notion that people “should” be able to believe what they wish.
So Happy Holidays.
If Flynn doesn’t want to celebrate Christmas, the winter solstice, or whatever other holidays which don’t strike his fancy, that’s his call. He doesn’t have the right or the authority to dictate what anyone else does. I didn’t vote for him to be Emperor of Atheism and he doesn’t fulfill that function as far as I’m concerned. If he has a problem with that then I suggest he do something with a flying donut.
Markita Lynda @2,
That is exactly one of the reasons he gives for atheists not celebrating Christmas. On page 232 of his 1993 book The Trouble With Christmas, he wrote:
“Infidels who keep Christmas or an analogue of it promote a myth of consensus in American culture that serves the fundamentalist agenda. When infidels turn into ‘December Christians,’ keeping the shards of Christmas that suit them, they bolster Christian ideologues who claim that everyone celebrates Christmas.”
Also see page 234, under “Do As I Say, Not As I Do.”
My question is, how can atheists design their various of celebrations in ways that Christians simply can’t use as evidence that we are really secret Christians? How do we make it obvious to everyone else that the Christianists’ claims of consensus are wrong?
Markita Lynda @2,
I think that you may well be right about this. It is something in its specifics that Flynn did not anticipate a generation ago.
However, on page 209, he wrote:
“As for Christmas, I predict that it will eventually be abandoned as a universal public holiday. Multicultural forces will chip away at ‘public Christmas’ until what is left no longer satisfies Christians. They may then seek to replace the holiday with a more narrowly sectarian, hence protected, observance.”
He was almost predicting the War on Christmas with that bit about unsatisfaction. But what’s ironic about this quote is that most of Flynn’s book is about how secular Christmas already was when it was re-invented in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. More multiplicity of styles of celebration could further drain the Christ-ness of Christmas.
I also wonder if this secular dilution will make things easier for the marginalized people about whom Greta was writing.
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John Horstman @4,
Regarding the winter solstice, Flynn seems to have associated it only with pre-Christian rites. He wrote in his book (p.233-234) that atheists gain nothing from “an even older” “outmoded, superstitious observance” “which amounts to obsessing on human impotence before the elements” and which “traded in human helplessness”. He seems not to have been able to predict that some folks might use the solstice as a metaphor for observances he did favor, ones which would “celebrate our human achievement in keeping the elements at bay”. He missed the idea that symbols of enlightenment, like science as a candle in the dark, could supplant ancient (or neo-)pagan rituals.
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kellyw @5.
It turns out that the Center for Inquiry (of which Flynn’s Council for Secular Humanism is a part) does have Winter Solstice parties. I doubt that Flynn has ever attended them, but thanks for compelling me to find out that they happen. It’s actually kind of funny.
Al Dente @ #10: To be fair, Flynn is not setting himself up as an emperor or an authority figure. He’s setting himself up as a person with an opinion about what other people should and should not do — something I myself do all the time. (Heck, in this very piece I’m essentially saying, “Don’t tell other people that they’re not real atheists if they celebrate Christmas.”) The problem isn’t that he has an opinion about what other people should and should not do. The problem is that his opinion is wrong-headed, insensitive, and ridiculous.
Greta Christina @12
I agree that Flynn is merely offering his opinion. However, to quote your OP: “…no atheist should celebrate Christmas ever ever ever — yes, he uses the words “should” and “shouldn’t,” repeatedly. ” That certainly gives the impression that No True
ScotsmanAtheist celebrates Christmas.Personally I like Christmas. I have a decorated tree in the living room with an angel on the top (this is because of a joke which I will tell anyone who asks). Last Sunday I was with several hundred other people at a local museum singing Christmas carols (including religious ones). In a couple of hours I’ll be stuffing my face with poultry and cranberry relish and other good stuff to stuff one’s face with. I got gifts for my near and dear (and a few other people as well) and I’m undecided as to which book I received this morning will be read first.
As I said, if Flynn doesn’t want to celebrate Christmas then I won’t stop him. However I’m not going to deny myself a pleasure because someone I’ve never heard of before yesterday decrees I’m a double plus ungood atheist because I don’t follow his diktat.
In short: Should Atheists Celebrate Christmas Or Not? Yes.
To echo the OP and what others have said here, Christmas is something I’ve always enjoyed. It’s a special time of year for many reasons (my birthday being one of them). And my family was pretty secular Catholic of the only-go-to-church-a-handful-of-times-in-your-life brand, so there was never really any Christ in our Christmas. The manger scene under our tree was mostly a crappy alternate toy set for me to play with and we never had any prayers or hymns etc. So I refuse to deny myself (and my wife who is also a strong atheist who loves Christmas) the joy of the season.
As far as actions that reinforce, encourage, or empower Christianity, I feel like my celebrating an entirely secular version of Christmas is pretty far down on the list. If anything, I feel like celebrating Christmas but insisting that it has nothing to do with Jesus (for me) actually perturbs the annoying/evangelical types even more because it is tantamount to taking their precious thing away from them and stripping it of the most important part (to them.)
So that said, Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukah, Yule, Kwanza, or whatever else you all celebrate or don’t. Hopefully 2015 will be better (from the social justice angle) than 2014. Thanks Greta and all the other FtBers for providing a whole lot of great reading and thought-provocation.
I’m really not sure if this applies to everyone but for me as a kid the entire “Christmas is Jesus’s birthday” was always kind of an small afterthought and still is for my family that would identify as Christian if asked. Sure we had a nice little porcelain nativity scene but it never got any special reverence that the porcelain santa or snowman figurines weren’t given. So for me when I became atheist it was very easy to just drop that small little afterthought and keep everything else.
@ludicrous — I don’t think it’s particularly prejudicial to point out that when you are young, you often think dumb things. It’s part of being young and learning, and it’s ok. There are plenty of studies if you’re so inclined on how teenagers’ brains aren’t fully formed in many areas. (This is why we don’t let 15-year-olds, no matter how smart they are, pilot 747s, for example, and why we don’t recruit child soldiers, and why we don’t let kids do a load of other things even if they proclaim how mature and bright they are and we can all agree that Jane really is mature for her age).
The point i was making is that we grow out of it, and realize the world is a complicated place. Flynn hasn’t got that point yet. And unfortunately, he should have a long time ago. He looks at atheism as a black and white entity, and like more than one atheist I have met, completely ignores the actual functions that religions serve in various societies. I wonder if he’s never spoken to someone for whom religion is, for instance, a marker of identity against the dominant society.
Christmas is a bit more complicated, because what Christmas actually is will differ — sometimes widely — depending on the particular group you are speaking with and their relationship with the dominant culture. There’s a very big difference between the way the writers of Charlie Brown’s Christmas and say, a Filipino or Mexican family see the holiday in the US. Flynn seems to be ignoring that completely, along with a lot of the other stuff that Greta brought up.
Tom Flynn must be a puritan since he has that
haunting feeling that someone, somewhere, is having a good time.