COTTON
MATHER'S DILEMMA:
CHRISTMAS IN PURITAN NEW ENGLAND
by
Doug Ward
On a December morning, a congregation has gathered to worship,
and the pastor steps to the pulpit to deliver a pre-Christmas sermon.
Quoting Romans 14, he encourages those in his flock who celebrate Christmas
and those who do not to treat each other with brotherly love and mutual
respect. He then cautions both factions to avoid the sins and excesses
often associated with that season of the year.
This scene sounds very familiar to us in the Worldwide Church of God
in 1998. Interestingly, though, it took place in Boston in 1712. The
speaker was Cotton Mather, the famous Puritan Congregationalist pastor,
and his sermon is described in the first chapter of historian Stephen
Nissenbaum's fascinating book, The Battle for Christmas (Alfred A. Knopf,
1996). Nissenbaum's account of the Christmas controversy in colonial
New England provides us with an insightful glimpse at Christian attitudes
toward Christmas three hundred years ago, giving some much-needed historical
perspective on our current struggle with this holiday.
Who
Were the Puritans?
When
we hear the Puritans mentioned today, images of witch trials, punishment
in the stocks, and scarlet letters probably come to mind. We use the
adjective ``puritanical'' to describe a rigid, overly strict attitude.
To really understand the New England Christmas controversy, though, we
will need to look beyond our modern stereotypes and learn more about
the Puritans, their convictions, and the times in which they lived.
The Puritan movement began in sixteenth-century England as an effort
to reform the Church of England. Through the courageous efforts of people
like William Tyndale and Myles Coverdale, the Bible was becoming more
widelyavailable in English [1], and greater biblical literacy led many
to the conclusion that centuries of Roman Catholic tradition had moved
the Church far away from scriptural principles. Taking inspiration from
John Calvin's reforms in Geneva, the Puritans hoped to reconstruct the
Church, and ultimately all of society, according to a biblical model.
The Puritans were never able to fully implement their program, either
in England or America, but their movement did lead eventually to the
formation of a number of different Christian denominations; in fact,
much of American evangelical Protestantism, including the WCG (see the
chart at the end of [3]), can trace its lineage to one part or another
of the Puritan movement.
The Puritans who founded the Massachusetts Bay colony in 1630 saw in
their new home a wonderful opportunity to carry out the Puritan program.
They viewed themselves as a modern nation of Israel, with a mission to
set up a model society in the ``promised land'' of America as an example
to the world and a preparation for Christ's return. (In a famous reference
to Matthew 5:14, John Winthrop, the first governor of Massachusetts,
called the colony a ``city upon a hill.'') To accomplish this mission,
the church and the civil government would work together to build a Christian
society. In particular, they would promote an orderly weekly cycle, with
six days of work followed by a Sunday set aside for rest and worship,
and they would move to suppress observances that they deemed unbiblical.
Accordingly, the Massachusetts General Court outlawed the celebration
of Christmas in 1659, setting a fine of five shillings for violators
of its ruling. Christmas remained illegal in Massachusetts until 1681,
when the General Court revoked the law under pressure from English authorities.
Reasons
for Opposition to Christmas
Some
of the reasons for the Puritan opposition to Christmas are very familiar
to us today. First, they knew that there is no biblical or historical
evidence connecting the birth of Jesus with late December, when it probably
would have been too cold in Bethlehem for shepherds to be ``keeping watch
over their flocks by night'' (Luke 2:8). Second, they recognized that
Christmas had its roots in pagan winter solstice festivals like the Roman
Saturnalia. However, their rejection of Christmas stemmed from a deeper
source than a mere academic awareness of its origins. Culturally as well
as chronologically, the Puritans were much closer to the origins of Christmas
than we are today.
In the agricultural societies of early modern Europe and colonial America,
December was a time when there was relatively little work to be done
and an abundance of food was available. The harvest was complete, animals
had been slaughtered, and the year's supply of beer and wine was ready.
This combination of circumstances naturally resulted in the Christmas
season being a time of gluttony, drunkenness, and sexual promiscuity,
often expressed in public rituals that, in Nissenbaum's words, ``involved
behavior that most of us would find offensive and even shocking today''
[2, p.5]. In these rituals, social and sexual roles would be reversed.
For example, men would dress as women and women as men, and bands of
peasants would roam the countryside, forcibly entering the homes of landowners
and offering songs and promises of goodwill in exchange for food and
drink from the landowners' stores. If the owner of the house refused
to accommodate such a roving mob, the revellers would vandalize the house
in a kind of adult trick-or-treat.
