I gazed one night at our Christmas tree in the living room of my family’s house. I considered the darkness surrounding the tree, its warm glow, how the tinsel reflected and intensified the steady and inviting lights, the various assorted ornaments, and the Yoda figure atop the tree (tacky, I know, but I didn’t make that decision). Most strikingly, I noticed the thinness and relative smallness of the artificial, plastic tree, this imitation of a fir, and I thought to myself:
What a strange religion I’ve come to believe.
The fir makes a contrast with the Thunder Oak, venerated in ancient times by the Germanic pagans of northern Europe. The Germans would worship this tree and offer sacrifice to the god Thor by taking a poor soul, usually a child, and slaying him bound at the base of the tree. Saint Boniface, the apostle to the Germans, when ministering to them, took an axe to the Thunder Oak, cut it down, and admonished them to look to the fir instead as a sign of Christ. It worked. The Germans converted to the Christian faith, and this is how we have Christmas trees.
What a strange religion I’ve come to believe.
The fir tree is a sign or icon of Christ, as the apparent frailness of the tree matches the frail humanity that our Lord took upon himself in His Incarnation and infancy. The tree, symbolizing Christ, represents the triumph of right over might, not that might is evil, but that right must make might, and not the inverse. Through Christ, in his frail humanity, we are redeemed, as it is through this union of the divine and human natures in the person of the Word that man is reunited with God through the blood of the cross.
What a strange religion I’ve come to believe.
The Incarnation of Christ elevates human nature, and it is through this event in human history that we see the basis for human rights. For, if Christ took on his humanity that all of mankind might be saved through the atoning power of the cross, then all men must possess some fundamental dignity and equality. It is this dignity— found through the revelation of the scriptures, first in our being created in the image and likeness of God, but secondly in Christ’s Incarnation to redeem humanity— that undergirds a consistent, persuasive account of human rights. It is not obvious to me that “all men are created equal” is, in fact, a self-evident truth, particularly given both the near-universal acceptance of slavery and the fact that a coherent and comprehensive account of universal dignity and equality among men only seems to emerge in the Christian/Post-Christian West. Equal human rights, as we understand them, do not exist apart from the particularly Christian notion that all men, even the weak and vulnerable and the forgotten, possess some fundamental dignity that must be respected by the state and society. I contend that the weak and vulnerable are understood to possess this dignity and the rights flowing from it only in light of the Christian revelation, particularly God’s revelation in the Incarnation of the Son of God, as it is through the weakness and the vulnerability of Christ, especially as we see him in the cradle and on the cross, that men are redeemed and sin and darkness are conquered. Apart from this account, I fail to see how a fully intelligible account of equal human rights may be given. Even within the other great monotheistic faiths of the world, there is not this same understanding, as the distinction between the Jew and the Gentile, the Muslim and the Kafir, carries implications that don’t hold in the Christian analogs of believers and non-believers, baptized and pagan, or reprobate and elect, leading me to believe that the fact of the Incarnation distinguishes Christianity even from other monotheistic religions as regards this issue of human rights. The scriptural proof for this lies in St. Paul’s writing that “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal 3:28). For the secular materialists, I’m not exactly sure where they would begin to derive an account of human rights that is real. Are we to deny transcendental values until it is convenient to accept them as if they are real in this one instance, to treat them as the “unicorns” of the materialist paradigm, as Macyntre might say? Regardless, on Christmas, the weak have been granted equality and dignity, and the weak have prevailed over the strong, the victim victorious over the naked might and power of this world. Christianity has triumphed over paganism. The frailty of the fir overcomes the immensity of the great oak.
This faith I profess consists in an inversion of the ways and expectations of this world, and for that, it is ironic, paradoxical, and in this way, strange.
What a strange religion I’ve come to believe.