It is understandable, then, that the Massachusetts Puritans did not take
the approach of trying to ``conquer Christmas for Christ. ''After all,
Christianity had been unsuccessful in doing so for well over a thousand
years. Nissenbaum summarizes the situation this way [2, pp. 7-8]:
``The Puritans knew what subsequent generations would forget;
that when the Church, more than a millennium earlier, had placed Christmas
Day in late December, the decision was part of what amounted to a compromise,
and a compromise for which the Church paid a high price. Late-December
festivities were deeply rooted in popular culture, both in observance
of the winter solstice and in celebration of the one brief period of
leisure and plenty in the agricultural year. In return for ensuring
massive observance of the anniversary of the Savior's birth by assigning
it to this resonant date, the Church for its part tacitly agreed to
allow the holiday to be celebrated more or less the way it always had
been. From the beginning, the Church's hold over Christmas was (and
remains still) rather tenuous. There were always people for whom Christmas
was a time of pious devotion rather than carnival, but such people
were always in the minority. It may not be going too far to say that
Christmas has always been an extremely difficult holiday to Christianize.
Little wonder that the Puritans were willing to save themselves the
trouble.''
More
broadly, the Puritans saw Christmas as a symbol of a whole lifestyle
that they viewed as corrupt and hoped to reform. In the agricultural
societies of Europe, the year consisted of ``times of intense labor followed
by periods of equally intense celebration'' [2, p. 11]. The celebrations
included those that are known today as Halloween, Valentine's Day, Mardi
Gras, and May Day; occasions that, as Nissenbaum points out, have been
``generally observed with more revelry than piety'' [2, p.11]. The goal
of the Massachusetts Puritans was to replace this yearly pattern with
a more disciplined structure based on a weekly cycle.
Sermon
Notes from 1712
Throughout
most of the seventeenth century, the Puritans were successful in suppressing
Christmas and these other popular celebrations. Nissenbaum reports that
in almanacs of that period, the date of December 25 was listed without
comment, ``or it would contain a notice that one of the county courts
was due to sit that day-an implicit reminder that in New England, December
25 was just another workday'' [2, p. 14]. Christmas was never entirely
rooted out of Massachusetts life, but it was largely pushed to the margins
of society.
As the century progressed, however, the situation changed for several
reasons. First, the Restoration government in England, which disapproved
of Puritan rule in New England, annulled the Massachusetts Bay charter
in 1684 and ruled New England directly under the short-lived Dominion
of New England from 1687-89. The royal governor was soon overthrown and
the Dominion dissolved, but Massachusetts never regained its original
charter. As a result, the close alliance between church and state that
had governed the colony in its early years no longer prevailed. Second,
such an alliance became less and less appropriate as the population of
Massachusetts gradually became more diverse. People of many religious
views settled there, and they brought with them a variety of attitudes
toward Christmas. Third, the zeal of the early Puritans to reform all
aspects of culture, including popular celebrations, eventually waned
in later generations.
So by 1712, when Cotton Mather strode to his Boston pulpit, he faced
a congregation divided in its attitudes toward Christmas. In his sermon,
he did not concentrate on condemning Christmas itself, although he seems
to have personally disapproved of it. ``I do not now dispute whether
People do well to Observe such an Uninstituted Festival at all,
or no, ''he said. He went on to encourage a ``Romans 14'' attitude: ``Good
Men may love one another, and may treat one another with a most Candid
Charity, while he that Regardeth a Day, Regardeth it unto
the Lord, and he that Regardeth not the Day, also shows
his Regard unto the Lord, in his not Regarding of it....''
[2, p. 26].
Mather was more concerned about the immorality that typically accompanied
the celebration of Christmas. Referring to Jude 4, he condemned those
who would ``turn the grace of God into wantonness.'' Nissenbaum, by the
way, confirms that Mather's concerns were well-founded. Social historians
have discovered, for example, that there was a great increase in premarital
pregnancies in early eighteenth-century New England, with the largest
number of those pregnancies occurring during the Christmas season [2,
p. 22].
Ecumenical
Yearnings
Later in the eighteenth century, Congregationalist pastors
began to express a desire to celebrate the nativity in December with
other Christians, while continuing to lament the origins and the excesses
of the Christmas season. Nissenbaum presents examples of such sentiments
from several diaries. For instance, Ezra Stiles, who would later become
president of Yale University, showed his mixed feelings in a diary entry
from December 25, 1776:
``This
day the nativity of our blessed Savior is celebrated through three
quarters of Christendom. . .; but the true date is unknown. On any
day I can readily join with my fellow Christians in giving thanks to
God for his unspeakable gift, and rejoice with them in the birth of
a Savior. Tho' [i.e., if] it had been the will of Christ that the anniversary
of his birth should have been celebrated, he would at least let us
have known the day. . . .''
In
an entry from 1778, Stiles added, ``Without superstition for the day
I desire to unite with all Christians in celebrating the incarnation
of the divine Emmanuel.'' Another Puritan Congregationalist minister,
Ebenezer Parkman of Westborough, Massachusetts, expressed in his diary
in 1755 the ``desire to be one with all of them that are one with Christ,
and who avoid the Superstitions and Excesses of this Day, and Serve the
Lord in sincerity.'' Many in the WCG today can understand both the desire
for unity with other Christians and the misgivings about the origins
and customs of Christmas expressed by these ministers.
The descendants of the New England Puritans have continued to have mixed
feelings about Christmas. According to Nissenbaum, ``To this day New
England's Unitarian, Baptist, and Methodist churches are ordinarily closed
on Christmas Day, along with its Congregational and Presbyterian ones''
[2, p. 48].
Conclusion:
Lessons for Today
The
Puritan struggle with Christmas is just one skirmish in an ongoing ``battle
for Christmas'' that has lasted for sixteen centuries. Against the immorality,
materialism, and greed that have long characterized this season in the
northern hemisphere, a minority has always spoken out for righteousness
and moderation. In the remainder of his book, Nissenbaum chronicles this
battle through the last 200 years of American history. Along the way,
he traces the origins of the modern Santa Claus and describes the transition
of Christmas from a public holiday to a private, family-centered celebration.
The Battle for Christmas is an engrossing account of the history of American
approaches and attitudes toward Christmas, one that I highly recommend
for those who seek some historical perspective on our current Christmas
controversy.
What can we learn from the experience of the New England Puritans? I
would like to highlight two main lessons:
We are not alone. Today's problems are not new. The
excesses of the Christmas season are not simply caused by modern business
and advertising. Their roots lie much deeper, and Christians have always
been troubled by them.
We are all in this together. There is more than one
legitimate Christian response to Christmas. There have always been some,
like the Puritans and the WCG in past years, who have preferred to completely
abstain from the observance of Christmas. As we have seen, they are not
without historical justification in believing Christmas to be beyond
redemption. On the other hand, many others choose to replace the celebration
of the solstice with the worship of the Son of God. These two groups
have some important things in common. Both stand up for the worship of
the true God and oppose the sinfulness that has long been part of the
Christmas season. Both have their roles to play in advancing the Kingdom
of God.
My own attitudes toward Christmas have evolved over the years. The customs
of Christmas will probably always be rather strange and foreign to me,
and I largely tend to ignore them. For me, there is greater meaning in
the symbolism of the Incarnation that is present in the fall festival
season (see the preceding article). When the Christian Church largely
abandoned the Hebraic festivals in favor of celebrations like Christmas,
it was motivated partly by antisemitism, and I find this implicit antisemitism
more troubling than the pagan origins of Christmas. On the other hand,
I no longer view December celebrations of the Incarnation as wrong, and
I will gladly raise my voice in praises to God with fellow Christians
at any time of the year.
All of our readers will be able to make their own personal Christmas
statements, some much different from mine. In the final analysis, we
must all follow our consciences and accord each other the respect urged
by Cotton Mather back in 1712.
References:
F.F. Bruce, History of the Bible in English, Third Edition. Oxford
University Press, New York, 1978.
Stephen Nissenbaum, The Battle for Christmas. Alfred A. Knopf, New
York, 1996.
Joseph Tkach, Jr., Transformed by Truth. Multnomah Books, Sisters,
Oregon, 1997.
To
quote a famous 1960’s tune, “The times, they are a changin”.
After September 11, 2001 we have all become aware of the fact that
the world has become a more dangerous place to live in, even within
the borders of the United States. September 11th should be a wake-up
call for all Christians and those who think they are Christians. If
you were to die today-tonight-would you be assured of your place in
God’s heavenly kingdom, a recipient of eternal life? The words
of the apostle Paul ring out across the centuries asking this age-old
question “Examine yourselves, whether ye be in the faith; prove
your own selves. Know ye not your own selves, how that Jesus Christ
is in you, except ye be reprobates.” Dr. Charles F. Stanley poses
this same eternal question in his sermon “What Does It Mean To
Believe In Jesus”. And he gives three essential criteria that
will help you answer that question in your own personal life. The assurance
of your eternity is worth confirming. http://www.unityinchrist.com/faith/whatis.htm to
find out if “Jesus Christ is in you.”